In which I put a knife in the week's back

One week down, three to go. It's been a busy one, but yesterday was an impromptu day off.

 I say impromotu, because our little electronic Town Crier, the program that displays our schedule, was getting dicked around worse than a drunk coed at a Spring Break house party. 

 Seriously, most of yesterday was beautiful outside. It would have been a great day to get some work done. Instead, I spend the day filing and prepping, doing pre-transfer paperwork for the SIX GODDAMNED jobs that were assigned then deleted before suddenly, at the end of the day, adding yet one more, to which I simply give the Hawaiian good luck sign and put my feet up and ignored.

 Seriously, how fucked up are things where you have to change plans six times in 5 hours? I can totally see anybody having a bad day, trying to get shit under control, but damn. I wish it were an isolated experience, but when there's more cooks than soup, I guess this sort of mess is the result.

 Anyhow, courtesy of bad circumstances, not a whole lot got done.

 You know, I really miss working in Philadelphia sometimes. Just 4 years ago, it was a rare, rare thing to not have at least 72 hours' warning of a cargo coming in. New York seems to be more like Wal-Mart's just-in-time approach to logistics... and it shows. Yesterday I had two jobs go slower than planned, and the end result was a ship containing thousands of cars scheduled for offloading, which had to sit at anchor, because they couldn't go under a bridge until they got loaded deeper into the water with a couple thousand tons of fuel oil.

 That last one was kind of funny, in a messed up way. The engineers kept screaming at me to hurry up, load faster, but I couldn't, and yet they kept trying. Kinda nice to see the shoe on the other foot, really, but the usual M.O. is me asking a ship to let me increase my rate because OUR schedule is backing up, and the engineers responding with a yawn and the Hawaiian good luck sign.

Pictured: engineers emphasizing the desire to increase discharge pressure

At any rate, I can speculate as to who was ultimately responsible for all this, but not much point. Some jobs take longer than others, and a cascade effect happens when you schedule so many cargo evolutions nonstop. I take it to heart, because I don't like looking bad, but in all reality, I'm just the Domino's delivery man. I'd probably sleep a lot better if I didn't give a shit.