I’ve just had a really rubbish week and mostly due to union members who do not give a toss about doing any work. It started out as quite a normal nice week, run down to NYC to preload a couple of trailers, I got in my cab at 03.00 am to leave the house and a message was on my screen ‘Please call dispatch Pat’ I call in to be asked if I can do an extra preload … at 01.00am ? I call in … “I can’t load a trailer at 1 o’clock as it is now just after 3 o’clock now and I will not be in NYC until 8 o’clock”
“But will you think about it ?”
“I have a load to do at 8 o’clock followed by another at 10 o’clock so I will see if I can fit it in around noon”
“But thats too late”
“There ya go then” … All went ok after that, I did the 2 loads, got up next day and loaded then delivered Ben & Jerry and went home, weds I went to get a service and a new windscreen fitted, thurs is the bad stuff. I get up at half past midnight to start loading trailers at 01.00, got the first 3 loaded by the good shift by 06.30 then the bad 'union lazy gits came in, it took 9 hours form them to load the other 2 loads. I went to my sleeper shattered. Fri I get up to load 5 and again the first 2 were done by the good shift in 3.5 hours, then the strict union tossers arrive. I was positioned in the loading spot at the start of their shift and sat waiting, after almost a hour one of them comes to me … “Pat, we need to switch you to the other loading pipe” Took him an hour to come out and tell me this, I switch and its another 30 minutes before he turns on the line, this makes everyone 90 minutes late and on fri mornings there are a lot of trucks, so my 4th load which was to load at 09.00 was now stuck behind the line of waiting vehicles, a mate who was supposed to collect one of them calls me and being a good guy comes in to get in line himself and load it which means by the time the tank I have actually git washed and ready to load at what is now 11.00 would be my last. I eventually get to the loading spot at noon, the guy puts me in the line and goes to lunch without starting the loading, he is gone and hour then underloads me by 25,000 lbs FFS so after scaling I then have to return and hold up everyone else to get more stuff put in the tanker, meanwhile my mate has been under the pipe without being started for an hour, they top off my load and I ask “Are you going to start on him now?”
“No, we finish the shift at 3.00pm and it’s 2.00pm now”, lazy sods 
I left and there was a line of about 10 tankers waiting to load, how the hell these thoughtless lazy gits keep jobs is beyond me ?
Even at home on sat mornings I am being pounded with crap. The refinery boss calls me because some guy has loaded a dry tanker with a liquid truck, he overloaded it, dropped it and went home, leaving the load unable to be delivered or even leave the refinery, they couldn’t get hold of anyone on our company so they called me (supervisor for the drivers) for me to sort it out, I did get another driver in the area to go in and blow some of the load off but it’s not my problem when I am sitting at home.
This sounds like typical American inefficiency when it comes to anything transport or storage related. I spent 24 hours last weekend in Loblaws in Cambridge, Ontario getting pratted about and in the past I’ve been in there 36 hours. Drivers in the UK complain when Tesco’s keep them for 4 hours, while they’re on full hourly pay. In the end I did get paid waiting time for Loblaws but its nowhere near as much as I’d be earning if I were driving, and after 24 hours of being woken up every 4 hours by phone calls telling me to back on to this or that door, knocking on the door to sign this or that paperwork, more knocks on the door telling me to move as I’m in the way and the like, I was absolutely shattered and have now refused to go in there again, which they seem to have accepted.
Know where your,re coming from Pat. Back in the day when I worked at the Dagenham dustbin factory on the fleet it was the same old story then with union. For example, we use to do a run to Genk in Belgium for 60hrs, so I suggested / asked why don’t we drop our import trlr at Dover and pick up a cleared trlr and return to yard and get vehicle ready to outbound on the next morning, so that way we could do 2 runs for 60 hrs to make job pay and quite legal. The sharp reply I got was " what do you want a f****** flying helmet, so in the end we lost work to firms that run bent as a butchers hook. Also the union tried to stop the buy outs for the lads who wanted to go…yeah right. Another union gem after I left was that the union agreed to a change over with the Liverpool lads just 25/30 mile short of Liverpool. one of my old friends said we have to take our night out gear in case we don’t get back as the job so tight and just thought of another wonder gem by said union. When I was on the drivers committee at one meeting with stewards and other union bods 2 of was told keep your mouths shut or you,ll be looking for other jobs…another yeah right. I ve found union reps to be totally pos and waste of space, only in it to feather their own nest, no morals , no honesty. my rant over. 
ray
A similar thing happened at Tesco Brackimills, we had a change over at the Calais store, it was a good number, a day each way then along came a bent as hell contractor who pulled out early one morning to re-appear that night having done the run
Getting back to the bad week, I developed some sickness later in the day and have been in bed since 8 pm Saturday until 11 am Sunday, then slept on the couch all day.
Pat , best of it was the contractors that were used were so bent that nothing would be able to straighten them up. One bent one actually dropped his log book , one of our guys found it and it read like this…dover-----oxford------dover------Dagenham( tip & reload genk) , when seen in the ford plant it was late at night, no mot on trlr, no tax or o licence on unit. 
PS hope yur feeling better.
ray