I can't even come up with a witty title for this one.

[gridlore]

I have a site, pretty far out there, that has been nothing but a headache since day one. We're delivering to a subcontractor there. From what I've gleaned, this site is going to be housing for families of patients staying the hospital across the street. The site is pretty small, and fairly narrow.


The first two times I went out there, which was weeks ago, I brought full pallets of material only to be told that the only Grade-All on site wasn't leased by the subcontractor, and could not be used. The first time, being naive about this guy, I unloaded the pallets by hand. The second (with close to 3,000lbs on my truck, I got the general contractor to unload me.

Today, I had eight freaking pallets for this site. Nothing from him for weeks (and I can see the site from a freeway I use frequently, so I could see the ongoing work) and suddenly he needs four orders, each at least seven pages (kshandra asked if we invoiced every single bolt), each consisting of two big pallets.

Yeah, this made loading the truck a joy. I have other stops, y'know?

To cut to the action, my day sucked. In every aspect. But I was down to my last three stops, and this site was the next up. I pull in, hit "call" on my phone, and immediately get yelled at. "Don't block the driveway!"

OK, dillweed, the reason I'm calling you is I DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU NEED ME!!! I don't see any clear laydown yard, you don't have a labeled trailer onsite, I can't even see a truck with your company logo on it! Those are the signs I look for. On such a cramped site, I'm not going to blunder forward and put myself in a position where I need to inch my truck out. I get surly directions to park. Then wait.

And wait. Half an hour later (After having had to move the truck three times) I call my boss to tell him that I'm sitting reading a book and getting paid for it. He promises to light a fire.

Finally, after 45 minutes, the crap is off my truck. Since I'm now in a really odd position (sort of wedged up between a retaining wall and a bunch of surveyor stakes) I ask how to get out. "Go about 10', you can do a Y-turn, and come out this way." Fine. I do that, come back to the place I started to find the damn Grade-All parked in the middle of the only road out of the site! I had to waste another ten minutes tracking down the driver and letting him know that he had 30 seconds to move that pig under its own power, or I would see how far an International 4300DT could push it.

But on the way home, I got Cracker's Teen Angst on the radio. cranks that sucker up to 25, and the world is a slightly better place.

Crossposted to gridlore and customers_suck

Comments

[rickvs.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the time my bosses were playing musical printers at work -- and by printers, I mean grand-format monsters capable of outputting banner material on eleven-foot wide rolls. They'd bought one machine, then intended to replace it with a different brand ...then decided to keep both after the manufacturer of the first one gave our owner some sort of sweetheart deal. This decision, such as it was, was made on a Thursday -- with the second monster due to arrive on Saturday.

So of course, the high muckety-mucks above me immediately pulled out the graph paper and constructed a cunning game plan that would enable them to move the first printer to its new destination while leaving room for the second one to swing in, right? Right? Hear the hollow echo...

By the time it was all said and done, six feet of the carpet had been torn up by the forklift, and one of the door frames was not quite broken free of its mooring.

My esteemed bosses figured, I suppose, that they could just eyeball the back-and-fill process on the day of delivery, as if they were moving a couch rather than two precision machines, each bigger than my car.

Charming little scamps, the lot of them...

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Hope it was a -good- book. [Important safety tip: always have a book!]