Night Creatures
by
Phil Madsen, Expediter
(Written June 9, 2007 for publication on SuccessfulExpediters.com)
Ok, readers! Here’s a slice of the expediting life. Grrrrrrr.
It is Saturday, 3:50 a.m. I am writing this to vent emotional steam so I can get back to sleep. I will not identify the cities in the deep-south states so as not to identify the shipper.
The immediate-pickup load offer we received about 12 hours ago seemed routine enough. Proceed immediately to the pickup location, load the truck and then drive to the delivery address that was provided with the run information. We have done that many times.
The load picked up early Friday night. Delivery was scheduled for Saturday morning. With 138 miles to the pickup and 358 miles to the delivery, one of us could do the whole run while the other slept.
While we would have preferred a cross-country run that would have kept us driving over the weekend, no such offers were received. If we did not take this run, we would likely wait until Monday for the next one. The pay was OK but the delivery was not near a busy freight center.
Given the choice between taking this load or doing nothing at all, we chose the load, knowing we may end up deadheading (driving empty at our expense) out of there on Monday in search of new freight to haul. On the other hand, a load might bubble up over the weekend and we may not have to deadhead to a freight center at all. You never know in this business.
Using Delorme Street Atlas USA, a computer mapping program, we found the address and plotted our route. The address did not exactly match the local directions that were provided in the run information. That is not unusual, so we did not worry about that.
Around 3:00 a.m., Saturday, we arrived in the area. Diane was driving. I was asleep. The local directions said the delivery was across the street from a Wal-Mart but there was no Wal-Mart in site. After driving around for a bit, Diane called back to me for help. While still in bed, I was already awake and knew something was amiss.
Sleeping in a moving truck is a learned skill. At 3:00 a.m. it us usually pretty easy to sleep, whether the truck is moving or not. When I went to bed, I had no reason to believe anything unusual would develop. If this run went like many others, Diane would drive to the delivery address, arrive a few hours ahead of the delivery time, drive around a bit to find and move into a parking place, and park the truck.
As with most runs, it would be easy to sleep while the truck rolled down the highway. I would probably wake up when Diane entered town, stopped and started at traffic lights, found the address, turned into the parking lot, parked the truck, and set the brakes. While I stayed in bed, she would send a message to our carrier saying we were at the gate, update her log book, secure the truck and join me between the sheets.
When one of us is in bed and the other is driving, one of the best sounds in the world to hear is the loud blast of air that comes when the air brakes are set. At that instant, you know the truck is not going to move any more. You don’t have to lay in bed half-braced for the next stop, start or turn. You know you are where you are supposed to be and your codriver will soon be in bed with you.
Not this time. Diane had driven up and down local streets more than the usual amount. The extra number of U-turns and driveway entrances and exits told me something was wrong. Her calling me out of bed for help was no surprise. We were lost.
Diane parked the truck. I got up, got dressed, set up the computer on the kitchen counter in the sleeper, fired it up, and opened the mapping program. With Diane driving and me following along on the map, we found no meaningful landmarks on the ground except a cross street that was also on the map. The map said we were just a few feet from our delivery address. Other than the cross-street itself, there was nothing there but brush, vacant lots and small businesses scattered about; most closed for the weekend, some closed forever.
Some towns do a great job of lighting and marking their streets, and putting street numbers on their buildings. This town was not one of them. While the weather was OK and the neighborhoods seemed safe enough, it was dark and difficult to identify landmarks. At that time of the night, the bars were closed and most of the drunks had made it home. We had the streets pretty-much to ourselves.
I could have plugged in the GPS antenna and used satellites to pinpoint our location on the map but that was not the problem. We knew where we were on the ground. The problem was the delivery site was not where the directions said it was supposed to be.
I opened another computer mapping program, CoPilot Truck, and plotted the address. CoPilot agreed exactly with Delorme. The streets matched. The numbers matched. There was no doubt about it. We were at the address we had been given. Only, no building or parking lot there matched the delivery description.
