7/26/10

As I suspected might be the case, it seems to be taking me a while to adapt to being in Michigan on a permanent basis.  For instance, yesterday's work took me past a handful of golf courses.  My reaction was the same as always - I thought to myself that I should get out and play a round or two the next time I got home.  It wasn't until this morning that I realized that I didn't have to wait a feeks if I didn't want to.  Golf courses are not merely something to see from the window of my truck.

So did I play golf today?  No, no I didn't.  On the other side of the coin, I also was reminded today that things tend to 'pop up' when you're not rolling down some remote freeway without anybody else around to bug you.  I got a call from work this morning, asking if I would like to make some money on my scheduled day off.  Nope.  Thanks for asking though.  Back to bed.  Another call came later in the morning.  The dispatcher put on his best Monty Hall persona and made me a pretty compelling offer.  I pull a "dispo" load today (more on that in a minute) in exchange for a day off tomorrow.  The dairy had put us in a bind today, apparently, and we were short on manpower.  Fair enough then.  So much for my day off and so much for the golf course.

I had no idea what a dispo load was.  I'm still not even sure what "dispo" means.  Here's the skinny on the run though.  The dairy, for one reason or another, had been short on chocolate milk in recent days.  As such, a given store may have ordered fifty cases and only received twenty.  If that store's next milk delivery was a couple of days away, then there would exist the possibility of the store running out of chocolate milk.  This is not something that the folks at the dairy would like to see happen, for obvious reasons.  Kroger is a pretty damned important customer.

So we get these dispo loads.  Nothing in the trailer but gallons of chocolate milk.  Each store along the route (I had eight today) gets a certain number of cases and that's that.  There's no other product mixed in.  There are no empty cases to retrieve.  After shuttling a few trailers from the terminal to the dairy and earning my extra fifteen bucks this afternoon, I grabbed my paperwork and found my loaded trailer.

The entire load consisted of four pallets of milk.  I had two stops in Dearborn, one in Richmond, three in Macomb, one in Sterling Heights, and one in Livonia.  That's a pretty good way to learn some store locations, since I had only been to one of the Dearborn stores befores.  The other seven locations were new to me.  Only the Richmond store got a full pallet (54 cases). Each other store got between 9 and 34 cases. I just had to pull the cases of milk off my trailer and let the stock room people stack them. Then I had to try and make sure that the remaining milk in the trailer was secured and the load was balanced.


This run was also a good way to make $200 in a relatively short period of time.  I started my pre-trip inspection at 7pm and finished my post-trip at 2am.  The run paid $197.35, to be more accurate, but it's safe to say that it beat my initial $20/hr target range.  I spent more time trying to get someone to open the door at each stop than I did unloading milk.  There was a produce truck in the dock at one of the Macomb locations when I arrived, so that cost me a half hour of waiting.  Then there was a lot of construction on the way from Sterling Heights back down to the store on 8 Mile in Livonia, burning a few more extra minutes.  In theory the run could have taken even less time, but I think it went about as well as could be expected overall.  I hit the more congested areas late at night after the traffic had eased up and so forth.

Today's conclusion has to be that I really like my job a lot better when it involves anything other than what it usually involves.  I like it well enough when I'm making regular milk deliveries and such, but it's pretty awesome when I'm delivering empty cases to Tennessee or making a drop/hook in Grand Rapids or running all over Southeast Michigan to unload a few pallets of chocolate milk here and there.

I'm taking the day off for realsies tomorrow, so that's pretty nice.  The swap wound up being a positive for me overall, since I made $212.35 once we add in my three shuttle runs to the dairy.  My typical Tuesday work load would be somewhere around $150 and would take the same 7-8 hours to complete.  Now, if only I could figure out why the air conditioning in my apartment isn't working...