The Source for Trucking News, Opinions and Trucking Jobs | Put Up or Shut Up

Remember when I mentioned about shippers treating drivers like crap in the previous post? These two signs were at our latest pickup. Between the New York attitude and these signs it didn’t put me in a very good mood. Then when I was told I was responsible for the case count, my response was, “Nope”. They said you can’t take the load unless I signed for the piece count. I said, “okay”. And I started putting my pads and straps back on the trailer and started getting ready to leave, when the Operations Manager came back and said, “Wait!” He’ll call the customer and figure out something.

I already knew the customer needed this product really bad and was paying us to team this load cross country in two days. I really was ready to leave. We had an LTL ready in Chicago that would have paid for fuel and we really wanted to go home now! The customer calls me and said they had been having problems with this warehouse and they had two loads left and they were going move their business somewhere else. Plus, she was going to give me $200 to count cases because she didn’t trust these people.

After that, I counted the cases. The guy on the forklift tried to “help”, telling me how many cases were on that pallet. But after he placed it in the trailer, I counted it anyway. If there’s anything I’m good at, it’s giving back more attitude than I’m getting.

I was beginning to think I screwed up, but after the customer told us they were done with this warehouse I didn’t feel so bad and it confirmed my initial feeling that I wouldn’t be coming here anymore. I still helped the customer, got the job done and stood up to not being treated like crap.

Originally posted 2006-05-16 17:44:03.