A little while ago, about a month and a half, I took a job with Pratts Food Service loading their trucks at the Pizza 73 warehouse on 137th Ave. They load in Calgary, ship to Edmonton via semi, where they “cross-dock” with Pizza 73, breaking it into routes and delivering it in 5 ton body-jobs to Edmonton and area.

I loaded trucks for two weeks, long enough to say “this had better lead to something else soon… ” when a driving job came available as one of their drivers found a better job.

For a variety of reasons I wanted to try something different other than construction, and this certainly fit that role. Food service is recession proof and they seemed to be growing, so job security was what I had in mind. Additionally, the job was less than 10 minutes from my home, and while the pay wasn’t very good, $22/hr, I didn’t care at first. The job was simple – drive a 5 ton and deliver food. Boy, was I naive.

The first problem was the lack of training. Being the new guy, I was given the downtown route – busy, congested, with lots of little nooks and crannies difficult to get in and out of, and road closures all over the place. To ready me for this I spent a week and a day with the driver doing that route, covered less than a quarter of the stops within it, and was then thrown to the wolves.

I also got the oldest truck in the fleet, which was a “center-divide” – the freezer on one side, the cooler on the other, and a removable wall down the middle of it. This means if your load wasn’t properly in order, you had to crawl over the load to get to the other pallets – which became a constant pain in the ass.

Having been to only a few of the stops, the lack of information was a huge problem. If you had a new stop you first had find it, and locate the loading doors, which often meant circling the block a few times to figure out how to get to it.. in downtown traffic. Word of mouth from the other drivers was the only source of information you had, via cell phone, while you were driving. Once you had been to a location, it was easy, but prior to that…. I could go on, but why bother.

Once, I was given 7 unfamiliar stops for the day, which had me pushing a cart with 20 bags of flour over the pedway in Edmonton Center (through the mall and up the wheelchair ramp, BTW) because I had parked at the loading docks in the wrong building. I gave my two weeks notice the morning after that…

That’s the straw that broke the camels back, but not what led up to it…

During all of this, I’d been climbing a steep learning curve of my own. It was all new to me – the driving, the delivery, dealing with impatient, condescending, often rude clients that threaten to do business with the competition (like I care…), parking, backing up, people milling about, trying to remember everything, forgetting little things and having to go back, etc…. You name it! Any wrong move downtown in a 5 ton would set you back a least a half-hour, so I was constantly playing catch-up.

What I thought would be driving with some delivery, turned out to be mostly delivery with a little bit of driving, and not a moment of downtime between. Delivery was anywhere between 8000 – 10000 lbs a day, and I was getting used to it, but it was the dealing with the picking and sorting by the knuckle-heads in Calgary that made the job entirely miserable.

The loaders were underpaid, and either not caring or inept, so that you often ended up moving each item 3 or 4 times before making your delivery. They would bury items within a pallet, layer items out of order, place orders on the back of pallets, or all manner of dirty tricks, and yes, I know how that sounds. I’m not paranoid. I have proof.

For whatever reason, the pickers in Calgary put extensive, unmistakably intentional, effort into messing up the stacking of the pallets so that you had to tear the whole thing apart to find the items for your delivery. The energy put into it was amazing, at times laughably creative, but relentless. You were encouraged to report it by management, the direct result was retaliation, and nothing was being done to change it.

To get around this in a center-divide, you had to have a functional pallet jack to move your load around, and many of them were in need of repair, making them just as much a frustration as the jumbled load.

At first I tried to rush to make up for it. Management, completely removed from any affect, sympathized but did nothing. After enough torture (and giving my notice), I just took my sweet time sorting it out. Two hours extra every day.

Whether the competition had seeded the Calgary pickers with saboteurs, or Pratts just wasn’t paying them enough to give a shit, it really didn’t matter. Every reason to stay simply vanished before your eyes, and all you could do was say “I’m not doing this shit anymore”, and give your notice, which I did.

If I sound resentful, sorry. I’m sure I’ll get over it, but here’s some proof of why.

That was the warm up, and a mild example. After reporting a few of these, the retaliation began.

