Did you ever think that we,(dockworkers) can only play the hand we're dealt to the best of our ability? The numbers games that Yellow plays with us requires us to have a certain number of stops per hour. They frown on drive time between stops. Thats all fine and good if you're peddling the city you're based out of. Some of the cities/towns we service are well over two hours away on a good day. Pepper in a few stops and 2hrs becomes four, so much for AM deliveries.
Now your pickups start rolling in. It's 1pm now and you just got to the town you're supposed to be servicing in the first place. You drive right past all of the places you should be picking up right now because you still have a half a load of freight that still needs delivered.
Finally you're empty. It's now 3pm, everyone's cut-off times vary between 3:30 to 5:00. You go to the place with the earliest cut-off first. These places that had open docks earlier when drove by are now packed 4 deep with trucks. Get in line and start making phone calls to other customers asking if they can wait for you. Some will some won't, then you have to explain to your boss why you missed a pick-up. Like he doesn't already know?
You get to your last stop of the day, you take a look at your bills and realize that a lot of it is going to the same place so you talk the tow motor operator into stacking and turning the majority of the freight into a header. Sweet! That's going to make life so much easier when you get back to the dock.. Relay that little tidbit of info back to the boss and go grab some lunch.
You get back to the barn that night and find that a ******* bomber must have hit the place. Freight everywhere, and nobody to load it. Everyone is out of hours. We don't call in help anymore since Yellow started leaning on us. Grab a strip sheet and hop on a forklift, try to make some sense out of this mess. Oh, and that header I loaded can't be used because it all needs weighed. Turns out it was tail freight anyways.
You want to know why we're late every night? There's the dumbed-down reader's digest explanation for you. If you've never been a P&D driver, you really don't have clue, and I'd appreciate your keeping your comments to yourself.