How not to act towards a shipper/receiver

I arrived to pickup a piece of equipment at a company.

Arrived 10 minutes early ( told not to arrive before assigned time ) , nothing ready.

Guy in shipping said 3 hours before its ready , still building it.

Asked if ok to stay at the dock , NO MOVE IT.

I moved off to the far side of they parking lot ( it was BIG )

Puttered around cleaning up my truck to kill the time.

Guy in work clothes wanders over starts talking.

Askled why I was sitting there , told him , got a HMM funny that unit was finished and tested 2 days ago.

He heads back in to the building.

Few minutes later he drives over in a nice mini van , asks if Im hungry.

I said ALWAYS

We head off to go get food.

Takes me to a nice fancy steak house , we walk in and he is treated like GOD , have a top of the line meal , then we head back.

He takes me with him as he hands the bill to the shipping guy , and tells him YOUR PAYING this + $120.00 / hour for every hour he was / is delayed.

Shakes my hand and walks away.

I sort of say gee kind of bossy for a worker , shipping guy says HES THE FN BOSS , owns the place.

Then says he treats truckers and labourers like GODS and the rest of us like workers.

Have gone back 3 times , get a nice lunch and load is ready when I get there.

 

thats nice when something like that happens --i find that some shippers think they are god--i try and give them no reason to have any qualms with me--always early--friendly--the quicker i get unloaded--the quicker iget reloaded--i have seen some walmart recievers just plain dickwads--but a couple fantastic ones as well
its the same as dealing with dot--dont pee off the ones who have you by the short and curlys

 

You should have bought a lottery ticket that day ...

 

That is a great story. LMAO. In the late 70's, I had to wait for a load of grape juice (in blue 55-gallon barrels)going from central Calif. to Canada to be made into wine. Headed to a shady area outside of a bowling alley, a few miles away. After a few hours, some guy knocked on my door: "Sorry for the delay, thanks for waiting, they are ready for you now." The guy hands me $100. I guess he was the owner. Whatever he was, he made the world a better place that day (not just for me, karma, you know). Every now and then, I run into a person with integrity and honesty, and that makes it all worthwhile.

 

I used to love going to bad sippers/recievers when i was getting paid by the hour.
I treat everyone with respect, but if they give me attitude for no reason i would give it back 10 fold...it felt kind of liberating...theres nothing they could do to me, as i made same money sitting on my ### as i was driving down the road.
The really bad ones.... i would purposely push their buttons by doing things i knew irritated them and whip them into a heart attack inducing frenzy...
If the offending ###*oles at the dock werent foaming at the mouth and jumping while shaking their fist at me, i didn't do my job right.

The funniest thing is after a while, most of them would realize that their scare tactics don't work on me, they actually became very civil and sometimes even helpful.
I know of few places where there could be two trucks pulling in...one of them a bunk and the other a daycab...the daycab guy gets no hassle and hes loaded/offloaded in no time, since they know hes paid by the hour, while the highway guy gets all kinds of grief.
They know who's willing to take the abuse for the fear of having to wait to get loaded/offloaded.

But the best thing for me was the changed look in their eyes, when they realized that i don't give 2 sh*ts about my job and i'm more than willing to get into a fist-fight with any of them, if they insist on being idiots...

 

No way am I bribing someone to do their job. I'll show up at the time our companies agreed on greet them with respect and wait.

If someone feels the need to be a dichead, hey by all means, I knew your job sucked from the time I walked into this dump. Bad day? Save it for your momma cause no one cares.

Luckily, working for a smaller company, I know all my shippers on a first name basis. As for their customers, some of them but not all. Still get somewhere new every now and then. But for reasons unknown to me it's always a whole different situation with these people than it was when I worked for a junk carrier hauling junk freight to junk customers.