I worked in a 2-person warehouse under a supervisor, a job I got straight out of high school. No training, just pick orders based on the bills of lading, load the trucks, etc.
Over the course of about 18 months, two things became apparent to management: 1) I was a hard worker and took my job seriously, and 2) my supervisor, who ran the warehouse, was a late-stage alcoholic who had to slip out to his car every few minutes for a drink.
He did a stint in rehab and came back, but he relapsed and was fired.
And I was made warehouse manager. I think I was 21. They put the regional manager’s son under me as a helper. (Ugh.)
What they didn’t do was provide me the first bit of training. The office folks would print out a bill of lading with all the needed placards listed; I would pull and stage the order, load the truck, and give the trucker the BOL to sign.
We were a flooring company, selling epoxy flooring, complete with nasty Part A & Part B chemicals, as well as hazardous sand that can cause silicosis. We also sold and serviced lots of job sites throughout the region, and we had lots of partially used epoxy liquids coming back to the warehouse from completed jobs.
These liquids were poured into barrels labelled Part A and Part B, but nothing about their specific provenance was recorded.
After almost two years on the job, management told me we would ship all the returned liquids to the New Jersey headquarters of the company (Stonhard, located in Maple Shade, NJ).
I wasn’t given any guidance on how to do this. I was given a blank bill of lading and told to fill it in to the best of my ability.
Well, I had something like 14 barrels of liquids, and all I knew about them was that they contained 2-part epoxy liquids. At a loss for what to write, I wrote something on the BOL like, “55,000 lbs of crap”.
Big mistake.
That poor trucker signed the bill and left one Tuesday afternoon.
He returned late Wednesday. He had to park at our dock because he was out of hours. But that was the least of his problems.
He didn’t even make it out of the state before the DOT pulled him over. He had no placards, because I had no clue what placards he would need. He was made to feel the fear of god and sent back to our facility to get a proper bill of lading.
The front office realized they would have to save their own asses here, and came up with a semi-realistic BOL that described all the chemicals one could expect to find in these barrels.
I apologized profusely to the trucker, gave him a corrected Bill of Lading, and sent him on his way, only two days behind schedule.
I felt like such a shit-head, but I had absolutely no training on any of this.
