Relative Something

In the middle of the day yesterday, I received a text warning of a delivery of feed for the horses expected to happen in 40 minutes. I headed down the driveway with Asher, hoping to meet the driver on the road, in case he hadn’t been here before. Previous deliveries have gone the smoothest when they park their huge box truck on the road and use a three-wheeled forklift to travel up the driveway to the barn.

I’m glad I was there when the truck arrived, but it didn’t make much difference in the end. I don’t know how many drivers they have, but it was another first-timer. He appreciated my advice; however, the truck he was given didn’t have a forklift. It had a folded liftgate on the back and two versions of pallet jacks inside, neither of which would work on a gravel surface.

This was a first since This Old Horse started using this supplier for feed. I invited the driver to walk up and take a look at the situation himself to see if we could conjure up a method that could work. He decided it would be possible to back the truck up to the barn, and we could transfer the 40 bags by hand. I wasn’t worried about that solution, since I had moved one entire pallet-full by myself just two months earlier when the barn doors were frozen shut. Two of us could make quick work of moving 40 bags.

As the driver maneuvered the truck into position, I saw his tires sinking deep into the turf beyond the area of gravel. Those ruts will complement the many holes made there by horse hooves when they got loose on Cyndie a couple of weeks ago.

I don’t know what the load capacity of his lift gate on the back of the truck is, but it looked like he was severely taxing it when the loaded pallet settled onto the wobbling gate. He struggled mightily to get the tongues of his electric-powered pallet jack out from under the pallet because the significant bend of the straining gate made the angle almost impossible.

Once he was able to lower the gate down to stable ground, it was a reasonably easy effort for the two of us to move the bags a couple of steps to an empty pallet inside the barn. It was an overall awkward process, but a reasonable solution that avoided him driving the load back and waiting for a different truck to be able to re-deliver to us some other day.

I’m all for creative problem-solving. As a bonus, I kept the pallet the bags were on, instead of having him take it back, like I usually do. It looked like a good candidate for containing compost piles.

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