when they give you a date and the item arrives too early.
Back when I was at sea I would try to syncronize things so the item arrived the day after I got home instead of on the day because I'd arrive home late at night and the package would be on my porch all day.
I did manage to combat that by having one of the neighborhood kids on the payroll. He had to drive by the house anyway and he'd glance at the porch and check. He was pretty good about things and saved me a lot of grief.
He had a key and would put whatever showed up either inside the front door or in the garage for me.
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At work a number of tug skippers acted like they were going to get a medal for getting to a dock early when the truth is they ought to have been beaten senseless with baseball bats.
These idiot would brag to us "I got there 5 hours early, guys!"
We would tell them time and again they were doing nobody any favors. Still, they continued thinking they were making points with the office.
Actually it really irked everybody.
There would more often than not be annyone on the dock to catch our lines. Dock people would have to be kicked out of bed and called in. Inspectors would have to be notified and would stumble in angry, often half asleep and mad at us.
Often we'd ne rousted early and be just as dazed as the dock people.
On top of that some bright boy at the office would decide, "They did it that time...They can do it again!" Needless to say, it couldn't be done again with any remote form of reliability because they didn't take into account the tides, currents, etc. But that didn't mean anything to them. They'd schedule things based on the newest time set by Captain Dunderhead and then others would come in late.
It would take quite a bit of time for things to settle down.
Needless to say, he'd sit in the wheelhouse gloating while we'd have to put up with the wrath of angry dockmen and inspectors that were bleary-eyed and angry.
Other times we would be blocked out because the tanker at the dock hadn't sailed yet so we'd have to anchor, drift or hole up somewhere, steering in circles while we waited for the dock to clear.
The ideal arrival time for a scheduled 1800 arrival time was around 1755 if you wanted to be 'early'. The perfect time was on time, at 1800.
Most tug skippers were actually pretty good about hitting ETAs on time or pretty close. They knew that they were not going to get brownie points for early arrivals and upsetting the rhythm of the whole trip.
A good tug crew would give us about an hour's notice in case we were sleeping so we'd be able to grab a cup of coffee before we arrived and get the deck squared away.
Maybe I'll do a post later on the skipper that used to wake us up too early because he was a nervous wreck.
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