I'm not sure if it's possible for an entire department to be maliciously stupid, but that seems to be the only thing that fully encompasses just how utterly asinine things have become when our customer service department gets involved. Things started off simply enough this morning: the consignee will accept the load as soon as I can get it there. With that knowledge in mind, I started as soon as my break was up and went to scale the load out. After getting the scale ticket, I came back to the truck to find a message waiting for me: appointment scheduled for 11 PM. This conflict wasn't just a contradiction: it presented an impossibility, as my hours for the day were going to run out at 11:15 PM and the consignee doesn't allow parking.
I called in immediately after seeing that mess on the Qualcomm and explained the problem to ops; my DBL agreed that it was not cool that customer service was screwing things up this badly yet again. He said he was going to work on something, probably a relay, and that I should just head to the Carlisle OC. If I didn't hear anything by the time I arrived, I was to call back in and see what the updates were.
Nothing arrived, of course, so I was left to call in. Once again my DBL said that he was working on something and that he had a likely candidate for a relay, but that nothing was confirmed. I ended up calling back in after another hour and found that I was still stuck trying to deliver the thing at 11 PM, but that two people in customer service had talked to two people at the consignee and both said that I could park for the night in a lot they had on the facility. I said that was fine, albeit questionable, but at least I had the names of the people involved this time rather than a faceless case of "customer service talked to the consignee" as so often happens. So I got dinner, waited a couple hours, then hit the road yet again.
Upon arriving at the consignee around 10:15, I found out that everything I had been told about the load was wrong. No, I couldn't have gotten there as early as 9 PM and been worked in. No, there isn't anywhere on their property to take a break even if I don't have enough hours. No, I can't drop my trailer in a dock door and leave to take my break. I called ops again and got the first reasonable, straightforward answer I'd had in quite some time: get out of there and find a legal place for my break while I still had time. I didn't ask twice about that, but I did stop by the receiving office to explain the situation and make one last appeal for an alternative. In the process, I found out that even my work assignment was wrong; it originally said to get there between 7 AM and noon today, but that all unloads have to be confirmed appointments, scheduled in advance, and that absolutely no trucks are handled on a first come first served basis. So, in short, this load wasn't just doomed to fail from the beginning; we never even had a time set up for it. So much for it being a service critical/line shutdown load, right?
One of the few good things happened after I left: I actually found a legal parking place just as my 14 ran out. I called operations yet again, explained the situation, gave an estimated time of delivery, explained that I didn't have a Qualcomm signal, then was asked to send in a message over the Qualcomm with my estimated time of delivery. After facepalming, I explained yet again that I had no signal and repeated that the best I can do now is 11 AM. Ops then tried to tell me to just go back in there as soon as possible to get the load delivered; I told them that I'll go in there when and if I get an appointment and, according to the receiving office, they're already booked solid for tomorrow.
Regardless of what happens overnight, I'll be calling in to first shift when I wake up and trying to get some actual answers from the people who screwed this thing up in the first place. I really hope I get to relay the load, just so it turns into somebody else's problem, as I'm quite tired of feeling like I'm doing the work of almost every department we have in Green Bay. Seriously, is it that hard for anybody up there to just get this stuff right the first time?
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