Apparently we're famous now.

I've never heard of Danny Gokey. Apparently he's a country music dude, which explains why I've never heard of him.

I've never heard of GAC.  Apparently it's a country music channel, which explains why I've never heard of it.

At a recent shareholders' meeting, we were informed that there's a GAC show about country singers who perform regular jobs or something.  It turns out that this Gokey fella used to be a truck driver.  So, for the TV show, he became a truck driver again.  And he worked for my employer.

The episode was based at our Murfreesboro location.  I've been down there a time or two.  It has been quite a while, but I used to head down with a load of empty milk cases once a month or so.

I met Kevin Moore (who appears in the video) one time.  There were no empty trailers at the dairy, so I had to drive over to the Quickway terminal and get an empty trailer to bring home.  "Y'all them boys from Michigan that need some empties," he observed.  (There were two of us on this particular trip.)  Yep.  We's them boys.  So he gave us the numbers of a couple of empty trailers and we were on our way.

Other than that, I don't know.  They played the video at the meeting, so we all watched it.  Pretty cool to be famous for a minute, I suppose...

You would have no way of knowing this from the video, but the job is quite a bit harder than they made it out to be.  I'm sure it was no accident, but they arranged it so this character could work in stores with nice big receiving areas, and people who answer the door when you arrive, and pallet jacks that function properly, and loading docks that are reasonably accessible, and so on and so forth.  For those of us in the daily grind, days like the one experienced by Mr. Gokey are a rare treat.

And just for good measure [a little inside baseball here], you'll note that he had an odd number of pallets when he loaded the empties at the second store. That's why the one pallet was placed in the center of the trailer. You can do that when there's no milk in the trailer. Empty cases don't provide a lot of inertia. When you have milk in the trailer, it's a different story. That shit will slosh around and cause all kinds of trouble. So you have to keep the pallets to an even number, meaning that they're side-by-side from front to back and can be secured reasonably well. So not only did this dude get easy stores and an easy run, he got a two-stop easy run. The only thing better than a two-stop run is a one-stop run, for obvious reasons.

Amidst the Great Recovery™ of 2010 2011 2012, I seem to get anywhere from 4-6 stops on damned near every trailer. Stores that order 8 pallets during good times will only order 3 pallets when business sucks. So more orders can be squeezed onto one trailer. So the driver - I - will have to work a LOT harder for a LITTLE more money. By the time you get to the second or third store, you have to figure out a way to get the empties rotated to the nose of the trailer and the milk rotated to the back. It's not difficult when there's enough space in the stock room, as pictured in the video there. It's almost impossible when you get a sequence of stores with no extra space at all. In what was surely a coincidence, Mr. Hoppy and his trainee didn't face the prospect of rotating a trailer in a tiny stockroom with a pallet jack that stops at random, while the Pepsi guy keeps putting pallets of Sierra Mist in the way and the store manager decides to call every department to the back door for a trash run, taking away any hope of getting the milk delivered in a reasonable time.

(Think that one may have happened yesterday? Hint: It did. Pissed me right off.)

And they sure as hell didn't face last Saturday, when the bastards at the dairy loaded my trailer with the load bars in the wrong position.  I wound up stacking 1,148 cases of milk by hand after the entire load tipped over against the nose of the trailer.  It was like a wicked dangerous Jenga puzzle.  Every time I would move one case, five more would fall.  Luckily I didn't break an ankle in the process.  Yeah, that one pissed me right off as well.

Anyhow, that video is probably the closest I'll ever come to giving you folks a taste of what it's like to haul milk to your local Kroger store... on a good day.

(If I wasn't supposed to use this footage and my video gets zapped or whatever, they have a flash version at quickwaycarriers.com, toward the bottom of the page. That one has no embed option so I had to upload my own version here.  No harm is intended to whoever created the content and so on.  Just trying to share a video.)