gridlore: Doug looking off camera with a grin (Don't Drive Angry!)
Douglas Berry ([personal profile] gridlore) wrote2010-05-03 07:07 pm
Entry tags:

I'm on a horse.

When we last left our hero (me), he was heading back into work after coming home when no one showed up to open the damn place.

Since I was going in during the heart of rush hour, it took a little longer than usual. Once I was finally at work, I did not clock in (they can my 0530 start time.. I was there, and their failure is not my problem) and walked into to find that my route had so little on it that it was being put off and I was originally tasked with covering East Bay.

At this point I should explain. Today we were already going to be short of drivers. The usual Local 1 driver is out with an injury, and the usual East Bay driver is having massive dental work done (much like mine of a few years back) so things were already going to be tight. We had four scheduled drivers and two of us could be reached after we left.

I looked at the EB route and remarked out loud that i had no clue about any of the stops. At which point one of the emergency cover drivers offered to trade Local 2 with me, as he's done East Bay recently and knows at least some of the stops. Local 2 is mostly San Jose, with some stops in west valley cities like Saratoga and Cupertino. I gratefully accepted the offer, and of seventeen stops, had been to four of them before and at least had a clue about another half dozen or so.

Just writing up my trip sheet took forever, since I had to use the Thomas Guide to route things. I honestly had no clue how to set this up, but things fell into place. That should be your guide in picturing this, for most of the day I was clutching a Bay Area Metro Thomas Guide in one hand while driving with the other.

But out on the roads I went; and once out, I kicked ass. Without much knowledge of the sites I was hitting, I made my first five stops in one hour. Company standard is four stops in an hour (not possible on my usual Livermore Valley route.) Using my mapbook and phone, I managed to hit just about every stop with little problem, and even saw an old coworker from the SuperShuttle days at SJC. I even managed to fit in an extra stop in Santa Clara. One of my first stops was a wrong address error, and I had more than enough time to fit them in at the end. Even with the late start I rocked out 17 deliveries in about six hours.

Look at me.
Look at your driver.
Now back to me.
I'm on the mother-freaking horse, baby!
claidheamhmor: (Default)

[personal profile] claidheamhmor 2010-05-04 11:15 am (UTC)(link)
Nice going! 4 stops in an hour is pretty hectic - how could you manage that unless the deliveries are really close to each other?

[identity profile] gridlore.livejournal.com 2010-05-04 12:09 pm (UTC)(link)
This route, Local 2, is mostly confined to one good sized city (San Jose) and most of the stops were no more than a mile or two apart. It also helped that the majority of the deliveries were of the "one 40lb box" variety, and not time consuming things like multiple pallets or large bundles of Unistrut or all-thread.
claidheamhmor: (Default)

[personal profile] claidheamhmor 2010-05-04 12:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, that sounds more believable! I've seen you mention the sort of things you deliver, and I was wondering how it could possibly be unloaded fast enough.

[identity profile] gridlore.livejournal.com 2010-05-05 01:45 am (UTC)(link)
Most deliveries take ten minutes or less, even that big ones. These guys are busy and want their shit, so they tend to jump to it when a truck rolls in. There's also the factor that my truck takes up a lot of space on the typical tight jobsite, and they want me to move along.

If a delivery takes longer than 10 minutes, we're expected to explain the delay. The most common notation is "BH" - By Hand, meaning that a load that would normally be handled by a forklift or Grade-All had to be done piece-by-piece. BHA means By Hand Alone. "On Break" is another common one, meaning they were on a union-mandated break and you had to wait.