It's all 80's in the early hours on the dock...

Gordon Food Service/ New England, Taunton, MA

It's 5:30 A. M. on the large and well lit dry dock at Gordon Foods.  My load is spread out in front of me as are the loads of a dozen trucks along the 18 doors of the dry warehouse.  Lumpers, receivers and drivers are counting building and breaking down pallets of everything you would find in restaurant. The soundtrack, and yes there is one, is a steady stream of 80's rock and roll turned up to 11.  At every large food distributor the music is the same, Bruce Springsteen, Blonde, The Police,  The Cars....

What makes Gordon Food different is that when Bohemian Rhapsody comes over the sound system everyone, I mean everyone, stops and sings along. 50+ year old receivers,   20 something lumpers, and drivers just stare....For a few seconds we are all attending the worst musical ever as the chorus of untrained but well rehearsed  voices rise and fall, " Gallileo! Gallileo! Figaro!!!".

"Every week I come here, and they do this. Why do they this?"
I ask Mike, a 30 something reciever.

"I don't know,"  he says quietly.

The senior receivers are almost always 50+ year old guys.  They choose the music.  They choose the music of their youth.  In 10 years we will be hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the docks.




Bohemian Rhapsody Wayne's World

Sysco/Boston dry dock.

Waiting

Severence Foods, Hartford Connecticut

Waiting.  Being a truck driver  is as much about waiting as driving.  

I am a local driver so there are days where I wait more than I drive.  A delivery can take anywhere from a few  minutes to six or eight hours. Pickups can take a few minutes or several hours as well.  With a pickup I am entirely at the mercy of other people. I don’t have much control over the situation.  In fact I have none.  If the pickup is taking too long I can sometimes get a dispatcher to cut me loose so I can go home. That does not happen too often.

I am sitting in my truck in a parking lot, with people walking and driving around me, while I tap away on this keyboard and take in the strong aroma of cooking tortilla chips.  I am thirty minutes from the Chicopee truckstop, and I have another 3 and a half hours left on my driving clock. Getting home tonight should not be an issue, and neither should meeting a friend for a run after work.  I am a truck driver who believes it is possible to do this job and still have a life.  

I am here to pickup six pallets of tortilla chips. I called ahead and was told the order would be ready when I got here. At least they would try. It is 2:00 and I am early.  The driver in the Estes truck tells me the crew here is on lunch break til 2;30. He also shows me where the docks are, and he points out the worst dock that if I am lucky I will not have to back up to.

That is it. That truck is leaving the dock and I will be going in.  

The waiting continues after the crew comes back from lunch. With alot of swearing and laughing I get the trailer around the corner and into the dock.

I have time to check out the bodega on the corner before anyone thinks of loading  my trailer.

It’s getting close to 4:30 and two pallets of chips are on my trailer. It occurs to me that I could run out of hours before I am done with this pickup.  I send a text to my boss (one of many bosses)  to request use of  the 16 hour exemption.  A local driver can request an extra two hours to the 14 hour work rule once every 5 work days. If traffic holds me up and I will need it.

I get out of there at 4:35 and the traffic cooperates. I don’t have much time to spare, but I roll into the drop lot with 20 minutes to spare.

Coming at You

I work alone. I drive alone, I break down my orders, move on to the next delivery, the next pickup and then  head home.  Occasionally I meet up with other Dot drivers on a customer's dock.  

A half mile up the road I see the blue Volvo driving in the Eastbound lane. I am driving west. The two trucks would be hard to tell apart if they were parked side by side. I can not read the oncoming truck's number, and I would not know who's truck it is anyway.  We can not see each other, but I always see an arm through the driver's side door window waving enthusiastically my way. I am waving also. As the trucks pass I never recognize the driver. We both work for Dot Foods. It is comfort enough to see another Dot driver, even if I don't who  it is.

I work for a food company. I don't make food. I just give it a ride.

I drive for Dot Foods. I got my license on August 10, and on August 12 I was in Liverpool, New York interviewing for a driving job with DTI, Dot Transportation Incorporated.The next day I had a job.  DTI is Dot Foods trucking company.  Dot Foods is huge corporation that you never knew existed, but you have food in your refrigerator that road on a Dot truck. The restaurant you went to last night, your favorite bakery, and the supermarket you shop at all sell food and products from Dot, and most of them don't know Dot exists either.  It's not a conspiracy, Dot buys from food producers and sells to food wholesalers. We are the middlemen.


I work for a food company. I don't make food. I just give it a ride.

Joey

"My name is Joey Fucking GEE!  This dock is my place. I run this dock, You have to understand you are in my territory and I make the rules here. Understand that and we will be okay." - Joey

Joey Fucking Gee is a receiver for a big food service company south of Boston. His territory is from door 17 to door 25 on a dock with about 40 doors. He has the ability to make a truck driver's life easier or more difficult than it could be, or should be. Mostly he just wants you unloaded and the hell off his dock. Pretty much what you want as a driver.

I met Joey Fucking Gee my first week driving with Dot Foods as a driver trainee. My trainer did not like Joey.  He did not like Tony either. Tony is a receiver for Costa Fruit and Produce in Charlestown. They are both loud in your face Italian guys in their fifties doing the jobs they have done for years. For both of these men, they are their jobs. It feels like home when I work with both of them. They are my people, and I totally get how they see the world, and it means that I have no surprises when I work with either of them.