8/8/10

Do you ever read newspapers?  I don't anymore.  There was a time when I had subscriptions to the Detroit News, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  At some point after Mr. Gore was kind enough to invent the internet though, I lost my taste for reading through forty pages of shit in order to see one worthwhile article.  Anyhow, back in the good old days, they had comics in the Detroit News.  I guess they probably still do, but you know, I don't read the paper anymore.  Somewhere in the comic section they would have a few crossword puzzles and such.  They also had horoscopes, complete with your lucky numbers for the day.  Well, today's lucky numbers for me were probably not 53 and 4.  If you're kicking those numbers around in your head right now, just stop.  You have no idea.  We'll get to it soon enough.

We might as well start with the 'man bites dog' aspect of the story.  For the second day in a row, I didn't get any phone calls from work and my assignments didn't change.  I was scheduled for six stops on two trailers when I left work last night and I had the same six stops on two trailers when I got to work this afternoon.  This, my friends, was simply stunning.

The first three-stop run took me to the Toledo area.  I shot down US-23, since my first delivery was on the western side of town.  Shortly after a quick fuel stop at the Pilot at Exit 5 in Michigan, I was in the dock for my first delivery.  Seven pallets of milk unloaded, five pallets of empties retrieved, no worries.  On to Stop #2...

Aside from the fact that it took damned near a half hour to cover the three and a half miles to the Kroger on Monroe Street in Toledo, I really have no complaints about the second stop.  I managed to get all of their milk off my trailer before their electric pallet jack's battery died, so good enough.  I prefer to use a manual jack to retrieve the pallets of empties anyway.  They're not very heavy and the manual jack seems much easier for me to control.  I got the milk for my last stop halfway rotated to the rear of the trailer and then headed on to Stop #3...

{Technical note - In a perfect world, I would rotate all of the milk to the rear of the trailer and all of the empties to the front of the trailer.  Some loading docks, however, are a little too tricky.  Any time a pallet of milk crosses the dock plate, there's the potential for a mishap.  I usually can get half the milk rotated to the rear of the trailer without ever taking it across the dock plate.  Then I leave the milk on the other side in the nose of the trailer and pile empties behind it.  Once I've made it to the last stop and removed the half of the milk that was rotated to the rear, I can shift the empties that are blocking the rest of the milk into the space that was vacated by the milk that I just removed.  Then the 'unrotated' milk comes off and everybody is happy.}

My third stop on the Toledo run was the store on Monroe Street in Sylvania.  I had been there once before and found it to be one of the best stops I've made in my short career as a milk man.  So, obviously, I was feeling pretty good about the first half of my day.  Just gotta drop these last seven pallets and then head back to the dairy for my second load.

As I pulled the first pallet out of my trailer and across the dock plate, the damned pallet jack seized up for some reason.  The one rule that is never to be disregarded is that you DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!  The other rule is that you never stop a pallet of milk as it crosses the dock plate.  Never.  So I guess you can see where this is going.  I sure as hell wasn't trying to stop, but the jack froze up nonetheless.  The milk was left to recoil from the impact of hitting the dock plate while all momentum was gone.  As unintentional as it may have been, I had stopped a pallet of milk on the dock plate.  Crash.  Bang.  Boom.

After taking the time to restack the pallet of milk and set aside the bottles that had spilled from the mishap, I had to figure out what to do next.  Surely the pallet jack seizing up had been an isolated incident, I thought.  No reason to think that would happen again.  On the other hand though, my trailer was sitting quite a bit below the dock.  Any effort to drag a pallet out of that trailer was going to force the pallet to tilt back into the trailer as it was removed.  I needed to employ some analytical skills and come up with a solution.

This is where the brightest idea of my week comes into play.  Since the milk would be tilting back into the trailer (the way the first pallet had tipped), I decided that I would turn each pallet around and then bring it out of the trailer as I was going forward.  This way the milk would tilt back into the pallet jack and would be supported well enough to keep it from tipping.  Yeah, fucking brilliant.

The milk never had the chance to lean back against the pallet jack.  As soon as the forks of the jack hit the dock plate, that second pallet of milk was launched like a cruise missile across the stock room floor.  This time, instead of having spilled milk in my trailer, I had spilled milk everywhere.  Awesome idea to come out going forward, eh?  Truly awesome.

After restacking my second pallet at that damned place, I needed to figure out how the other five pallets would be getting out of my trailer.  Backward was no good, since the dock plate was too steep.  Forward was no good, since the dock plate was too steep.  What to do?  What to do?  I wound up convincing the guy working in the stock room to back the pallets out of the trailer.  I stood on the other side and pushed them as he pulled with the pallet jack.  This approach managed to head off the tendency of the milk to recoil when the jack hit the dock plate.  It also cut down on the chance that the jack would freeze up again, since I was giving it an assist with my manly girly physique.

No more issues arose at that Sylvania stop, but my total time there wound up being an hour and a half.  You win some, you lose some.  When it came time for the stock receiver guy to sign for the delivery, I did a quick casualty assessment to see how muck milk had been spilled due to my incompetence.  53 gallons and 4 half-gallons.  Son of a...

As I drove back to the dairy to get my second load, I started doing some calculating to see if my little episode was going to cause me any problems vis a vis the 14 hour rule.  Any time a day is paying me close to $300, there's a chance that I'll get pretty close to the legal limit.  Any lengthy delay can derail the whole shift.  Probably not gonna be a problem tonight though, I concluded.  My second trip would involve a long drive out to Imlay City, but I should be okay as long as I didn't dump a couple more pallets along the way.  The last two stops were closer to home so I would be able to knock them out pretty quickly after the initial long drive was finished.  It turned out that the dairy didn't even have the paperwork ready for my second load before I got there.  So even if I had been quick and efficient with that last stop on my first trip, I wouldn't have begun the second trip any sooner.

The nightcap went as smoothly as I could hope.  I left the dairy at 10pm and got to Imlay City at 11:30pm.  I was out of there at midnight and then arrived at the store on 8 Mile in Livonia at 1:15am.  That stop took a while, as the store had only one electric pallet jack.  I would use the jack to pull a pallet off my trailer, then the receiving lady would take it from me and drive the pallet down the hall to the dairy cooler.  Then she would return a few minutes later and we would do it again.  Not exactly the most efficient approach, but I wasn't about to tell some old lady that she would have to use a manual jack to drag the milk down the hall.

I took a few more minutes at the end of that Livonia stop and performed my 'half rotation' in order to set up for my final stop in Walled Lake.  I left Livonia at 2:15am and got into the Walled Lake store at 2:30am.  I pulled off the first few pallets of milk, shifted some empties over, and then pulled off the last four pallets.  Once I had loaded the store's empty cases and closed up my trailer, I was back on the road at 3:15am.

At the dairy by 3:30am.  Trailer dropped and inspection completed by 3:45am.  One hour to spare.  (My 14 hour clock was good until 4:45am.)  Never a doubt, right?

A little birdie (aka the night dispatcher) told me that a couple of guys had already called in sick for Monday.  I'm not on the schedule at this point but she seems to think I shouldn't be surprised to get a phone call in the morning.  I'm not really sure what my response might be.  To answer the phone or not to answer the phone - that is the question.