Viva la Me!

Since we have been celebrating the special powers of the jerk-off little guy vs big business, I thought I would share a very special moment from much earlier in my driving career. I would like to say that it struck a blow for some principle, or some down-trodden group or something but nope… it was just me being a great big old ‘tard.

We delivered our load of salt to a shipper who shall remain nameless somewhere in New York. I can’t remember where it was and it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, when I checked in with the shipper he broke the seal on our trailer and told me to put our loaded trailer into a specific dock door and drop it. No problem. I got the trailer into the dock and dropped it without mishap and went back to the shipper to see if they had any of our empty trailers.

He said if they did they would be in their empty lot. Her showed me a map of their facility and pointed out the empty lot and said, “all the trailers in this lot are empty.” So I headed over there, picked up a trailer, gave it a quick pretrip and sent the number of the trailer we were taking in to our company via the Qualcomm. Then we headed on our way to Pennsylvania to pick up our next load.

About two hours later, we got a message on the Qualcomm: “Please confirm empty trailer number.” This was back in the day when the Qualcomm still worked while you were driving so I just resent the trailer number and kept driving. About 15 minutes later we got another message, “Pull over immediately at first safe location and await instructions.”

Well that was kinda weird, but I found a rest area about 20 miles down the road and pulled in. We sat there a while trying to figure out what the heck was going on, but couldn’t really come up with anything. Finally we decided they were probably going to put us on a different load or something.

The next message was even weirder, “Go look inside trailer and report immediately.” Wondering what the heck was going on I went back to the end of the trailer, opened the doors, and was hit with the heavenly smell of thousands of loaves of fresh-baked bread. Not just any bread. This trailer was full of special fancy-pants speciality breads. Crap. They had put a loaded trailer in the empty trailer lot and I hadn’t checked it to confirm it was in fact empty before we left.

I went back up to the the truck and told them the trailer was full of bread but that I had taken it from the lot that the shipper had told me held only empty trailers. Dispatch told me the shipper had already confirmed that it was them who had put the trailer in the wrong lot, so I breathed a little easier. I figured that I was now looking at driving two and a half hours back to the shipper to return their bread, two and a half more hours to get back where I was sitting right then and another four hours to get to where our next load picked up. What a huge pain in my ass. Five extra hours of driving that day… great. But in the end things were not even going to be that easy.

Our company messaged us then and asked if the trailer had been sealed when I picked it up. I told them no it hadn’t been… thinking “duh, if it had had a seal on it I would have known it was loaded and not taken it even if it was in the empty lot.” As it turns out, the yard dog who had moved that trailer out of the dock had not only put it in the wrong lot, he had also ignored their primary rule — that all loaded trailers were to be sealed immediately after they were removed from the dock and the seal number was to be recorded on their seal control form. It was actually this rule which was causing the problem.

That was the first time I had really thought about how tightly food shipments are usually controlled. They are almost always sealed by the shipper and the seal can not be broken except by the receiver. Which is a good thing as I think we can all agree we don’t really want our food products easily accessible for tampering in truck stop parking lots and all. Unfortunately, in this case it meant that the shipper didn’t want their bread back since it had been outside of their control for over two hours without a seal on the trailer.

So… hmmm… the company we worked for at the time didn’t know what to do. They had a dumb-assed driver sitting in a rest area with a trailer full of fancy-pants breads – worth several tens of thousands of dollars — that the shipper was refusing to take back. They couldn’t just keep it and sell it, either. Both because nobody would buy finished food products that had been traipsing around unsecured and also because the shipper wouldn’t let them.

We sat there in that rest area for hours before they came up with a solution. In the end our company ended up paying the shipper for all the bread and having us take the trailer to one of our company’s yards and drop it there. We never did hear what they ended up doing with all that bread. Luckily I had been working for that company for over a year so they knew my excellent track record and knew that I hadn’t done anything maliciously. I never got in any trouble or even heard any more about it after that day. Whew!

The lesson certainly stuck though. To this day I check inside every single “empty” trailer we pick up. I may occasionally be a ‘tard, but thankfully I am capable of learning.