I would have taken it as "this portrait packing slip has what we need, now scale and rotate and put it on the left of the same size paper" - and then gone over to the warehouse and grabbed a few copies of what they did.
Yeah, just pop over to a client's warehouse (which may not even be in the same city) to chat with some guys you have never seen before - sounds like a plan! I imagine if it would have been as simple as you suggest they would have just done that ;)
I’d suggest a phone call, but yeah dealing with the actual users is far better than some middle manager without a clue how the job actually gets performed.
