Dog Chow and Oreos

I got hooked up with a load on the yard in Omaha heading out to the PetSmart distribution center in Ottawa, Illinois I've been to so many times before. Not quite a full day's work, being 470 miles or so, but it will do.

Delivery was quick and easy and I parked at the nearby Super Wal-Mart to rest, take care of some shopping and await the next load.

Turns out, my next load was about twenty miles away in Morris, Illinois. A bunch of Nabisco products (Oreos, crackers, cheese, etc.) heading to a small town in Iowa. Now, I've berated the Nabisco folks before, as their shipping policies are, well, insane. Hours and hours of lost warehouse time searching for the two missing boxes of corn flakes with a wholesale value of a buck or less. Product that I had to store in the cab of my truck to be returned to our headquarters then later packaged up and sent back to them. It would have to be diamonds or bank notes to make it worthwhile to do this for the quantities I'm describing. But no, Oreos and corn flakes get the ritz treatment.

I hoped for a better outcome, I really did. Even though I got to tiny Carroll, Iowa ten hours early, parked across the street in a tiny truck stop, made it to my appointment time of 0300 early and was docked and ready to be unloaded by said time it still took the warehouse people SIX FREAKING HOURS to unload half a trailer of product... on pallets.

You remember The Grinch Who Stole Christmas? Remember the Grinch's little dog that pulled that humongous sled? That freaking dog and a quadriplegic on a skateboard could have beat that time hands down.


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