“Bump the dock” is a term that goes hand-in-hand with dry van and reefer hauling. Checking into a shipper or receiver to get assigned a door to back into becomes so regular in this line of work, it could almost be said that it could be done with one’s eyes closed! Perhaps it is my being spoiled by having regular customers that are dock-to-dock, but I was a little thrown off by a recent job site delivery that I had to make in the dark hours of the morning.
As cliché as “It was a cold and stormy morning” sounds, that is exactly what it was like outside. Rain had saturated the ground and I was up before the sun to deliver the load of solar panels I had held over the weekend to a high-end beach community. Being that this city was not exactly “truck friendly” in the respect that it is not often you have 53-footers running through the streets there, I took the time to look up my delivery location on Google Maps the night before. The address was coming up as the city’s high school, so immediately my brain began to wonder where they might want this actually delivered on this large campus once I got there? With a 6:00am delivery appointment, I was not really expecting many people to be around to ask for directions once I got there.
As I approached the high school and pulled into the vacant facility, I was a little worried when no one was picking up the phone number I was given as a delivery contact. I began to wander the campus roads with my truck and trailer, making sure to not get into anywhere I could not get myself turned around and out of. I was happy to see, as I crested the hill leading to the faculty parking lot, a fenced off construction area with various pieces of construction apparatus. I decided to wait here patiently for someone to hopefully arrive, since there was really no sign of a traditional unloading dock on any of the campus I had scoured up to that point.
As luck would have it, a crew of three construction workers arrived within 15 minutes and we were in business! They directed me to the middle of the narrow parking area and told me that is where they were going to unload the panels, which occupied the front third of my trailer on twelve pallets. Not knowing how they planned to unload without a traditional forklift or dock, I watched as they unloaded their product. Their ingenious combination of using a long-forked hand jack, a tow strap, and a long-armed lift was enough to rival the speed of some of the fastest docks I typically unload at! Right there in the middle of the parking lot jobsite they were able to unload the entire load in less than 30 minutes! As uncommon as these types of deliveries are for a dry box or reefer, I look forward to the next one if this is the norm! Pretty sad fact that even without a dock, these guys got me unloaded at a job site with less than adequete tools for the job, in a fraction of the time of most warehouses fully equipped to do so!