Wintertime rant

[Spinning Hat]

Ok, I'm not sure how many of you know what my current job is, or what I actually do. In a nutshell, I work for C.H. Robinson, a very large 3PL provider and major produce supplier to pretty much every grocery chain in the US. That said, I work in the after hours group of one of the largest branches in the company. We service other branches as well, and we handle produce and dry traffic from 50 branches across the US and Canada. We troubleshoot problems, help drivers get loaded, notify customers when things happen, help drivers get unloaded, and all manner of things in-between.

This time of year, especially this winter, we get a lot of drivers calling complaining about weather, and how they think they won't be able to make their delivery on-time, or how they had to stop because it was snowing, etc. Another one is "There's no snowplows on the roads! How can I continue?"

I understand maybe a little better than most that having plows on the roads is not always going to happen right where you are when you would like them to be. These things take time, but they will get there eventually. Lately, it seems that in every corner of the country drivers complain of this more and more. I live in Minnesota, the land of snowplows and road construction. Are we the only ones besides New York that know what this invention is? How can it be that when it snows, we're the only ones that regularly traverse the land as if nothing was happening? It snowed 6 inches in some spots here between the hours of 6 and midnight. I drove home 2 hours after the snow stopped, and the roads were almost in good enough shape to drive the speed limit. It's not as if 6 inches of snow is trivial.

What really got me tonight, is I had a dispatcher call me, saying her driver was 200 miles from his delivery doing 35 miles an hour, and he may or may not make his 7 AM appointment at Wal-Mart. This was at midnight local time, so he has 7 hours. By my count, it'll take about 5.7 hours at 35 mph to finish up, which is less than 7 last time I checked. I explained this to her, yet she still didn't seem to understand the math. Now, this carrier is from Utah, and last I checked they get snow there every year. I figured hey - This guy should be able to handle a little snow no problem, he should be used to driving in it. Right? Wrong. Not 5 minutes after I get off the phone, I get the driver / owner on the line screaming at me that I'm not there, so how would I know what the weather is like, and how dare I tell his dispatcher that he should still be able to make it, blah blah blah.

I'm no weather dummy. I watch weather for fun, spend all kinds of time between the National Weather Service site and weather.com and Intellicast.com for fun. I have an aviation related degree, and if I remember right, a good portion of my education was spent on this very subject. I know it's no use explaining this fact to the driver, afterall the call timer is ticking, but I calmly tell him that I've been tracking this storm all night, and as he gets further east, the weather lightens up quite a bit, and he should be able to make better time as he gets closer to his destination. This, apparently isn't what he wanted to hear. He immediately launches into a tirade about how I'm not there, and I couldn't possibly know, blah blah blah. I end the call with the 'gentleman', and put some notes in the load with the drivers' concerns and finish my shift.

After I get done for the night, I go outside, trudging through our fresh fallen snow, brush my car off, and head home, which got me to thinking about this. We had about 150 trucks running through Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa and Wisconsin tonight, and nary a complaint about the weather. What is it about the western part of the US and their fear of snow? It's frigging mostly mountains for Pete's sake, there's going to be SNOW. Get over yourselves.

I'm not too sure why this particular call bugged me so much tonight. It seems that drovers we employ tend to forget we live in a cold climate here, we measure our snow in feet most years, and we still manage to get around 365 days a year regardless of the weather. I drive a mid-size car, and it goes through the snow pretty good. So what gives?

/rant

I guess this wasn't so much about winter as it was drivers and their fear of snow in general.. It gets frustrating after a while when you're constantly told you're wrong, when you know for a fact you speak from experience....

*edit* This is the 8000th post in this forum. */edit*

[BlackRider]

8001!

Meh, I didn't go to school on Tuesday because of 5" of snow. But that was more because I couldn't get the Miata out of the parking lot than the roads being bad. You just have to face it that most of the country can't handle snow... and most of the country is a bunch of slackers... and snow is a reason to pull over and take a nap.

I just can't see a semi getting stuck in anything but traffic... snow should be no problem unless there's a slight up grade.

[XMEN Ashaman DTM]

The problem, at least in Washington State, is that the snow often falls faster than the avalanche crews can clear it. It's usually the big wet sticky stuff, then it freezes at night. The major pass from west-to-east in the state usually causes problems shipping stuff. And that's the other problem with WA state: they don't have a second major east-west interstate to carry the excess. If all of the passes close in Washington, you have to go to Oregon and hope theirs are open.

[TimberWolf]

My Dad is a driver for Schneider and use to do the long hauling stuff. At that time he had lived in Texas for over 20 years and hasn't had to handle real winter stuff since he left Ohio. There were times he was out there in blizzards and was still going until he could no longer see a certain distance in front. Then he would call the near by dispatch to inform them of his situation and ask for weather updates. He never got ticked off like the driver you had to handle. The only part of the long hauling he really hated was being away from his family for almost a month at a time.

Those owner-operators get protective when they are afraid something might happen to their nice shiny truck. Just stay cool, calm, and collected. You can always shorten up one of their schedules later during good weather to make up for it and show them who is boss.

[Ambush Bug]

Once visibility gets down to less than a quarter-mile.... then I get all paranoid on the roads.

And that is considering that I am a guy with no depth perception and a flaky remaining eye. Any standard person with binocular vision should be doing better than I am.

The one thing I truly fear is ice. This is not because Minnesota gets a lot of it--it doesn't. Southern Illinois gets a lot more ice than Minnesota, mainly because there are two rivers feeding the storms around there. I am used to driving a car in conditions where I have no traction at all. And on twisty, hilly roads to boot.


My main problem these days if figuring out where to put the 2+ feet of snow that's fallen all this season.

[TimberWolf]

Feel free to ship the snow to me in Ohio. We could always use more some where. Makes a great snow castle or bunker for wars, or a ramp to pull a sled over behind a snow mobile, or a race track for snow mobiles.