Sell me my own hat, will you?

I had pulled up a sales order for one reason or another when I notice on the order header:

Sold To: Friendly Neighborhood Distributor
Ship To: Recently Acquired Subsidiary of Acme

When I say “recently,” I do not mean last week. I mean a major acquisition that was announced, reviewed, and has been in place for at least one financial quarter. Our part of the business operates under Acme’s flagship name, so there is no possibility that a buyer ordering the product would not realize it is made by their new parent company. No, for whatever inscrutable reason, we have chosen to pay a distributor their markup for them to sell us our own product–without their ever touching the item, at that.

Clearly I am in the wrong business. I wrote an short e-mail to my boss pointing out this nonsense; I said we had an opportunity to drive an acquisition synergy.

It was a week for sarcastic e-mails.