Let The Stupid begin!

I really shouldn't be surprised at the stupidemic going around, but when it afflicts certain people it becomes cannon fodder. Today's example is courtesy of a business that has been around for over 30 years, and the stupidity has followed it through several owners. I think it's in the water.

Yesterday was my first day back at work since mid-December. I should not have expected anything to be different, but one can always hope... even though over the ten years I've worked there, the lack of common sense among certain elders of the tribe has become legendary among the lesser villagers.

We have three plants, each with their own loading docks. Yesterday a truck delivered 14 pallets, which were supposed to go to Plant A, Dock X. The pallets were stacked about 10 feet high with flowerpots. Instead of sending the truck to Plant A, Dock X, someone in management had the driver go to Plant B, Dock Y for offloading. This required an in-house forklift driver to move each pallet from Plant B to Plant A. Just a minor inconvenience in a normal workplace, but we aren't normal. Nope.

The forklift driver has to go through three garage doors to get from B to A. At each one, she has to stop, unhook safety belt, climb down, open the door, get back on forklift, rehook safety belt, drive forward 6 feet, then repeat the process to close the door behind her. 3 times, in each direction, for 14 separate trips. (We have to keep the doors closed due to it being 37 degrees outside and heat on inside.)

This in itself would be enough to make a half-hour offloading job take half a day instead, but it doesn't stop there. The first and second doors are all high enough for her to drive through with a 10-foot-high pallet, but the third door is only 8 feet high. Now she has to drop every one of the 14 pallets before the third door, get a ladder, unwrap the shipping plastic, take off the top 2 feet of flowerpots and re-stack them on additional pallets before she can once again get on the forklift and do the door thing to move each one to the planned destination.... which is right NEXT to the dock where they should have been offloaded in the first place. She was still working on it this morning, along with two other employees brought over to help.

Why didn't they offload at the first dock instead of creating so much extra work? "Having that dock door open for 30 minutes would create a breeze and somebody might be bothered by it." Never mind that the driver had to repeatedly open and close the other doors where there are actual flower seedlings and oil heat running... someone might get a bit of a draft in the conveyor area, where NO ONE WAS WORKING for most of the day.

I told the forklift driver that this kind of stupidity is job security for us. Didn't make her any happier about it though. And that kind of thing happens all the time. Gotta love it.