Worst experience while loading / unloading
 

I don't have much idea about what it's like to deal with shippers and receivers at the great big warehouses and other such places. I'm keen to know of some of your worst experiences with shippers / receivers, and how you guys dealt with the situation.

You have to know whats going on the truck, as you will be the one that takes the heat when it comes off the truck. Make sure the count is correct and items are in good condition. Arrange for "lumper fees" if needed. CYA
Grocerey warehouses {my experience} are the worst, they are ALWAYS looking to cut the freight bill, "the load is to cold", "the load is to hot", "its not stacked right", "its not on BLUE pallets", ect, ect.
AND your dispatcher may dock you. They have insurance, but having to deal with bad loads {with your name on them} takes up thier time. You may wind up sitting a lot if it happens to often.

Well, two terrible experiences. (actually a lot more, but these are the worst).

Told to pull to dock X at an Atlanta foodservice whse, for a load to Walmart in Fla. Backed in at my time (6pm). waited and waited. Went to check, they said we 're waiting to load. Checked again...later; still told to wait. Third time I checked they told me I was at the wrong dock...there was a loaded trailer at another. Finally dropped and left at 4am, 12 hrs later....too late to make my scheduled appt at WalMart in Fla within my HrsofSvc; transferred the trailer in Fla to another.

Another time was at the dock in a NOLA whse; full load of pallets of mixed M&M candy. Took them 5 hours (they do move SLOW in New Orleans) to break the order down, and couldn't make my next PU.

Run a refer, and what everyone says about food service is true. You sit and play with yourself while you wait for them to decide they are ready to load/unload. Other bad places....the military district warehouse in Norfolk; bring a good, looooong book.

But let me give you a positive so you don't get too discouraged. Once ran a dry van to a shirt warehouse (forgot who) in NC east of Charlotte. Full trailer of boxes full of shirts. Got there to find it was "driver unload". I talked to the lady who was the whse supervisor a little about the Panthers and the Bucs, and next thing you know she told me she had some guys finished with their work, so she had them unload. Then marked my B/L that it was "driver unload", so I got the (minimal) payment. You meet those folks often, too. Just remember that you reap what you sow, so treat the whse folks nice and it will eventually come back to you.

I took a load of rice to Norfolk about 20 years ago. I havent had a worse experience yet

Worst.....well, it was the longest, although the people where nice.

We picked up a preloaded piece of machinery, I think it was a skidder. To fit it on the trailer without being oversize, they took the wheels off of it. They put it right on the deck, because it would have been tall too.

The directions we had just took us to the town, the buyer had to meet us, because it was difficult to find (no kidding). We went what seemed 100 miles out of town in the wilderness, skinny roads got skinnier, and finally turned into dirt trails, at the end of which was the farm.

To unload it, in the middle of nowhere in Vermont, at this guys house, they had to put the wheels back on. All 4 of them. They only had a bucket loader if I remember this right, and little by little lifted this piece up, sliding pieces of wood under it to raise it up, so they could reattach the tires. Of course they had to go back and forth, left and right as to not topple it.

After about 4 or 5 hours, I was starving, hubby was starving. The guy just handed us the keys to his truck with directions on how to get to the only place to eat at within about 20 miles. We had to do all kinds of explaining what we were doing in "bubba's" truck.

We get back, and only 2 or 3 more hours after that we were all done. All together only about 10-12 hours.

The worst? Probably the time I some Ricky Racer on a slip sheet machine remove another drivers feet ... I saw a driver killed by another go fast moron on clamp lift (hit the driver as he was shrink wrapping a pallet, and I witnessed another driver die on a loading dock of a major heart attack... I try not to dwell too much on the bad things.. but I still do not trust idiots on forklifts..

Wow. My worst. I had a one stop extra load. It was a full trailer of discontinued waterbed mattresses we hadn't carried in years, to be delivered to a store that was a regular on my normal route.