If the address does not get us to the delivery, sometimes the local directions will. In this case, they were worthless. From the pickup, no freeway ran to the delivery town. The route followed secondary roads the whole way. The local directions started from a freeway exit. Once we were in town, finding the freeway was easy enough, but the exit name in the local directions matched nothing on the map. The freeway had only two exits for this town, but neither one of them could be identified from the local directions.
I was starting to wonder if we had the right address but the wrong city in the run information. I called dispatch and said we saw nothing on the ground that corresponds to the address or local directions we received. Before I finished speaking, the dispatcher said, “Hold on.” and abruptly put me on hold. She did not say why or give me a chance to confirm the address with her, which is all I wanted to do. You can tell when you get a new dispatcher. This was one of those times.
A few minutes later, the dispatcher came back on the line, now on a conference call with the shipper, who she woke up. In this case, the shipper and the consignee (receiver) were the same. He was in a hotel, in town near our delivery. We picked up the freight at a terminal. He traveled to be at the delivery when we arrived. He was not familiar with the town. He tried his best to figure out where we were and confirmed that the delivery was across the street from a Wal-Mart.
As the call proceeded, I started to feel stupid. Finding a Wal-Mart store in an unfamiliar city is not hard to do. We do that all the time. Because most Wal-Mart stores permit truck parking, it is where we often go to resupply the truck or park to sleep. I imagined the shipper thinking to himself, “They can’t find Wal-Mart? How hard is that?”
I was embarrassed and frustrated. We cannot find Wal-Mart and our customer got woke up. This is not good. “I can’t believe we can’t find Wal-Mart!” I said to myself. “This is nuts!”
Beating myself up changed nothing. No store magically appeared. After asking us some more questions about landmarks, and with the dispatcher listening, the shipper said, “You are on the wrong side of town.” The dispatcher told him to hang up. He did so after telling us to go not to the delivery address, but to the Wal-Mart, where he would meet us in the morning. “Great!” I thought. “The shipper said we are on the wrong side of town. Now the dispatcher thinks I am an idiot too.”
As abruptly as before, the dispatcher put me on hold to set up a conference call to Wal-Mart. While on hold, I broadened the search on both mapping programs to find a Wal-Mart anywhere in town. Neither program found one. Dispatch was going way over the top, I thought. All I needed was a good street address for the delivery but this conference-call-happy dispatcher was on a mission.
The dispatcher took me off hold. Now the dispatcher and a very confused Wal-Mart employee were on the phone. The employee was unsure why someone was conference-calling Wal-Mart for directions, and she was not good at giving them. The conference call could have been avoided if the dispatcher gave me a moment to explain that she or I could use the internet and Wal-Mart web site to get a good address for the store. But I could not get a word in.
Not wanting to make the dispatcher look bad in the hearing of the shipper or Wal-Mart employee, I bit my tongue while the unneeded conference calls proceeded. At O-dark hundred, it grew increasingly frustrating dealing with a dispatcher that spent too much time helping and not enough time listening. All I wanted to do was confirm the delivery address.
I did not think about it then but now realize that I should have used our other cell phone (we each carry one) to call another dispatcher and have the second dispatcher put the brakes on the first.
Soon after setting up the Wal-Mart conference call, the dispatcher hung up. The Wal-Mart employee put me on hold to get the store street address and zip code. It struck me as strange that she would not know the address of the store where she worked or how to give directions to get there, but that was the case.
Being called out of bed at 3:00 a.m., being lost, feeling stupid, and being poorly served by the people I was talking to, I was not in a mood to listen to the gospel and rock music that blasted loudly over the phone while I was on hold. However, I had not heard Three Dog Night’s Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog, for a long time, and that was a treat. Singing along helped a little, but not enough to change my now-surly disposition.
