A Little Payback

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This morning I was asked If I would go and assist on a task at work and had no idea what I had said yes to. I was not given the entire brief and we call it getting sold a lemon. Once I was on site I was chuckling to myself as I was most definitely sold down the river on this one. I did not mind on this occasion as I actually do not know if they could have finished this task correctly.

I have sold many lemons in the past which takes skill in not revealing the entire story of what the job entails as there is too much unknown and all you know is that it is not going to be pleasant. In many ways it is best not knowing and finding out on the job itself. Dealing with family is not easy and we do not try and set each other up on purpose even though it could be debatable at the time.

This reminded me of a few years ago when we had to retrieve stock from a temporary warehouse 40 minutes away from where the stock needed to be delivered. I sent my son and his friend to supervise the retrieving of the stock at 6pm on the Friday night and only saw them again at 6pm on Sunday evening. In fairness I was working this entire time and had underestimated the time this was going to take. A worse case scenario was finishing on Saturday evening and definitely not Sunday evening. This was one of those moments you laugh about years later but this was not funny at the time.

What screwed us up was one of the three trucks broke down on Saturday afternoon which cost us a good 8 hours of lost delivery time. These are the unknown factors you cannot control and similar to the task I was asked to do today the unknown was the time factor. A job that possibly could or should have taken 3 or 4 hours became a job that took double that time.

The problem I only spotted after we were already an hour into the job and that was the weight distribution loading a truck. Weight has to be placed over axles at the front and not midway so the entire first few hours were wasted and the entire truck had to be off loaded and repacked correctly.

The driver did not even pick this up which I found worrying and instructed the staff to stop and redo the two hours work which cost us an extra 4 hours. I understand why I was sent to do tis job today as I tend to be meticulous and have the knowledge to get this done correctly. If I had been filled in from the start then this would not have been so problematic and explained this to my family afterwards and they admitted they would not have picked up the weight distribution problem.

The driver was moaning how long things were taking yet I was making his load safe to travel and had to explain how dangerous this could have been if left as it was. I have driven an incorrectly packed and over loaded ammunition truck in the army and this was one of the most scariest trips I have ever driven. This was literally a bomb with over 20 tons of mortars and other various ordnance.