My day - so far.

Man, here it is 2 days away from my wedding and the last day of work before my vacation. I'm usually scheduled for Friday (Niggas) but I took a paid day off to start my second vacation of the year (I'm starting to sound like Mooch-elle, huh) early so we can wrap up any loose ends before the big day on Saturday. Either that or I'll wire the garage or something.
But anyways, the last fucking place I wanted to be was at work today so as soon as I walked in the door I signed up for an early out, know that Thursdays are slow but Fat John likes to start them out with a bang. I figured on loading anywhere from 6 to 15 trucks today before he decides he can afford to cut any loaders loose. You gotta sign the list if you want to go home early with no penalty and once you're on the list it's done by seniority and classification.

Allow me to wander for a moment. We have a motherfucker out there - we'll call him Art, because that's his real name - that is a fucking worthless sonofabitch. He's a loader but he refuses to load. If he can't get a position on the dock running bread flats or full pallets and has to load trucks, he'll go home sick or on FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) for one of the 5 family members that he's been approved for FMLA.
It's funny, but the only time he or one of his family members gets sick is when he has to load trucks. So what we have is a loader that cries like a little bitch when he has to do his job and he's got the backing of the State of California backing his ass up.

Today Art was happily running his full pallets and I was getting ready to load my third truck of the day, about an hour into the shift. I looked at the paper work and it was routed for 27 pallets - how they come up with that, I don't know. A 50' trailer only holds 24. My paperwork says there's 29 pallets coming to the door which means I have to combine 5 smaller pallets to get it to fit. I look at the load and figure that even though the pallets will be so tall I'll have to scrape them motherfuckers into the trailer, I can do it. I am an ace when it comes to loading a truck.
So I stack all the shit up and get ready to load it when I hear Fat John paging me to the office. He says I'm done, thank you very much, and that Art will be taking over my doors in 5 minutes. I started laughing and asked if Art knew that yet and he said no, so I asked him to wait 15 minutes before he told him that he was going to have to actually do a little work today.
Then I went back to the load and unstacked every bit of the shit I combined together. Brian and Greg were loading on either side of me and was fucking dying laughing. They knew what the deal was. Fuck that shit, I'm not making it easy on that lazy motherfucker. He wants to be a loader so he can have choice days off, he can take the bad with the good.
Then I hotfooted it back to the office to clock out and my timing couldn't be better. I got my handshakes and congratulations on the wedding from all the floor bosses and got to watch Fat John tell Art to go load my doors for the rest of the day.

I was out the door by 8 AM and it was cloudy, making it seem a lot earlier. I took the long way home hoping to spot some coyotes on the way, probably drove 60 miles instead of my usual 40, but it was nice not having anyplace to be and plenty of time to get there.

I did see a couple of coyotes out and about today - not as many as I had hoped but the dominate females should be whelping right about now - a coyotes gestation period is 53 days and they mate in late January so the last of the litters should be being thrown right about now. So the breeder's aren't out mousing right now. They're denned up with a litter of squealing, squirming little targets.

So, that's my day so far - pretty damned good if you ask me.