10/30/10

A brief note to aspiring football coaches around the world:  If you happen to find yourself in a tough game against an opponent that you really should be blowing out... and if you happen to be playing a freshman quarterback because your starter has suffered a severe knee injury... and if you happen to be trailing by one point with less than a minute left in the game... and if you happen to have the ball deep in your opponents' territory, perfectly centered between the hash marks... and if you happen to have a kicker who has never missed a field goal, not a single one, in his career...  Should you ever find yourself confronted with this odd set of circumstances, you should do two things.  (1) Put your ego in check for a minute and (2) kick the fucking field goal.  Or, you know, if you're a super-genius who walks on water, just have your freshman quarterback throw the ball into the endzone and feel sorry for yourself when the pass gets intercepted.  Either way.

That was fun to watch... or something.  At least there's one upside to this Saturday work arrangement of mine.  Instead of sitting around and stewing about this shit, I tend to be pretty busy driving and delivering milk.  You know, glass half full and whatnot.

I wound up being a little busier than anticipated today.  If you pay close attention, then you've probably noticed that the milk business is picking up a bit of steam.  This means that we, the drivers, are making more money.  In what I'm sure is a coincidence, the sick calls on weekends seem to be popping up again.  So my scheduled one-stop second run was replaced by a three-stopper.  Another fifty bucks on my paycheck is fine and all, but I had been planning to hang out with my niece and nephew tonight.  My new schedule carried me through almost to midnight, so we had to scrap those plans.  Work is work though.  A fella's gotta earn a living one way or another.

The driving and delivering, in and of themselves, didn't go too badly.  My first trip involved a stop in Howell and another in Swartz Creek.  I knew that there was something amiss when I left the dairy, so I made sure to tell the guys in Howell to wait before they pulled their milk into the cooler.  According to the bills, they were to get 192 cases from me.  That's around three and a half pallets.  There were five and a half pallets on the tail of the trailer, each with white tags indicating that they were going to the Howell store.  When I pulled the pallets out of the trailer and counted the cases, I found that there were 282 instead of the 192 on the order.  It only took a second to spot the fact that 90 cases of 1/2% milk were on the first two pallets that I had unloaded (54 & 36, respectively).  What are the odds that a store getting a total of 192 cases would be getting 90 cases of 1/2%?  Pretty small odds, obviously.

Subtracting those 90 cases left us with the appropriate 192, so I was pretty sure that we were on the right track.  A look at the order for my second stop showed that the Swartz Creek store did in fact have 90 cases of 1/2% coming.  Okay then.  So the dairy had been running behind on 1/2% milk production and had put those two pallets on after the rest of the trailer was already loaded.  This happens sometimes, usually with chocolate milk and almost always on Saturday, but it's no big deal.  It's my job to pay attention for odds and ends thrown on the back of the trailer.  It's their job, however, to put the right tags on each pallet.  The Swartz Creek load had black tags, not white.  Someone wasn't paying attention.  Fortunately, that someone wasn't I.

Speaking of the Swartz Creek load... oy!  17 pallets and 35,000 pounds.  That's a lot of freaking milk.  I think I've seen one or two loads that had 14 pallets.  12 or 13 pallets are common at a few of the busier stores.  17 though?  That was something new.  It probably goes without saying that I was in Swartz Creek for a while this afternoon.  That store has a narrow corridor through which the milk has to go in order to get to the dairy cooler.  Then the empty cases (13 pallets, in this case) have to come through the same corridor to get to my trailer.  This means that it's a one-at-a-time affair.  We got 'er done though.

My three evening stops were in the Toledo area.  The first involved waiting for a bread truck to leave before I could get into the loading dock.  The second involved nobody answering the door, then nobody being in the receiving area after I had walked around and into the front entrance.  (Turns out the only guy working in the back tonight was on his break at the time.  Go figure.)  The third stop involved a grocery truck pulling out of the dock just as I arrived, leaving pallets of shit piled from wall to wall in the stock room.  Each of these delays added a bit of time to my shift, but what are you gonna do?  Just part of the job, I suppose.  All in all, my shift took less than twelve hours from pre-trip inspection to post-trip inspection, so good enough.

Tomorrow brings another decent day of earnings, at least as things stand now.  I have the long Midland and Mount Pleasant run, then a two-stopper to Toledo.  I'm familiar with all of the stores involved and things should be pretty smooth, so this is probably the right time to prepare for some unfortunate event.  We'll see.