Black Friday Melt Down!

MikeJ

TB Veteran
Credits
189
Wednesday night when I got to work the pallet building machine at my work was going and building pallets for Friday.
I though oh how lovely will be able to get out on time and were going to be a step ahead. Boy was I wrong.

Today I got into work and our drivers that start at 4:00am were still sitting in the drivers room waiting to be loaded, and it was 6am, 7am, 8am and 9am and 9:30am before they were even loaded and left and those guys a lot of them have far drivers all the way out to east Ohio.

My day thank goodness was fairly light 333 cases and 21 stops and 12 kegs. I didn't leave the warehouse until almost 11:00am!

Some how someone hit the self destruct button on the pallet building machine and the machine stopped production and reset it's self back to pallet number one! So say the machine was programmed to build 10,000 pallets for today, well they started it up Wednesday night and it processed and built enough pallets to hold 18,000-34,000 cases of beer, we got conflicting reports from the warehouse. Any how the reset or self destruct button as I call it was hit and the machine started rebuilding pallets right back at number one so all the work they did Wednesday night was a total loss!

Now the report was some machine operator hit the reset button when they were not supposed to, I don't know how any of that works, but it caused a huge warehouse melt down and caused our entire company to almost go down. It was a disaster of epic proportions! Our shuttles were coming in and getting loaded way late, we had one shuttle driver who took a set of doubles out to a drop lot and said "This is wack." Called someone to pick him up and he just walked off the job!

We had guys from drop lots coming to the main warehouse to pick up there trailers. They sent guys from all over the state up to the main warehouse to pick up trailers because it was such a disaster and they couldn't run shuttle. They were pulling equipment from drop lots and switching things up all over the place.

The trailer I was in was totally reasigned and then at the last minute they put me in some antique that we have at the yard, so piece of junk with bad doors and bays that aren't even wide enough to hold our pallets so all my pallets were turned sideways totally economically obsolete, but at that point I was lucky I even got a trailer and truck at all.

Once I got out on the road things were fine I was in and out of a lot of my stops pretty quick to tell you the truth. I really was only on the road 5-6 hours today it was not a bad day out on the road I was flying traffic was light the convenience stores were not crowed it was pretty much 1-2-3 on that end, I made it back to the yard before 6:00pm at night! So I actually did good management even gave me an at a boy they called me on the phone and when I told them I only had 4 stops left and actually I was working on stop 4 when they called me they said "Good job were proud of you."

I was the second last truck to leave the yard. One of the warehouse workers said to me "I saw you heading out on the highway when I was on my way in and I thought that's not a good sign."

Any how the warehouse is in complete shambles they have 34,000 cases to scan back into inventory that will keep them busy for the next week.

When they were loading my truck one of the tow motor operators said to me "See Mike this is what we get to be thankful for." As he said that he was trying to jam some pallet into my antiquated trailer, that spends 3/4s of it's life sitting in the yard because it's just a spare.

The warehouse was in complete shambles management is busy licking there wounds tonight, that poor machine operator who hit the self destruct button I think he pretty much probably quit, I know if I did that I would be so besides my self that I couldn't walk in there ever again.

Although when I got back to the yard the woman at the check out window said she still had 12 guys out on the road. Seriously though I bet the last couple just got back an hour ago.

Management is busy licking the wounds and that machine operator who hit that button, I don't know what that poor person is doing right now (probably sleeping or eating chips and being as happy as a clam.) I don't know how much money that mistake cost the company 10,000s of thousands of dollars in lost time, productivity and guys on the clock not working, but getting paid.
 
Man.
I won't tell you then that all our Fri trucks were loaded Wed night, was able to get started early and had a good day.
We've had those 9, 9:30,10:00am days here too though, and I've almost quit over a couple of them
 
Well that was what was supposed to happen to us that's why they were pre building pallets on Wednesday night and then the bottom fell out. I have an interview with the city tomorrow might be getting out of this business.
 
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