Here are the contents of that hole. A great warm-up stretch first thing in the morning….

This example shows the effort put into it. All the pallets are plastic wrapped, but after a while you come to expect the games, so you start looking for them before you even begin. There it is, order number 5 buried under 7, 6, and 8, with the tag hidden from view, and more buried was behind it.

After some digging. Check the skinny package in the oval.

Buried, with the labels out of sight. The arrows are the packages I was after. A pallet jack is essential to not losing your mind.

Proof enough. But wait, there’s more…

Parking was utter nonsense! Pratts didn’t negotiate parking for their drivers, so the following is the routine we had to go through every morning. Come for a trip…

First, you drive to this one door, leave your car running and use your fob to enter the building. Then head to the lunch room to log into work on the computer there. You need your fob to get out of the lunch room, then you grab your scanner and spare battery from the cabinet just outside the office. You then leave the building and jump back in your car.

Now, you drive to the other side of the lot, and …. find a place to park while you find out where you are supposed to park. ??? Right.

You are supposed to park your car in the spot the truck you’re driving that day is parked, but you have to go inside (using your fob of course) to look at your paperwork for the day to find that out. But if your truck isn’t moved yet, then….. I guess you wait? Reading this isn’t so bad. Walking it out every morning is retarded.

Anyways….. If your truck is at the docks being loaded, great! Go back outside and park where it was parked (there’s a parking plan for reference), use your fob to get back into the building, and put your dolly and cart (if you need it) into the back of the truck after it has been loaded. But… check your load, as well as whether you got an NFG pallet jack or not, and if not, then you’re ok, you can get in it and start your pre-trip.

But….

If it’s already loaded, you have to wheel your dolly and cart (if you need it) out to wherever they put it (somewhere in the parking lot… who knows where…. they all look the same), and load them into the back of your truck. But, if you’ve got one of the NFG pallet jacks, you had better swap it out, because if you don’t you’ll wish you had before your second stop. This means dropping the tailgate because the deck is 5 feet off the ground and the pallet jack weighs a bit.

The end of the day is this redundancy in reverse, but with a twist. Here you park the truck in it’s designated spot, and place the truck keys into the lock-box located just on the other side of the emergency door in front of where you park, which you can’t open because it is an emergency exit, (unless you prop it open earlier) see? You have to fob your way into the door by the docks, walk over to the lock-box, hang the key, walk back and get in your car, drive over to the door you started at in the morning, and fob in to hand your paperwork in for EOD scrutiny. Forget your fob anywhere, and your fobbed.

After that, you can go to the lunchroom, log out for the day, fob out of the lunchroom, and do it all again tomorrow. Fobs of fun!

For the life of me, I have no idea why they don’t have the login computer, scanners, key-box, and paperwork all in one location right outside the office, but hey, that’s just me, and maybe it just looks like it makes total sense……….. IDK.

So, to sum up:

• No benefits… well, medical after 6 months and dental after a year… so benefits for management.
• Low wages for the work performed – remember, you’re humping 8000-10000 lbs / day
• Work every holiday – except if your shift is cancelled, which you’ll find out about at 6:30 p.m. on the Sunday of the long weekend you just got shafted out of (and FU, BTW).
• Different start times every morning which you don’t know until 5:30 p.m. the night before – you have 5 different alarms on your phone
• Irregular hours – you don’t know how long your day will be until you see your order sheets in the morning.
• You didn’t know what truck you are driving until you see your paperwork in the morning.
• No parking – you are supposed to trade places with the truck you are driving… but you don’t know what truck you’re driving until the morning, so you have to park, then find out, then move your truck, then park again… then… WTF??!! Back and forth back and forth…
• Management knows your whole day before they text you at 5:30, but won’t share it – I asked
• Everything needed for the job is sprinkled about the building like a treasure hunt.
• Every order has to be dug out from the pickers stupidity, adding toil when none need exist.
• Customers can be rude, and threaten business constantly.

So, there you have it. I’m sure the position is fine for the gravy boys who have been there a while. Then again, I’m also sure I’ll never find out.