Your most pain in the ### freight

Delivered a 3500 lb pallet of olive oil to a residence.Had a slick sounding business name.Was a house with an extremely steep driveway.lift gate was only rated for 2500 lbs.All I had was a manual pallet jack(couldnt back all the way up driveway,or drag the pallet up the rest of the incline.Had to have an OOP come out with an electric pallet jack and finish the delivery.Seems this joker was buying olive oil in bulk and using a business name to qualify for delivery.

 

Also delivered 2200lb skids of fertilizer to a co op in Howell Nebraska.These were bags of fertilizer,heavily shrinkrapped on pallets.This run involved gravel roads so steep (landing gear was digging into gravel,truck overheating),not to mention 10000lb limit wooden bridges.When I finally get there..."Oh were not used to fertilizer coming in a dry van palletized",We Dont Have a dock.Youll have to drag all 20 pallets to the a.s end,"So,we can pluck em off with a forklift.This involved dragging and spinning them around,to get the pallet jack out.About 103° that day 80% humidity.Later the owner calls me on the radio"What are you doing in Howell Nebraska? Me,delivering this load one of your bonehead salesman sent me on.

 

Exactly,This is why the owner "got involved".Fuel was around $5 a gallon at that time(something around 450 mile run from kc!.Company on site salesman set it up.Only around a $100 potential profit margin(if everthing went perfect!)Owner went thru the Lead Driver to try to get me to stay overnight in Omaha to bring a "backhaul" back to "Save his arse". Was pi.sed (refused,came back and "Never heard a word about it again!".

 

I got one for you. When you show up at a regular customer that is usually a quick stop... But along comes their second and third string forklift operators which are TERRIBLE at moving freight.

I had this one stop today, I usually load myself. But no, this tool was persistent on loading me. Owner's son who usually manages the phone lines and he thought it would be a great opportunity to hop on a forklift he was not even trained on.

Shipping manager tried to swap him out... But he really really wanted to drive the big big forklift. He had no idea which lever did what and this was the most opportune time to wing it and learn on the job. He burned 30 minutes to load 2 pallets with a standard 48 inch dimension.

"Sorry it took so long, but boy did I have fun".

Add insult to injury, this shipment was supposed to go to Canada... He forgot to arrange the NAFTA paperwork and made me wait another 15 minutes.

 

He probably had to be shown what a forklift is. From there, it most likely was downhill.

 

Not even exaggerating. Two pallets in thirty minutes with me spotting him and telling him which lever to pull and how long to pull it for. I almost lost my #### cause he refused to let me or the shipping manager drive the forklift.

 

After he "Successfully Loaded the 1st pallet..he Probably had to get on Facebook and Twitter."Hey Guess what I just did!!".