My husband was in London and sent me an email, “Having a good day framing?” He thought that today was the day that the framers would begin. “No, dear Peter, framing would have made today a FUN day,” I responded.
Instead, at 8am, sixty-five 1-1/2 ton bags of stone from the demolished 18th century French convent in Bourg-en-Bresse arrived in my neighborhood for delivery. I had never unloaded a truck of stones let alone five trucks of stones… and thus began my on-the-job training as a logistics pro. Each cab WAS to be hauling a 20 foot long container that I calculated could get through the narrow winding cow-path streets and up our driveway for unloading. So, so wrong I was. Each cab was hauling a 40 foot long container and could not manage the last tight curve two blocks from our house. The first trucker pulled over on a nearby street and walked through the neighborhood to find me. When I saw the size of the truck, I let out a big, shall I say, sigh of emotion?
I had hired my demolition crew to help unload so we had a skip loader, basically a Bobcat on rubber tracks and a pallet jack. We had no choice but to unload each truck of 13 bags of stones two blocks away from the house. The first truck was heading slightly down hill. The next four trucks would be positioned up hill to help my pallet-jack crew. It took two men inside the truck to put each pallet with a bag of stones onto a pallet jack and push the package towards the back of the truck for unloading. Once positioned, the skip load operator would maneuver the pallet and bag of stones onto his fork and lift it off the truck. Then if the package was flopping over, iron chains would be thrashed around its waist to keep it stable for its trip down the street, past my neighbors, up the driveway and around to the back of the property to a tightly placed position along side its brethren stones.
Each truck was to arrive every hour and a half. You are allowed two hours to unload a truck before you are charged a penalty. Upon discovery of the 40 foot long problem, I called dispatch. “Don’t send another truck until 10am!” It was too late. By 11am, I had three more semi’s stacked along the road, in our little bucolic town, waiting to unload. What was really most amazing of all, not one neighbor came out and yelled at me!
At 5:45pm, nearly 10 hours later, we unloaded the last bag of stones with a flashlight from the back of the container. God bless the skip load operator. He made 130 trips down the street, up the driveway to the backyard and back that day.