Things have been quite stressful and I have to get in bed shortly, due to a 3:45 AM alarm clock, but I wanted to write a short update of what happened today. The day started off simply enough: I woke up at 3:45 to get to the consignee on time, stopped for nothing but fuel, and made it with about 45 minutes to spare. Along the way I got my next work assignment. The first red flag was the estimated delivery time; even the trip planning computer didn't see any way I could get there less than half an hour late and this was reflected on the assignment I received. Adding to the confusion was the complete lack of a bill of lading or pickup number.
Along the way to the shipper, as I desperately tried to make up time, I started playing Qualcomm tag with the customer service department. I eventually was let in on a particularly odd piece of information. The load is a "blind" load, in that the shipper is not supposed to know where the load is actually going to. Think about that for just a moment: I'm hauling twenty tons of stuff and we're lying to the company who is paying us to haul it about where it's actually going. If that makes any sense to you whatsoever, then please explain it to me. After thus ruling out every piece of information I'd received about the load, the customer service department finally sent me a PO number, which was all I needed to get the load.
Once I arrived at the shipper, I saw one of our guys trying to pull a trailer out of the building. I figured he was leaving with it, but no, we weren't about to be so lucky. Turns out that this place requires drivers to put an empty trailer in the dock they take their load from. That may sound simple in principle, but it adds a substantial amount of work: we have to drop the empty trailer, grab the loaded trailer and move it out of the way, drop the loaded trailer, pick up the empty and try back it into the dock, drop the empty, get the paperwork from the shipping office, and only then can we grab the loaded trailer and leave. Compounding the issue, there was perhaps 25 feet between the front of the trailers and the cars parked directly opposite the dock doors. Even worse, because of the way things were configured, every other driver who needed to use the facility ended up blocking me in while they did what they needed to do, including two of our own guys. I had to help both of them, but neither one of them would offer any help to me at all, the good for nothing @#*$(@s...
In any event, what should have just been a half-hour drop and hook turned into a two hour ordeal. This made my delivery appointment for 7:30 AM - which looked unlikely enough from the beginning - into a complete physical impossibility. I conveyed this to operations and was told to call back in once I scaled the load and had a firm estimate of when I could deliver the load. So I went about ten miles the other direction since that was the nearest scale (I later discovered, much to my dismay, that there were other scales along the way), ensured that the load was legal, and called back in to operations with a firm estimate of 12 noon. I explained why, sent in the appropriate Qualcomm messages, and was assured that we'd "have an answer by the end of the day" with regard to a changed delivery appointment. So I started driving and... unsurprisingly, never got an answer. Go figure, right?
By the time I shut down for the night, I still hadn't gotten an answer about the delivery appointment. So I called support shift about it and was told that nobody had actually done any work on trying to get the delivery appointment changed. Apparently there wasn't even a note showing up in the system that someone needed to work on it, or anything other than my message saying that I wasn't going to be able to make it until noon. So I was put on hold for two minutes while he checked with customer service and told someone would send me a message when and if anything changes but, unless I hear otherwise, to proceed and try make it there as soon as possible. I plan on stopping somewhere along the way to call and get confirmation of what's going on, since this has gone beyond merely being ridiculous and into behavior I can only describe as malicious.
Regardless of what happens at this point, my alarm is still set for 3:45 and I plan on getting moving unless I'm told otherwise. If they move the delivery back more than a day, I'll ask about relaying the thing in Akron, OH. If they still haven't sent me some sort of confirmation about the new time, I'll be stopping before I make it into Pennsylvania for fuel and asking for verification of things before I get onto the turnpike. I'll be pleasantly surprised to hear anything at all, though.
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