Accidents and Why you should fear the road

Last Friday we had an accident in the warehouse. One of our delivery drivers was attempting to unload a truck and dumped the forklift in the parking lot. As the forklift was entering the truck, the truck pulled away from the building and the forklift fell out of the truck.

To someone who hasn’t worked around a warehouse, this may sound uninteresting. This is actually very remarkable. The driver came away uninjured. She "rode it out" from start to finish and only ripped the sleeve of her shirt. This is a 7,000 pound forklift…for comparison, that’s more than two Mazda Miatas. Additionally, this is a battery powered lift. The battery alone weighs about 2,500 lbs.

Most accidents like this almost always end in injury…often in death. Remarkable.

What the pictures do not show real well is the battery acid pouring out of the battery. The battery dumped out about 20 gallons of acid on the forklift and concrete. I wasn’t too concerned about this until we had to get the forklift back on its wheels. To do this, without the help of a crane, you need to drag the lift away from the building, lay the forklift on its side, and then set it back up on its wheels. This process spread the acid around just a bit.

On the brightside, chics in Europe are paying top dollar for acid wash jeans.

For those of you in the rest of the world, I have a single message…that I’ll undoubtedly repeat often on this blog: You should cower in fear of every delivery truck and semi that you see on the road. I mean the pull over and wait kind of fear.

“Why, Kyu? I know these trucks are big, but why be that afraid?”

Because of who’s behind the wheel. Oh. My. God. If you’ve ever had to go inside the gas station to pay for gas and looked at the attendant behind the counter and wondered: “Was the GED that hard?” Or been to a McDonalds and felt very fortunate to not have been dropped on your head by the nurse, and your mom, and your brother-daddy like the guy running the McFlurry machine. These all pale in comparison to the brain trust that is the transportation industry.

The reason that the accident at our building happened is because the driver of the truck that was being unloaded didn’t chock his wheels or set his parking break. Essentially, he left the truck in neutral. You don’t have to have a degree in physics or phys ed to know what is going to happen in that situation.

And the excuse:

“You guys never unload me with a forklift. I didn’t think you’d do it this time.”

Oh…but there’s more than just this guy.

You haven’t lived until you’ve given directions to one of these guys. They all speak in exit numbers.

Driver: “What exit number are you at?”

Me: “The one that leads to my building.”

Driver: “You mean you don’t know?”

Me: “You mean your dispatcher didn’t give you directions? No, I don’t know the exit number…but, I also don’t know my company’s 9 digit zip code and I can still find the place.”

Driver: “Zip codes only have 5 numbers.”

Me: “Yeah, and we use street names here. Call your dispatch.”

Something you may not know. There is a great majority of over-the-road drivers, those are the trucks with the big sleeper cabs, that are Russian. There’s also a good contingent that are French-Canadian. Those calls go a little something like this:
(as a side note, I not supposed to get these calls, yet somehow these dopey bastards still find my extension.)
-ring-

Me: “This is Kyuball, can I help you?”

Driver: silence

Me: “Hello?”

Driver: “I pick-up, need…ah…to you…how?”

Me: sigh “You’re making a pickup and need directions?”

Driver: “I pick-up. Where you?”

Yeah…you get the idea. Conversations like this usually take 30 minutes. Time I’ll never get back.

And these guys, sometimes women, smell like they’ve been sleeping with a dirty-turd. It’s not just their body odor, no-no it's their breath too. They must snack on rotten goat-cock jerky. It’s a stink that just doesn’t leave when they do. It sticks around like tree sap on your car window. Other people who walk into it look like they got slapped then they check there shoes for dog shit.

One more observation: I know that there are driving schools out there. They advertise. If anyone who runs these schools happens to randomly read this posting, please consider adding a three-week course on backing up to dock-doors.

It never ceases to amaze me how guys can drive forward for thousands of miles at a time, but can’t back up to a building to save their life. We’ve painted lines on the concrete for these guys and they still end up hitting the building. I’ve backed up a trailer before, it’s not easy, but it’s also not my career and while it’s not 40 feet long, it’s the same principle.

So the next time you're zipping through traffic and you see a large gap between a semi and the one in front of him, think twice before you put yourself in center of a shit sandwich. It just might come with pickles.