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Dec 15, 2022 - The Turning Point

Luke and I were in the midst of planning another "Porsche Pints" with the local fellow 718-enthusiasts we had met in the online forums. During the course of the day, we receive two emails in quick succession from Porsche Centre London. This time it is Christina, our salesperson:

Hi All!

Thank you kindly for this and apologies in the delay! I was away the past two days.

Builds look great! As Tim and Steve mentioned, we're working hard and doing our best for you gentlemen on this :)

Hey Guys!

In light of christmas, did you wish to have a Zoom call today? I'm in until 5pm, or let me know if there is another day that works for you.


Interesting. Christina hadn't ever initiated a call with us before. Plus, what was with that talk of a Zoom call? We had been told that online video calls were verboten for "security reasons". We further speculated:

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 10:46:59 AM
I can't do today (not at home) but don't really wanna either - other than the potential for any tiny slivers of info she might give/let slip

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 10:48:16 AM
(or the minute possibility it is a ruse to give us our allocations)

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 10:48:25 AM
yeah that thought crossed my mind

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 10:49:14 AM
I'm ok with arranging a short call with her. Apparently Zoom is ok now?

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 10:49:38 AM
yeah I know - zoom is ok now. I'm not going to bring at up at the moment.
anyhow
I'm up to do a zoom call but not necessarily today

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 10:50:56 AM
It is somewhat curious that she would initiate a zoom call though, don't you think
what's going on with that

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 10:51:01 AM
For the shred of possibility that it's an allocation call, let's do it.

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 10:52:00 AM
let us not get our hopes up here, btw - must maintain a level of restraint

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 10:55:31 AM
Ok I will draft a response to Christina and flip it to you

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 1:44:08 PM
12:30 work for you tomorrow?

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 2:08:26 PM
yes


Luke sent his Zoom meeting invite off to Christina. Within 30 minutes we observed that the invite was accepted. The pattern we'd been observing was again repeated:

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 2:47:37 PM
Christina has accepted so it must've gone through. We are back to her immediately responding to us ... Interesting ...

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 3:05:58 PM
Interesting and also ... the pattern is emerging: When they have nothing to say to us, they ignore us. When they have bad news to tell us, they ignore us. Otherwise, they are all over us. On the surface of it this might seem obvious, and if you are talking about widgets or inanimate objects, is totally fine. But for humans, who want to have some reassurance that they are being taken care of, it is not.

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 3:16:47 PM
That's well said.

From: Luke Ward 12/15/2022, 3:16:48 PM
And a tiny bit encouraging.

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/15/2022, 3:24:37 PM
All I will say is that it does correlate well with the arrival of good news. We shall see.


As you can clearly see in our text exchanges, we were noticing that this whole exchange over this 24 hour period was anomalous. And therefore, our spidey senses were tingling. Could this actually be about allocations? But on an emotional level, we weren't letting ourselves go there. Better to have low expectations and have them exceeded rather than ... well, you know the saying.

On the off chance that this was really an allocation call, I decided to set up my cameras to record the event. Just in case.

The next day, as the hour of the Zoom call approached:

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/16/2022, 11:29:53 AM
one hour to go to this meeting.
could be nothing more than Christina actually trying to be more in-touch.

From: Luke Ward 12/16/2022, 11:37:03 AM
Yep. That's my mental approach.

The Zoom meeting started. Some pleasantries were exchanged. A few minutes of hearing about how they understood how it was so frustrating to wait, and that you know, being around Christmas Time, it was too bad when people couldn't be given good news, and, and ... oh and about how it was weird that we weren't allowed to do Zoom meetings there for a while, but now it seems better. Etcetera, etcetera. And then, no doubt carefully planned, the following happened...

The moment where our salesperson Christina informs us of the momentous news.
And so, there you had it. Our spidey senses hadn't been tingling for no reason. It was indeed a call to tell us we had our allocations, and Christina had been having a little fun, deliberately obfuscating both the meeting title and the overall tone and content until she could spring the good news. We were told that tentatively our Euro Delivery date would be April or May (which actually, was perfect timing for best conditions), and that Luke's Boxster would be the first of our two cars built.

Our world had changed in an instant. Following the meeting, the aggrieved and frustrated messages in the text chats vanished:

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/16/2022, 12:43:45 PM
well well well

From: Luke Ward 12/16/2022, 12:43:50 PM
OK. Wow.

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/16/2022, 12:46:29 PM
YOUR Boxster. Being made. First.
keyword being "YOURS"!

From: Luke Ward 12/16/2022, 12:46:46 PM
I'm still pretty speechless.
CONGRATS my friend.

From: Andrew Lavigne 12/16/2022, 1:02:24 PM
and back to you too!

December 16, 2022 - A New Landscape
Luke's Thoughts
[on receiving our GTS allocations...]
Can it be? Our allocations have arrived. A Zoom call today confirmed that after just over 17 months of waiting, wrangling, hand-wringing, tossing and turning, and lots and lots of hoping … it's finally happened.

Two Carmine Red Porsche GTS 4.0s will be created and delivered to us in Germany this summer. The long night is over.

Now waiting for the dawn begins.

