Expedited freight is not the same load by load. Much of what we haul is high-value freight where sometimes a dozen people are waiting to go to work on it the instant it arrives. If the freight resolves an assembly line down issue, an employer may be managing the time he or she will have a hundred employees report to work and clock in.
It is not "such foolishness" as you suggest. It is excellent customer service that enables the consignee to coordinate efforts and paid labor hours at the delivery.
In other cases, delivery of our one item to one person in one location may set dozens of people in motion in another part of the world. In still other cases, it may be just one person that meets us but he is the one with keys to the refrigerator in which the freight will be stored until morning. Helping him know the freight is six hours, three hours, 90 minutes and 30 minutes out helps both the carrier and the company preserve temperature integrity on something like an irreplacable research compound that has no street value but in which the shipper has invested millions of dollars in a multi-year series of laboratory processes.
In still other cases, it might be something as mundane as a piece of furniture being delivered to a consignee's house. But to the consignee, it is important freight and the consignee wants to be told of our location and ETA.
Look. We have done loads where it took over a dozen people to put one box on our truck. Each had a job to perform in that process. They actually had a meeting about it when we arrived to review the steps of putting a box on our truck. It left us scratching our heads about the seemingly needless involvement of so many people. But it made sense to the shipper so we said not a word and went about our work. Subsequent communications about the load were intense.
There is nothing foolish about it. This is serious business.
Not only are these important loads to customers, they are in many cases loads that set people in motion when they are delivered. In some cases, a great deal rides not only on the successful delivery of the load but on successful communicatons about it. Communicating through dispatch, instead of directly with the customer, has the additonal advantage of creating an audit trail that leaves no doubt that we held up our end.
We have hauled freight where it did not matter to the shipper or consignee if it arrived this week or the next. In cases like that, Joe Truck Driver calling Joe Dock Worker would work just fine.
We have also hauled freight that if it was not delivered on time and communications about it were not made, a series of negative and sometimes disasterous events would accrue to the shipper and consignee. My comments about customer communications are made with the latter type of freight in mind. I don't want the shipper's and consignee's phone numbers. I prefer to keep dispatch in the loop and have them make the calls.
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unlike the Fed where they spend so much of their driving time text messaging the info that can and should be sent via the Qualcomm. On second thought I guess the tiny two or three line screen would be to hard to use/see
