so i goofed today at my job and grabbed the wrong trailer.

The part about working for free that day is true here, my 2nd month here we had a guy take the wrong trailer up to the company headquarters lol. He didn’t get paid and got a pretty good chewing. And I know back in November we lost our biggest customer in one of the regions we run. Company sent out a memo and posted it all over the terminals to make certain everyone saw it over and over.

Same guy who grabbed the wrong trailer also has dropped 2 on the ground out in the yard since I’ve been here. I ended up grabbing an empty and going with it that 2nd time because he dropped it right in front of the trailer I was supposed to take. He got a day off and had to come in on a Sunday to do yard work lol. It’s pretty hard to get fired here but they won’t play around if you screw up...

 

It's not as much of an urban legend as I'd like. We have drivers do it a lot, and customers do it occasionally. We catch drivers after a few hours of the driver heading in the wrong direction most times.

When I started out I had a blind shippment of plastic recylcing coming out of a big box dc. BOL said Boca Raton, FL instaed of BFN, WI. I called in (just as 1st shift went home), after some hemming and hawing dispatch said "follow the BOL". I grabbed the load and boogied to safe/legal to shutdown. Next morning I'm mossying down the road when QC blows up with a "MAJOR SCREW UP! STOP IMMEADILTY!" - first and only high priority message I've recieved. I'd crossed the point where the computer said I would miss OTD, and it alerted CS. So screw ups happen.

 

It's back to the bottomless pit of port work for you. Lol.

 

I do that on a daily basis.

 

The dispatcher who sent me to Boca. I got paid for all the miles, plus stop off.

 

OP, you made a mistake and you're accepting the responsibility for it. That's good.
We look at things like that this way...when a guy makes a real bonehead mistake he'll probably not make the same one for a long time. If he owns up to it and doesn't try to shift blame we take that into consideration.
II hope they don't fire you. They probably don't want to fire you anyway.
But you can bet they'll be watching you real close for awhile.

 

You're at the mercy of the company but you CAN be fired because one thing and one thing only.... THEY KNOW FOR A FACT YOU DIDNT PRETRIP!!!

Huge safety violation there!

 

They can fire you without you messing up at all. Most states are right-to-work states, which means you have a right to work and they have a right to fire you, for any reason or none at all.

 

I took a trailer to the wrong place a couple weeks ago; actually, I took two! I caught it shortly after drop-off of the second, and was able to fix it myself. But for the first one, I needed to get my dispatcher to call them. He did, and they were a little unhappy because they thought the dock had already started loading it. But he said I could come and get it anyway while they pulled it off the door. On the way back, I stopped at McDonald's and bought 5 Mocha Frappes, to take in to the dock crew as an apology gesture. It didn't work out that well, as the day shift had already left. I left them with the 2nd shift to do as they pleased. I knew they'd never remember me, but just hoped that when my company's name came up the next day, they'd at least get a chuckle from the Frappes.