Delayed

Friday. The day of Fish. The Day when our Fish Shipment is supposed to come in on our truck.

But...because of the pandemic and who knows what circumstances. Our trucks are no longer as reliable as they once were in when they deliver said truck.

Before the pandemic we used to be able to plan when the truck would arrive. -Usually in the morning- and schedule accordingly.

But that all went out the window a while ago.

And now the truck kinda just shows up....whenever. And despite us having the ability to track the progress of our trucks online and see when they're estimated to arrive....we usually don't know until the day of whether or not our truck will show up in the morning...or the afternoon...or in the evening....or not until Saturday.

Today was one of those days.

Where the truck was scheduled to come in around lunch time...but we then later saw it delayed until five or so. 

Did we know the reason for the delay?

Nope. No idea.

Which is usually the case as the company usually doesn't have the foresight -or care- to inform us why our truck has been delayed.

No. Usually it's the truck drivers that end up contacting us and letting us know the reason why they're not yet at our store. 

Today was such a day.

Where around lunch time the truck driver called and informed me that she had showed up yesterday morning to our DC to pick up our trailer...only to find that 'something' wasn't working.

No idea what that 'something' was. As she kinda garbled herself when she was trying to explain why she wasn't yet there. But she ended up sitting at the DC practically all day yesterday before they managed to fix it towards sunset. 

Which has to be frustrating expecting to show up and perform a job....only to find out you can't do it because 'something' is broken and needs to be fixed before you can hook up your semi to the trailer to brig it over to us.

And so the truck driver took off, headed towards us and drove as long as she was legally able to --as the truck drivers can only drive so far before they are mandated to stop and rest for a certain period of time before continuing--

Only to come out this morning and discover....that she had broken down again. And had to once again spend the first half of the day at the mechanics waiting for them to fix the issue and that she wasn't sure when she would be getting to our store.

Which gets kinda tricky because if she were to arrive after 7pm we wouldn't be able to unload the truck as we'd be down to one manager and there wouldn't be enough coverage for them to spend twenty minutes off the floor unloading a truck while the cashier and the petcare person tried to help customers.

It doesn't usually work that way. 

It was also slightly worrisome because again...this was our FISH truck. And like...having dealt with a frozen truck a couple weeks ago where the fish bags were a freezing 46 degrees and we lost like 900 fish....I was very concerned we were once again going to have a dead fish shipment. 

However. 

The fish were safe. 

The truck driver managed to make it to us around 5pm and we were able to unload the truck.

Though due to us having to deal with quite the Friday Night rush of customers in the store...it ended up taking us a good couple of hours to unload all the fish because we kept getting interrupted.

And I ended up staying half an hour late past my shift just to ensure that all the fish were put into the tanks before I left. 

But yah....crazy day. 

I'm grateful that the truck driver was willing to call us and let us know what was going on though. That way we could create a plan on what to do when she did come in and work on it from there. 

Until you next find these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi