Today's lesson in trucking: nice guys don't always finish first.
I was up around 0100 when the dock workers from the CDW warehouse came around to take off the seals to our trailers and assign dock doors. By the time I had my rig backed in, brakes set and wheels chocked I decided to grab a banana for some energy and then made my way inside the warehouse.
As I was walking in I passed a slower driver from Fedex LTL and didn't think anything of it. I was through with my snack and there was a dumpster about fifty feet beyond the driver's door so I detoured there to chuck the peel away, then opened the door for the Fedex guy and followed him inside to the waiting area.
Big mistake.
It turns out you are unloaded in the order in which you enter that door and sign in, and LTL (Less Than Truckload) guys have dozens or hundreds of BOLs (Bills of Lading) in each load. So I sat and waited while the lady behind the desk painstakingly entered each of them, stamped each of them, put a sticker on each of them then carefully piled them up for the driver. For more than thirty minutes!
Then, my turn came and mine took less than a minute, but the fun was only starting. Since his paperwork was done first, he started to get unloaded before me. As each package came off they had to hunt down the right BOL and check it off. Maddening.
Fortunately they had another dock worker there unloading so once he was done with the previous load he skipped past the Fedex guy and handled my load. One BOL, 24 simple pallets, no problem.
Turns out, the load was ten tons of HP laptops with a retail value of $800,000 to $1,000,000 or so. High value indeed.