I was told the guy was having some problems with his wife, so I should expect him to be sleeping at the store, and I should knock on the door at 8:00 AM.

8:00 AM came around. I knocked on the door. No answer. Around 8:30 AM the guy (Shane) finally peeled his half naked ass off the bare waterbed mattress he had been sleeping on, and came to the door, wearing nothing but his tightie whities.

He went into the back room, took out a Solo cup, and poured himself a tall glass of some cheap brown booze in a plastic bottle. He shook out a handful of pills, and chased them with the booze, then he drank another cup full of bourbon, whiskey, or whatever it was as a chaser.

He sent me across town a ways to some wrecked little dump of a place he was using for a warehouse. Backing in was hell. Around the time I got close to his door, his help arrived, in the form of a black college student looking to earn a little extra cash.

The door was locked, and the key didn't fit. The college student called the scuzzbag who owned all of this, and the scuzzbag called a locksmith. We waited for ages for the locksmith to come out and swap the pins in the lock so the key worked.

When we finally gained admission to the "warehouse" it was full of crap that looked like it had been bought at auctions and fleamarkets. Total junk. There was no place to put anything, let alone a whole truckload of waterbed mattresses.

The black guy didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, and had no idea what to do. So I had to take command of the situation, and figure out a plan for moving all this crap from here to there, to make room. A couple of hours later, we finally had nearly enough room for all the freight.

We spent another hour or two off-loading all that crap, carrying it through the obstacle course, and stacking it up as best we could. The black guy was a good worker, but he was just a clueless kid, who had no idea how to do anything, and needed constant micro-management to get anything right. No racisim implied. He just happened to be black, and it could have been a stupid college boy dumbass of any color or creed.

After spending all morning and half of the afternoon on this pointless quest, we finally got the last box crammed into that former auto garage, or whatever it was. The owner who was supposed to come by and direct all this had still not shown up (which is probably a good thing for all the motorists of Gastonia, NC.) The black guy left, and I drove back to the store to collect my COD.

I was supposed to pick up $8,000 for the load. The guy had finished off the bottle of booze, and the bottle of pills, and he was the most wasted human being I have ever seen. He paid me with small bills, with nothing bigger than a $50.

I was trying to count it all, since I was responsible for the money. He kept ranting about how the accountant where I worked was trying to steal from him, how I was trying to steal from him. He got downright hateful several times, and started to make threats against me.

I counted ~$5,000, which was ~$3,000 short. I pointed this out, and the guy accused me of pocketing some of the money. He started screaming at me, and flailing around.

I left, drove home, parked my truck, marched right up to the accountant, and told him "I got as much money as I could. If it's not here, I didn't steal it. I'm a truck driver, not a fu(king police officer. You don't pay me enough to deal with this sh!t, and if you try to say I stole any money from you, I will drive that wasted asshole up here to rape your bean counting ass." (Or something to that effect.)

What a nightmare.

I grew up in an alcoholic family, but nothing prepared me for dealing with Shane.

I really hope he's dead now. His wife was nice, and she really loved him, and his state was tearing her up inside. I hope he died, and she found a real man.

Why is it even relevant to mention the college kids color at all? :shock:

tehblakghi
 

more detail for the readers mind to picture the story?

A couple weeks ago, I was dispatched to load sugar in Paul, ID. I was told not to fuel up before hand, so I figured the load would be heavy. I get there and find out it's 2500 lb. tote/bags on slip sheets. After getting loaded and head to their scale, I'm over on the drives by only 100 lbs. but only have a 1/4 tank of fuel. Being the newbie that I am, I decide the load needs to be a little lighter on the drives. I drive back to the warehouse and there's another IDC truck getting loaded. I show him my scale ticket and he says to just let it go. Then he asks if I strapped the bags? ummm no, why? Then he tells the story.
His first load there 15 yrs ago was not strapped in. By the time he got to the destination he had a full trailer of sugar a foot deep. It appeared that the bags settled a lot and finally busted at the seams. The whole load had to be rejected and he had a big mess to clean up.
My reason for such a long intro story is for newbies to not assume they need no help and to never trust the guy loading your load knows anything other than where the time clock is. Overweight tickets are the driver's responsibilty where I work. Load damage can be too if it's determined that the driver was negligent. CYA