As my time on hold grew, I thought about hanging up. I stayed on the line because the dispatcher had probably identified our carrier to the employee who was now chasing down a manager. It would be rude and bad PR to put these people through their customer-service paces only to hang up on them in the middle of their efforts. Two songs after Bullfrog, a manager came on the phone.
I asked her for the store street address and zip code, which she provided. She also said to look for the Wendy’s on the main road and that the Wal-Mart was back off the road and around some curves. I thanked her and hung up.
Entering that address into the computer programs produced nothing. The address could not be found. Grrrrrrr. The internet connection was very slow but I was glad to have it. Finally, when the Wal-Mart web site opened, I discovered the store manager had given me the correct address but wrong zip code.
I next entered the right address and zip code into Delorme. Nothing was found. CoPilot produced the same results. According to both programs, there was no Wal-Mart in town and nothing even close to that address on the planet.
Back to the Wal-Mart site I went, this time to use the MapQuest feature there. It was slow. Zoom in, wait. Zoom in, wait. Zoom in, wait some more. Out of patience, I gave up and went to Google Maps instead (http://maps.google.com). Google instantly pinpointed the address and displayed a major cross street that helped me know where it was.
I located the cross street on Delorme. Twenty minutes later, we were parked in the Wal-Mart lot. The mental image created by the directions that said “across the street from Wal-Mart” is nothing like the way it looks here. It is a good thing the shipper decided to meet us at Wal-Mart. With the major roads, one-way roads, curves and intersections on three sides of the store, “across the street” could point to a hundred different buildings; and some of them a half-mile away.
With the truck parked, Diane went to bed. When I started writing this, I thought I would be going to bed too but that has changed. Delivery time is 6:00 a.m. While we could both go to bed and hope the shipper will find the truck and knock on the door, it is more professional for one of us to be awake and ready to move when he arrives.
If it would be a several hour wait, we would both go to bed and set an alarm. This time, it is easier to stay awake. I’ve been writing since 3:50 a.m. If I go to bed now (4:30), it would be harder to wake up and get ready for the shipper's 6:00 arrival than to stay awake now.
So ... here I sit, in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It is dark outside but the mercury street lights are bright. I lower a sun visor to keep their beams out of my eyes. In the artificial light that expediters know well, I see the night creatures moving about.
A dozen Wal-Mart night shift workers are smoking cigarettes outside the front door. Stray customers, coming from or going to the store, walk across a mostly empty parking lot. Cats are exploring the dumpsters behind the strip mall next door. At the all-night fast food store straight ahead, potheads are getting their munchies.
As the evening runs its course, it occurs to me that I am a night creature too; a trucker awake in the dark, unhappily grousing about how he did everything right but still ended up looking and feeling stupid. To someone else surveying the scene, I would be just another faceless person in the dark; another poor soul who is out and about while normal people sleep.
The cats know what they are doing and why. The Wal-Mart employees know what they should be doing (working) but are not. They also know what they should not be doing (smoking) but are. The potheads may know what they are doing, or not. It does not matter, because they do not care. At the moment, I think I know what I am doing and why, but I do not like how it feels.
Good grief! Look at me…sitting here at a Wal-Mart in the middle of the night, over 1,000 miles from home. I want to sleep but am not. I want this freight off the truck but it is on. I want whoever wrote the local directions to understand how a casual error in directions on their end can have negative effects on our end, but that is not going to happen either.
One thing I do know is that when our shipper arrives, he will be greeted by a uniformed and groomed driver who will apologize for waking him up (even though it was not my choice to do so) and is ready to get his freight into his hands. I also know that after we have a nap and shower, we will be feeling better and ready to roll again.
Yes. That’s it, Phil. Get your mind back in the groove.
Think past the negative circumstances of the moment and on to better things to come; a nap, a shower, and a perhaps sit-down breakfast at the Cracker Barrel we saw while wandering around.
First light will come, then the sun, and then the shipper. After that, it is a nap, a shower, and breakfast at Cracker Barrel.
It’s working. I feel better.
Think past the negative and on to better things to come.