Good evening. We have finally departed the loading dock 6 hours later. I will never understand why it takes so long to unload a trailer. We brought in 23 pallets but they resorted them into 135 different pallets for their own store location use. All the grocery warehouses do this, but why must I sit idle while they do all their sorting out on their time? Other than counting and product item accounting, there is no reason for a trucker to ruin his hours, time, and other trip appointments while they make a bigger mess things? And here is the truly sad part that happens quite often – putting an incorrect timestamp on the “driver completed and departed” line. In this case, we were given the bills and cleared to leave the door at 7:19pm, but the time THEY put was 4:15pm. This shorts me $15/an hour they have to pay me for detention time for taking too long. Everytime this happens I cross out their time and correct it to the real time. This happens so often that I actually had a rubber stamp made so I could stamp the bills with the correct times. Does this solve anything and I get paid what’s actually due? Not hardly. The delivery customers complain, throw a fit, say the driver is wrong and so in the end, it is the driver who loses not only money but driving hours and many times it affects other loading appointments. This isn’t unique to me but is very common in trucking, especially refrigerated trucks. Oh well, we just completed our 14th year in trucking so I guess it’s too late to complain about it. Oh, and what is the unloading fee that the trucking has to pay the unloaders? Today, the charge was $444.00. Nope, not kidding and no exaggeration.
We are sitting on customer property until Saturday morning when we will go get our Preloaded trailer from Ogden. We are very short on our 70 hour clock for the next few days…