I was brand new outta school, just out with a trainer a couple of weeks. We'd picked up a load of beef parts from Storm Lake, IA and delivered it to a small processing plant in Baton Rouge, LA. We got to the consignee around midnight and parked down the street a little ways till our appointment time at 6am. We walked down to the guard and he suggested we nose into the small spot across the street so that they could keep an eye on us. The gates would be opened and we could back in when the first shift arrived. My trainer started to balk at it because we would be hanging out in the street. The guard told us not to worry about it they owned the street in from of the dock. As we were walking back down to the truck my trainer is saying that we not gonna do it, it's not safe blah blah blah. About that time, from just a block over we hear gun fire. Not just a couple of cracks, I'm talking 3 good controlled bursts of full automatic. Needless to say we moved to where the guards could watch over us. I didn't sleep 10 minutes that night.

The first shift that came in around 5AM, they were in cuffs and leg irons. They were criminals from the local jail, the packing plant was contracted to the state and had to use convict labor.

After we were unloaded one of the convicts, a little punk, came out and asked what the "white boys" (those are his words) was gonna pay to wash out the trailer. My trainer, kindly told him we weren't paying, washouts are free, part of the contract. The little punk spun around, f-this and f-that and went back into the plant. I'd never seen a look like that on anyone face, I thought my trainer was gonna murder the punk kid. The guard said that he'd have the kid fired and the trailer washed out. My trainer just finished his cigarette and asked the guard if he could go inside and talk to the kid and the supervisor. A little while later the kid was scrubbing out the trailer on his own and then when he finished he was handcuffed and taken back to jail, no more work detail for him. HA!

Why was it even relevant to mention the college kid?

One of worst was getting loaded in the caves in Kansas City, I had to hire a lumper to load my trailer for me it was about $150 to load me,well I sat there for over eight hours getting loaded now it was winter time and because you are in a cave you cant idle your truck and anybody who has ever been in the caves in the winter knows how damp,musy and cold it can be in there in the winter impossible to sleep! Well I finally got loaded drove up to the guard shack to check out and my paper work didnt match up to make a long story short he put the wrong load on my truck,now I had to go back to the dock unload then reload with the correct load,by this point I want to kill somebody and the moron lumper had the nerve to ask for another $150 to unload and another $150 to reload ,well many choice words were said to the lumper. After all was said and done I sent 14 hours in that cave,cold hungry and tired,the one and only good thing about going to the caves is no qualcom and endless messages from dispatch asking "whats your eta" :evil:

Funny you mention that. I just re-read that post, and I was about to edit it to supply why that was relevant.

Shane was a HUGE loud-mouthed racist biggot. When black customers came into his store, he used to run them out with all kinds of ranting hate speech. (That was back when he was still lucid enough to actually have customers.)

That's why the fact that it was a black guy stuck in my head. What the hell was that poor kid doing working for that sorry racist sack of shit?

I took care of the kid though, and got him paid, and the hell away from that place ASAP.

I have had a couple lol

1. I picked up a load of bulk mailers from quad grafix in wi and took it to a post office in Atlanta ga it took 12 hours to get unloaded.

