Stories from the Road: For intheflow and anyone else suffering from workplace politics.
I'm a trucker and I've been working for my current employer for almost two years. When I signed on with the company it was for a different style of trucking than I had ever done. I haul containers now on a vehicle requiring a class B CDL. All I'd ever done before that was class A work which is tractor-trailer. It took me a couple of weeks to catch on and when I did they put me to work taking care of a local customer just a few miles from the yard. I did that for six months, but then I caught a break.
There was a guy who was doing out of town stuff, about 300 miles a day, and according to the boss he had fucked up bad. He had to take care of twenty containers on his route which usually entailed hauling three of them back to the yard with full loads. Three loads is a full day on that route. The guy called in sick one day and they sent another, more senior, driver up there to take care of the route. According to that guy, the driver who normally did the route was being neglectful in his duties and not taking care of the customers on the route properly. The original driver got kicked off the route and the senior driver then trained me on it. I took it over and I've been doing it ever since.
I'll call the original driver Jim. When all that shit went down I heard all kinds of nasty stuff about Jim. If you'd have listened to the other drivers talk you'd have wondered how they let a massive fuck up like Jim work there. If anything went wrong it was tied to Jim somehow. But I took this all with a grain of salt because I knew the origin of all of this anti-Jim stuff, the senior driver, and he wassn't exactly the most honorable man. But according to the boss the guy can do no wrong. He's been there forever and, supposedly, when something gets messed up he can straighten it out. He's the fixer.
Well, today I went on a run with Jim. All of my customers on my route were closed and there was nothing to haul there. I followed Jim to a customer he takes care of now to help him by taking care of one of their containers. I've always liked Jim, but I never really got a chance to talk with him about what had happened on his original, now my, route. So I took the time today.
We got to the customer and helped each other load our trucks. I then asked Jim to tell me his side of the story. According to the boss and the senior driver, Jim had left ten full containers on that route and the customers were getting backed up. They all disliked Jim. But according to Jim, he did get a little backed up, but it would have just been one extra container. In other words, on the day he got sick there would have been four loads instead of the normal three. However, Jim said this would not have been a problem. On the extra load that customer had an extra empty container. Jim had simply swapped those two and left the full one out of the way to be picked up when he had the time. I believed him because I've done something similar on that route several times. And it always worked out.
For some reason the powers that be where I work decided they have a low opinion of Jim. He told me he tried to tell the boss his side of the story but the boss didn't believe him and wouldn't listen.
I think there is something else going on here. I have a suspicion that something happened between that senior driver and Jim that no one else knows about. That driver saw a chance to stick it to Jim and he took it knowing that his word carried more weight than Jim's. That guy covers for me when I have vacation days, and knowing what I do now, I'll do everything I can to make sure that route is spotless before he covers for me again.
But, yeah, Jim is not the colossal fuck-up he's been made out to be. If that were true they'd have never kept him on. He does a good job and he's got his hours back now. I rarely hear anything bad about him anymore.
Jim is married and he's got young kids. When I think about that and what that senior driver did to him knowing that as well, it kind of turns my stomach.
= new reply since forum marked as read
This tells me that everyone's human and we all make mistakes, sometimes big ones.
The guy that decided to stick it to Jim did a really bad thing. Who knows why? I sure don't. I guess sometimes we are tempted beyond our ability to resist, though.
I'm not worried about you. You're one of the good ones...
Happy New Year, my dear Tobin...to you and Jen...
We just finished dinner......I am actually a little high from a glass of wine!
But I was built for drinking beer. 