We arrived yesterday at our 15:00 pickup only to discover that no one at the shipper knew anything about the freight. After an hour at the dock and several calls were made by dispatch and people at the company, the freight was finally found.
It turned out that the man who booked the load was off yesterday and he did not bother to tell anyone about the shipment he had booked. It further developed that the computer servers we were to carry would not be ready for transport until certain downloads were complete. And, there was a question about our ability to bump a dock where the clearance was 13' 4". If we could not, the shipment would be canceled as the shipper had no other way of getting the big servers onto our truck or to ground level where we could lift-gate them on.
As mentioned above, the shipper found the freight. Problem one solved.
Our truck is 13' 4" tall (designed to that height on purpose to let other trucks clear out the tree branches for us). By deflating the air bags, we were able to bump the dock. Problem 2 solved.
The shipper agreed to detention time so we went to a nearby shopping mall to wait. Problem three solved.
At the mall I got a haircut and we got flu shots. After business hours we returned to the shipper to park in the now-empty parking lot, sleep and wait for the call. Eleven hours after the original pick up time, we were loaded and on our way.
We will deliver this load around 16:00 today. It would have been this morning without the delay. We got paid to wait but wonder if it might have been better to deliver as originally scheduled in hopes of getting dispatched out on Friday. We'll never know.
Gotta love it? You bet! It's just another day in an expediter's life. If you don't love it, the life and work will get old very fast.