2. I grabbed a trailer in trenton OH in the middle of an ice storm. i dragged it to eden NC and dropped it then hooked to another trailer headed for MA. I made it about a hundred miles when dispatch told me I had grabbed the wrong trailer in Trenton OH!!!!! I had switched two of the numbers!!!they made take that trailer to piora IL where it was supposed to go. IT was a long drive staring at that trailer in my mirrors

3. after I dropped the wrong trailer in the right spot i was dispatched to john deer in Wi and had a 6 stop load. I made it to the fist stop in MI and it was in the middle of a snow and freezing rain storm. the place unloaded the gator and realized it was the wrong one. theirs was in the nose of the trailer. after long phone conversations it was decided that we would unload the entire load and then reload it properly. we did this in freezing rain with only a small tow motor. we had to balance the gators on the forks with blocks.

the last two all happend in a four day stretch. got to love it!!!!

my trainer told me to double and tripple check my numbers but in an ice storm in the middle of feb I was socking wet and all I wanted to do was get ahead of that storm!!! I laugh now but man that was a long ride to IL :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops: :oops:

I broke a nail once pushing that little release button on my load lock!! :shock: :lol:

whats a load lock? I rarely get to see the load b4 its sealed, so I can only guess how its loaded, LOL

I used to find that food warehouses were the worst in general....though over the years that had improved.

Just remember....never lose your cool. Never argue with the idiots you encounter. Its a no-win situation. Best to stay calm, and if there is a problem....let your company handle it.

If someone gives you a bad time,....they may have dealt with a driver who was a yutz to them...before you got there, and they may be taking it out on you....or they are just boneheads to begin with. Don't give them the satisfaction of upsetting you....just call your dispatcher or fleet manager and let them take care of the situation. It may turn out that you are at a "problem customer" and they are better suited to handle the situation than you.

Years ago I dealt with a customer or two like that, and called my fleet manager...and the result was that I was told to get my bills, close the doors, reseal the trailer and leave. Customer was real unhappy then, but I just said: "I just follow orders". Didn't far away before I got turned around and the customer unloaded me quickly and it was done. 8)

But generally speaking....over the years I had very few problems with shippers or receivers. Be polite, dress decent, act friendly.....and never let anyone get to you. It'll all work out. Not worth getting in a lather over anyway. 8)

If that's the worst thing that ever happened to you with a load lock, count yourself lucky. I've almost knocked out teeth with those things.

I guess if you want to get inside the trailer, another worst experience was the time I was dragging a mixed pallet of furniture to the back. I knew it wasn't going to make it all the way to the end without falling over, and I was aiming for a controlled collapse as close to the ass end of the truck as possible.

I wound up getting caught under the collapse, and pinned to the wall of the trailer, with both arms up at an awkward angle. The weight of the furniture cut off my circulation so severely that both arms went numb, and I couldn't make them move.

The customer had to dig me out. That was embarrassing. :oops:

Or better, back when we used to have a lot of waterbed frames, I used to lift one end, and push them at an angle, with one corner sliding on the floor. I caught a splinter in the trailer floor, and the frame came to a dead stop. I didn't. So I rammed my nuts into this suddenly immovable ponderosa pine behemoth full steam ahead.

Ouch.

Yes, the yellowjackets, the bedframe, and a few other things. My poor nuts have had a rough time of it in the trucking biz.

I'm really enjoying this no touch drop and hook freight. I haven't been inside a trailer since I started the new job.

That's a great feeling, isn't it? My old fleet manager was really good for sticking up for the driver, and I very rarely lost a battle like that.

We had one customer who was a serious dick about holding me up and holding me up some more. I would eventually cajole him into letting me carry the crap from the truck, across the parking lot, up the ramp, and into the back of the warehouse, piece by piece, just to get the hell out of there and go home. He always had problems getting a dock open for me, and I only had one crappy ~18-piece stop to get rid of between me and hometime.

This one time, he wouldn't even let me do that, and told me he wasn't going to be able to get me in until after noon.

We'll see about that!

So after they went around on the phone, my boss told me to bring it back, and we'd deliver it the next round. When I got back to that place two weeks later, they were much more accommodating.

Bullard Furniture in Fayetteville, NC. One thing I will never miss about my old life as a stick hauler.

Well, I can honestly say that today was one of my worst unloading experiences.