#sohappy

(to read more of Luke's thoughts from this moment, check out his blog post)


Over the months and years, the step to getting allocations had transformed from a bit of bureaucratic paperwork into an obstacle. Then a barrier. Then, in our minds, a wall, growing higher and higher until it blocked out all view of the future ahead. Over the last half year, most of our thought and energy had been bent towards that wall ... could we find a way over it, through it, with our media initiatives, with our allocation research, with our visits and self-advocacy...? We certainly had not really thought much about all of the things that lay beyond that wall. But now, now that wall had been pierced, and we walked through and saw an entirely new landscape ahead of us ... watching the builds of our cars ... trip planning ... selling existing cars ... crew recruitment ... road research ... and most simply, the real tangible anticipation of sitting in those leather-and-racetex seats and turning that left-handed key.

The first order of business was thanks. To Porsche Centre London of course, and to Christina, Tim and Steve - especially Tim. Through various hints from various communications we had gotten the impression that he was the one that was doing whatever mysterious wrangling had been going on. It would have been nice to have been more privy to the specifics of this wrangling, but for the moment we were simply over the moon about the allocation news. Specifics could wait.

We wrote all of the above sentiment into a quick thank-you email, finishing with the following: "As Luke and I discussed in the video call, we would like to come down to receive the allocation papers in person (and to shake all of your hands). We're working the dates with Christina but here's to hoping to say thanks in person soon.". And with that, we started the back-and-forth to make another impromptu whirlwind drive from Ottawa down to Porsche Centre London.

We happily updated our two rows in our ever-growing allocation-and-orders spreadsheet. We posted the good news in the forums and received many congratulations. Then we immediately turned to how we might celebrate this extra-important event in our ever-improving GTS Chronicles instagram feed. After some back-and-forth, we envisioned some sort of skit where we are walking through the cold-and-dark of Canadian winter and then ... ahhhhh ... light from the heavens ... the allocations news drops on us. Something along those lines. We get to work storyboarding and arranging for the initial recording of scenes. We also whip up modified versions of our new GTS Chronicles logos, now that we pretty much know for sure that our amazing delivery event is going to happen in 2023:

The final version of our GTS Chronicles commemorative Euro Delivery Logos start to take shape now.

December 20, 2022 - The Allocation Drive

Luke and I pushed hard for an "Allocation visit" as soon as possible. Perhaps it was a bit of latent paranoia, but we wanted as much "evidence" as possible - tangible evidence - that our allocations were real. To quote a message from Luke: "I really want our allocations in our hands". After much wrangling with dates (things were tricky as we were essentially during the Christmas holidays), we finalized on the 20th of December. All of the necessary folks down at Porsche Centre London were going to be in, and Luke and I had hastily arranged time off.

I arrived to pick up Luke at 3:30a.m, and soon we were driving westward out of Ottawa, again on regional highway number 7, bound for southwestern Ontario. It was full-on winter now: about ten degrees below zero and with a thin coat of fresh powder coating the banks on the sides of the highway. The road surface itself was cold and dry and coated with a dried, white layer of road salt. It is actually kind of nice to be driving at this time - there is no traffic and - assuming the weather is good - I find it relaxing.
The allocation drive
The allocation drive
Four+ hours to go
Gathering Media
Heading to London Again
We arrived at Porsche Centre London shortly before 10 a.m. Everything was very jovial. We got, from the discussion with Tim (the Sales Manager), a sense of some sort of drama surrounding getting the allocation for Luke's Boxster. Apparently, back during our second visit in October, they had already secured the Cayman GTS allocation, and they were extremely close to having secured the Boxster allocation - but something fell through, and they weren't able to complete it. They chose not to tell us anything (aside: we could have handled the uncertainty and we would have felt a lot better knowing what was going on - we're big boys, and know that a half-achieved goal is not guaranteed to be a successful goal. but anyway...), and instead we got the wall of silence from then until the middle of December, when they finally managed to secure the Boxster allocation - and then reached out to us. The timings of the various "we're working hard for you" correlated nicely with the points in time where they were close to getting that second allocation. It all kind of added up.
The Final Signing
Mint Green PTS
Apart from an in-person thank-you, the main reason why we had gone down to Porsche Centre London this time was to get some sort of official record / sense of our allocation status. It was one thing to hear it verbally, but we wanted something tangible. Christina typically printed out nice certificates when allocations are given, but somehow the order to her printer got screwed up and she did not have them on hand. We filmed some blank pages as a stand-in for the upcoming "allocations" Instagram post we were working on.

We had learned enough about the Porsche ordering and build system to know that what we really wanted - if we wanted real proof of our allocations - was to have our order status updated to "V200". V200 was the internal system code that meant: this customer has been allocated a build slot and a car WILL be built for them. We also learned that they had not yet actually done whatever needed to be done to achieve that new order status. We gently prodded a bit and received assurance that this would be done in the next few days, with confirmation sent to us. I still wanted something in writing today, and prodded a bit further. We decided that what we'd do is print out a new order sheet with our latest builds and sign those. That'd work, sure.

Before hitting the road back home, we spent a few minutes in the parking lot reviewing headlights (not "highlights". I actually do mean "headlights"). There had been some confusion in our minds about which headlight option our cars were going to be coming with, and we wanted to get a good look at all three options (Base, Dynamic Lighting, and Dynamic Lighting+). We were happy to confirm that our spec had the middle level lighting with Dynamic lighting (where the headlamps swivel in the direction that you are cornering).
Base Lights
PDLS Lights (intermediate)
PDLS+ LED Lights
And with that, we concluded our Porsche Centre London visit. We left earlier this time around, resulting in a less than ridiculous arrival time back in Ottawa in the evening. Feelings were good; we were now pretty convinced that the allocations were real. But still, we wanted to see that V200 status.
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