Ever since I started trucking people love to tell me dumb trucker stories and jokes. Every day we see
pictures on facebook of some trucker fail. When I meet people and they know that I am a trucker they have a story. Well folks the real genius is not the trucker. The real genius works in dispatch.
Every trucker must know that dispatchers lack the skills to actually read a map. Don't all dispatchers believe that an inch on the map is only like a mile or so in real life? It did not take very long into my driving career to discover directionally challenged dispatchers. It was time to go home and dispatch sent me to Kewaskum, Wi because “It sounds like Kewaunee so they must be close.” I told them that they are 100 miles apart. His response was the classic – They're only an inch apart on the map.
Then of course they take the best and the brightest dispatchers and put them in charge of dispatch. My
favorite dispatch story revolves around the special genius that it takes to be in charge. Logic just does not matter to some people. This special genius thought that having a trailer or not “didn't matter”.
This particular Thursday morning started 40 miles south of Green Bay. I was loading a load of cheese to live unload in Green Bay. From there they wanted me to run down to Plymouth, WI to load a load to the St. Louis area. It loaded and unloaded quickly. I decided to take the trailer over to the terminal to get washed out. That is usually a 10 minute job. Everyone appreciates a clean trailer. The shop wanted to keep that trailer to put a custom wrap on it for a large new customer. No problem, just grab another trailer from the yard. Except, there wasn't another trailer.
After 5 hours of waiting for another trailer, making that St. Louis delivery was no longer viable. I knew that customer. A late arrival on Friday could mean waiting until Monday. I told my dispatcher
that I could not make the load. About an hour later, I received a phone call from the head of dispatch. He was irate. “You can't take yourself off a load.” I told him that we did not have any trailers. He said that it “didn't matter”. I responded with “You can't load a load without a trailer.” He came back with it “doesn't matter”. I said that it kind of does. He threatened to fire me. I didn't want to work with this genius anyway.
Friday morning I went in and declared that one of us had to leave. We went back and forth and the operations manager came out and called us both into the office. He asked the “genius” what the problem was. He told him that I had been dispatched on a load and then “quit” on it. He left out the fact that we had no trailers. The operations manager said that I was not allowed to drop a load. I told him the trailer story. At that point he turned to the dispatch manager and asked him “How can he haul the load without a trailer?” Genius told him that it “doesn't matter”. The operations manager said, “Yes, it does.”
Throughout my over 30 years in this business, my dispatchers have been great. I suspect most of their drivers have been as well. We tend to remember when things go wrong. We forget all of the loads that went fine.