Go Team Pandy!

These are the words I heard last week from a freight broker. Nevermind the fact that I had been trying to get a truck to carry this product for nearly two weeks and that customers were getting antsy about their orders being filled, this just isn’t something you want to hear.

The truckload was to make two drops in Southern Oregon on a Thursday and then make two more drops near Portland on Friday morning before dropping the remaining items to us in Washington. Well Friday rolled around and the driver was a no show. I called the broker to see what was going on and the driver told him that one of the places was closed or something, but really I think he really just wanted to spend Memorial Day weekend at home which is understandable.

Anyway, back to the actual problem. The freight broker informed me that the driver had apparently been shot by deputies in Oregon after pointing a gun at them. Everything worked out in the end with some tag-team driving that had one driver picking up the load in Oregon, making the Portland drops and then handing it over to a guy from Tacoma that brought it the rest of the way up.

That probably wasn’t too incredibly interesting to you, but I just thought it was really crazy that of all the truck drivers in the country that had to go and get shot by cops, it was the one carrying our freight.

A couple of weeks ago I, along with just about everyone else I work with had what seemed to be a ridiculously bad week. Considering that the pictures below represent what I got to see and deal with within the first hour of work I should have known that things just weren’t going to go that well.

When people ask me where I work or what I do, I’m not sure they fully understand what I’m talking about when I say the company I work for does sales and warehousing for a manufacturer of irrigation/water meter boxes. I wouldn’t either if I didn’t have to deal with them every day. It still baffles my mind that pallets of these things ship out all the time. Where are they putting these things? Everywhere I go already seems to have a good supply already in the ground. Actually, I never even looked at them until I started working here and that was because it seemed like a fun game to see if the box in the ground came from the manufacturer we rep. Anyway, we rep for some other types of products as well, but this line just happens to be the one with the crappily loaded trucks.

Once again, you can click on the image for the full-sized one via Flickr.

Here’s a shot of the full scene viewed from the loading dock. If you look closely at the utility pole on the left border of the image, you’ll notice that the gray tube running next to it has a slight bend. Some drivers find it difficult to navigate into our loading dock and that bend is the result of one of those drivers.

Now a closer view from a side angle. One of the only things I was thankful for is that it wasn’t raining. Could you imagine having to help clean all this stuff up in the rain? Let me tell you, it sucks.

Here’s a shot that also shows another pallet that is ready to happily fall as soon as we pull out the gray vault box. I think we were actually able to save that one though so not all was lost.

Now this one is actually from a different day. I think some of the blame on this one could go to the driver. The pallets were probably already sideways due to a bent load bar, but his backing in wasn’t so smooth and the rough braking caused a few to slide out all over the loading dock. You can see some boxes stuck between the truck and dock in this image.