(update) The delivery arrived. Help appeared. The drums have been moved into position. Only took an hour with 2 people, and I won’t have to work out today.
I might have to transport 60,000 pounds worth of a corrosive chemical up a snowy hill by hand, by myself. And somehow that’s the good option. Work rant below
As a quickly growing but still fairly small business, my company is in a weird spot where a lot of things we need in order to expand, aren’t available to us. One of those things is chemical deliveries. I’ve spent the last month pulling teeth, offering favors, shaking hands and wringing necks to work out a deal, and I’ve finally managed to find a way to get a large amount of Sodium Hypochlorate delivered to our residential business address. How large? 14,000 gallons per month.
There have been a lot of delays and uncertainty, but everything was supposed to be settled and the delivery was going to take place today.
I’d called in a favor with a local Ewing Irrigation to borrow a pallet jack, and one of my employees was scheduled to pick it up this morning at 6:30am.
She called in sick at—wait for it—11:00pm last night. This is where the problems began.
There’s no way I could have gotten someone to come in at 5:45am with such little notice, so I resigned myself to an early morning. Remember, my usual work schedule is something like noon to 8:00pm, although it seems to always go late. I’m not a morning person. 75% of the reason I took this job in the first place was the lack of required morning work.
But, whatever. I wasn’t about to screw up something I’d spent so much time on.
So, fast forward to the morning. Woke up at 5:30am fter falling asleep at 3:00am, and somehow made it out the door. Only to be greeted with two inches of snow and more falling. For whatever reason my sleep-deprived brain decided to take the 850 wagon instead of the Miata. Spoiler alert: the Volvo sucks in the snow.
As I got closer to HQ the snow got deeper, and by the time I parked, I didn’t think I’d be able to make it out until the snow melted.
Still had a job to do though.
Grabbed the pickup at work, drove right back to where I started in the morning, and picked up the pallet jack (Ewing Irrigation is 5 minutes from my condo).
Snow getting even worse, managed to get the truck back to HQ, but it was really struggling on hills.
On the last hill before HQ, I saw a car going downhill swerve off into a ditch at a decent pace to avoid the cars stopped at the bottom. Went over and found a very shaken young driver and his girlfriend, neither of which could have been older than 17. They weren’t injured, so I calmed them down and called AAA, setting up a tow to pull them out of the ditch and get them home.
Walked back to HQ where I’d parked the car, and got the text that all other work had been canceled today. Great, so I’m the only one who’s doing anything, and everyone else has a free day.
Called the intermediary between myself and the shipping company, and didn’t get an answer. Called two more times, no answer. So I don’t know if I’m even getting the shipment, or if it’s canceled due to bad weather.
If it does show up, there won’t be anyone to help me with it, and I have no idea how I’m going to get 15 475lb drums moved from the bottom of the long, somewhat steep driveway to the top. I’ve got the aforementioned manual pallet jack, but that will just be used to move pallets a few feet out of the way so the truck driver can continue to offload additional pallets from the lift gate.
I’ve got a barrel dolly which should help, but.... Even with that I’m unsure if I can push/pull the barrel up the hill with the limited traction I’ll have.
And yet if the shipment doesn’t show up, I’ve spent this whole morning wasting my time, and I’ll have to return the pallet jack tonight in potentially even worse weather, and find a way to get the pallets out of the way without the jack whenever I manage to get the shipment rescheduled...
Whatever happens I’ll be skipping tomorrow morning’s 7:00am team meeting, and catching up on sleep.
Hopefully helping those kids appeases karma, because I really wouldn’t mind some good fortune right now.
I miss being a yoga teacher. The stress/bullshit to pay ratio here is getting further and further away from where I like it