soberups
Pees in the brown Koolaid
The new "flavor of the week" in my building is to reduce PM time by only allowing drivers to refuel their package cars every other day.
Its a great theory from behind a desk in management world...but in the real world its a stupid idea that saves no time and creates the very real risk of running out of gas in the middle of a delivery route.
My PM routine is to enter the gate and drive over to one of the 3 fuel pumps we have. I do my post-trip, empty my trash can, and put in 9 or 10 gallons of fuel. If there is a line of cars at the pumps, I will wait until the following day to refuel. Its called common sense and I have been using it successfully for 22 yrs now.
Common sense and logic no longer apply; I must instead placate some idiot from IE by not putting in any fuel. We must spoon-feed this idiot the number he wants to look at and only refuel every other day. There are no exceptions.
Now, I might roll in low on fuel and be forced to wait in a long line; a line that could have been avoided had I topped off on the previous day when there was no line. Also...the idiot who created this mandate apparently failed to comprehend the simple fact that it takes twice as long to pump 20 gallons of fuel as it does to pump 10, negating any time savings that might have been realized.
More critically...this stupidity potentially threatens tens of thousands of dollars in Next Day Air and International revenue.
I pull a pup trailer out to my area and drop it at a location once it is empty; the drivers in my loop then use this trailer as a drop point for our NDA and international volume. By 4:15 there will often be 200-300 pieces of air volume that needs to get back to the building to be loaded onto the airport feeder.
On 3 occasions in the last 15 yrs there has been a traffic accident which closes the main highway and makes it impossible to get this volume back to the building on time. When this happens....as a last resort I have hooked this trailer up myself and taken it on a 95 mile roundtrip via back roads to the airport to be unloaded.
If I dont get this trailer to the airport on time, every bit of that volume becomes a service failure for which we owe the customer a refund.
Is it logical to dispatch a route that must potentially make it to the airport...and then intentionally require that route to leave the building low on fuel?
The time I would spend going to a public station and buying fuel on my dime...assuming I would even be willing to do so in the first place...might very well make the difference as to whether or not those 300 pieces of NDA and International volume make service or not.
I have pointed this out to my management team...but my concerns have fallen on deaf ears. The reality no longer matters;I must work as instructed; I must placate the idiot and spoon-feed him his number with utterly no regard for logic or common sense. If I fail to do so I will show up on a report.
What really frightens me...is that the idiot who madated this is still being paid a salary by the company I work for.
Its a great theory from behind a desk in management world...but in the real world its a stupid idea that saves no time and creates the very real risk of running out of gas in the middle of a delivery route.
My PM routine is to enter the gate and drive over to one of the 3 fuel pumps we have. I do my post-trip, empty my trash can, and put in 9 or 10 gallons of fuel. If there is a line of cars at the pumps, I will wait until the following day to refuel. Its called common sense and I have been using it successfully for 22 yrs now.
Common sense and logic no longer apply; I must instead placate some idiot from IE by not putting in any fuel. We must spoon-feed this idiot the number he wants to look at and only refuel every other day. There are no exceptions.
Now, I might roll in low on fuel and be forced to wait in a long line; a line that could have been avoided had I topped off on the previous day when there was no line. Also...the idiot who created this mandate apparently failed to comprehend the simple fact that it takes twice as long to pump 20 gallons of fuel as it does to pump 10, negating any time savings that might have been realized.
More critically...this stupidity potentially threatens tens of thousands of dollars in Next Day Air and International revenue.
I pull a pup trailer out to my area and drop it at a location once it is empty; the drivers in my loop then use this trailer as a drop point for our NDA and international volume. By 4:15 there will often be 200-300 pieces of air volume that needs to get back to the building to be loaded onto the airport feeder.
On 3 occasions in the last 15 yrs there has been a traffic accident which closes the main highway and makes it impossible to get this volume back to the building on time. When this happens....as a last resort I have hooked this trailer up myself and taken it on a 95 mile roundtrip via back roads to the airport to be unloaded.
If I dont get this trailer to the airport on time, every bit of that volume becomes a service failure for which we owe the customer a refund.
Is it logical to dispatch a route that must potentially make it to the airport...and then intentionally require that route to leave the building low on fuel?
The time I would spend going to a public station and buying fuel on my dime...assuming I would even be willing to do so in the first place...might very well make the difference as to whether or not those 300 pieces of NDA and International volume make service or not.
I have pointed this out to my management team...but my concerns have fallen on deaf ears. The reality no longer matters;I must work as instructed; I must placate the idiot and spoon-feed him his number with utterly no regard for logic or common sense. If I fail to do so I will show up on a report.
What really frightens me...is that the idiot who madated this is still being paid a salary by the company I work for.