LogFAQs > #968889666

I don't recall exactly how long our flight was but my honeymoon flight from Boston with a layover in Amsterdam on our way to Capetown, South Africa was over 24 hours. I want to say 26? Fortunately we were going for leisure and took a nice nap on our arrival. Weddings are a lot of work, even for the guests! Hope you have a good time :)

I'm a supervisor for a couple dozen truck drivers, but I'm not management. I have no "real" authority over the other drivers. My direct boss has power to hire, fire, reward, reprimand, etc. But I do train new drivers, act as a mentor, and provide information, as a bit of a go-between for the manager, who oversees dozens of drivers more.

I'm not supposed to have more than 20 drivers under me. I've been overworked through pretty much the whole pandemic. They finally promoted a couple drivers out in Connecticut so I don't have to oversee the CT crew any more, which cut my driver pool down to about 15.

One of my drivers has been slacking hard. I've always been of the mindset that everyone has a day here and there where they're dragging ass and just sorta coast for a day and take it easy. But this dude has been coasting for weeks. Our supervisor notices this. He wants me to speak with the driver. I'm under no delusion that I have any authority over this other driver, so this puts me in an awkward position. This dude can tell me to go fuck myself and there's not much I can do about it.

I make a plan to talk to him. Ask him how he plans his day. We have a bunch of locations (dealerships/auctions/salvage yards/ports/etc) we can deliver cars to and pick cars up from. He seems to go to just two of our customer locations regardless of how much work is there. Coincidentally, those are the two of the easier locations as they're the shortest distance from our yard and they're not as busy. Normally, we'd plan for a longer run for our day, and hit one of those spots at the end of the day if we have the time.

I mention several other locations have been much busier recently and that we could use his help at these spots. We can fit anywhere from 6 to 10 vehicles on our trailers, depending on what truck and trailer we're using and what type of vehicles we have to load. He's been hitting the two easy spots so often that he only has sometimes 2 or 3 cars to load. I mention this and inform him that this is not an efficient use of the truck, and that we should be aiming to haul a full truck as much as possible.

He became very agitated and and began questioning why I was bothering him and not other drivers. It was all I could do to not snap back "Because the other drivers are doing their fucking job!" but I held it together enough to remain diplomatic and tell him that I saw an opportunity to improve his route planning, and that my aim was to ensure efficiency among all drivers, not just him. I described how we typically save those two locations for "finish work" (which I'd explained during training), and that his routine of clearing those locations was impacting other drivers' ability to work a full day, as most of the longer runs amount to 6 hours of work at best.

He seems to have come around since. He still makes some odd choices when route-planning but he's improved a lot. I don't want to nanny other drivers, and I like our current team including this driver and don't want there to be any agitation or division between them. Other drivers had certainly noticed his prior behavior, which may have been how the supervisor got clued into it. But everyone I've spoken to seems to be on the same page so I hope it's all hunky dory now