I had a load of mattress "parts" - frames, foam, fabric, etc. that delivered to Royal Beddng in Buffalo, NY. My appointment time was for 8am, and I was preplanned to pickup a load at 11am 40 miles away. Seems fine, right?

I arrived at the consignee at 6:45am and they put me right into a dock. The dockworker said they had to load a trailer of mattresses first and then they'd unload me. Ok - terrific.

Well, they finally finished loading that trailer at about 12:30 and haven't so much as put the ramp into my trailer yet. Finally at about 1:30 they decided to start on me. Now, keep in mind my trailer is less than 1/2 full of all palletized material. It took about 30 minutes to be loaded. At 2:30 I walked back to see the progress and the sole dockworker was sitting on a chair at the dock. Ok, that's fine.

I went into the trailer and started carrying items out and tossing them on the dock - there was only 2 pallets left. So, I guess he got the idea that I was pretty upset and got on the forklift and finished pulling out the last 2 pallets. When he signed the bills I told him to be sure to write in my in/out times, as well as sign and print his name. He asked why. So, I explained to him that that information was needed so my company could bill them for the 6 hrs of detention at $150/hour.

His boss wasn't all too happy to hear that.

So, now I'm nowhere near where I'm supposed to be at 6am. My dispatcher wanted to get stupid with me when I told her that my current load would be late on delivery because of that crap. I guess she thought I was going to run all night after sitting around all day being unloaded. She stopped pressuring me when I said I could deadhead an empty truck back to the shop than I could pickup and deliver a load of water.

Gawd - I love my job....

One time when I was with Werner, I went to pick up a older trailer and whent to raise the landing gear. Well, the gear didnt want to move. I kept working on it till the handle started to move. Well my hand slipped off the handle and I fell forward. I guess I was just winding it up because it let go REAL FAST and hit me in the side of the face! Just about knocked me out! left a nasty bruise though! My wife thought I got in a fight and lost! lol

Back in 2003, my girlfriend was due to go out with me for a week. Our first load was from somewhere down to Atlanta. I picked her up and got down there, delivered and then went to the JB Hunt yard to sleep. Got the next load; a load of paper from Macon to Cincinnati. We got there on time and swept out the trailer, then parked in the staging area. Then we sat. And sat. And sat. And sat. I have my old log books and it shows we arrived at 10:00 am. I know we got into the dock around 9:00 pm and sat some more. I checked in again around 11 pm and it turns out the machine had broke down that was making our product. I recall waking up a few times to the bouncing of the truck. We woke up around 7 am and they were done. We got our bills and hightailed it.

My g/f was so upset about the sitting. She never understood when I would describe long waits (although this was the longest at JB Hunt) before she was riding along. Plus, she thought we were in big trouble. "Oh no, mon bonbon!" We're fine, nothing to worry about.

We made delivery on time, although I made a wrong turn and had to head into a driveway to get turned around. Upon hitting thid driveway, it had a very abrupt transition and my tv jumped out of the cubby and broke the case on the floor of the sleeper. :cry:

It still worked, just looked bad.

I delivered a load to Food Service of America warehouse in Fargo, ND. It was a hand unloaded of many different items and each had to be placed on it own pallet and counted. It took me all day and several hours the next morning to complete. The company did pay me for a hand unload, layover pay, and a hotel room but it was not worth it. :cry:

Another time at Budweiser in Houston when they were just coming out with their "Cold Filter"(?) or "Ice"(?) beer, I spent 12 to 16 hours with at least 6 other company drivers waiting to unload our empty bottles at the same dock. Apparently, Budweiser was having major problems with the line for this product and only could take a truck load of bottles on the dock at a time. We repeatly requested to drop our loads in the plant yard, but no dice. Finally, when I got into the dock, unloaded, and ready to leave, the forklift driver tipover a huge stack of bottles all over the place. I heard this huge crash while I was in the office getting my paperwork signed. I got out of there fast and don't know what further delays the other drivers experienced. :sad: