A dock door does not open until a trailer is backed onto it and the sensor in the bumper says so. Dock twelve's sensor says so every night at half past one. The door goes up, the leveller drops to the height of a trailer bed, and over the next forty minutes the scanners log twenty six pallets coming off a trailer that the yard camera shows is not there.
I am the inbound supervisor at a distribution centre with forty dock doors and dock twelve is the one I do not put anybody on.
How a dock works.
A trailer backs on. A sensor in the bumper feels it and lets the door open. The leveller, which is a steel plate, drops onto the trailer bed so a forklift can drive in. The driver hands over a manifest and the unload starts, and every pallet is scanned off and its location in the building is logged. Then the leveller lifts, the door drops, the trailer goes.
Dock twelve does the whole of that every night without a trailer.
The unload.
Half past one, the sensor reads a trailer. The door goes up. The leveller drops, to a height, and holds, and the height it holds at is the bed height of a particular make of trailer that we stopped taking in 2012 because the beds were too low for our levellers. It holds there, at a height it cannot hold at, because the leveller's travel was shortened when those trailers went.
Then the scans. Twenty six pallets, over forty minutes, each one scanned by a scanner that is in its cradle, against a manifest that is not in the system, and put away to a location in the racking. The locations are real. In the morning they are empty, and the system says they are full, and the stock count is twenty six pallets out every day, and it is the same twenty six, by the descriptions on the manifest, which I have read, and which is a load of frozen chickens.
What has been checked.
The sensor, replaced. The door controller, replaced. The leveller, serviced, and the service man watched it drop to a height he said it could not reach and he put his hand under it and took his hand out again fast and he has not been back.
The yard camera. Dock twelve from outside. The door goes up at half past one on an empty yard. The leveller drops into nothing and hangs there over the apron, in the air, a steel plate with nothing under it, level, at trailer height. Forty minutes. Then it lifts and the door drops.
The inside camera. The door goes up and beyond it is the yard and the night. And on the leveller, over the forty minutes, the shadows that a forklift throws going in and out, the long shadow of the mast and the forks, on the steel, in and out, twenty six times, and no forklift.
The manifest.
I got the scans out of the system and put them together. A trailer of frozen chicken from a supplier that went under in 2011. The driver name on the electronic manifest is a name. I looked him up.
He had backed onto dock twelve in the January of 2011, late, in the ice, and the leveller had dropped onto his trailer, and he had got down from the cab to hand over the manifest, and walked between the trailer and the dock wall, which nobody does, and the trailer had rolled, on the ice, forward, as they do when the brakes are not fully on, and then back, with the leveller on it, against the wall.
They found him at six. They unloaded the chicken. It was the last load from that supplier because the supplier did not survive the claim.
What is done about it.
Dock twelve is out of use. There is a cone. The night unload is on the system as a phantom receipt and the twenty six pallets are written off every morning as a stock adjustment, and the freezer, which is where frozen chicken goes, has twenty six locations that are always empty and always full, and the night freezer staff will not pick from them, and I have not asked them to.
What I do.
I run inbound.
I went to twelve at half past one. The door was up. The leveller was out over nothing. The cold came in off the yard and it was colder than the yard. I stood at the edge of the dock where the wall is, where the gap is, where a man would stand to hand over a manifest, and I looked down into the gap between the leveller and the wall, and there was nothing in it, and then the leveller moved.
Forward. A few inches. The way it moves when the trailer under it moves. And back. Against the wall. And the steel rang.
I have put a chain across the gap. A chain, at waist height, from the dock wall to the leveller frame, so nobody can walk through it. There was nobody to walk through it. But the leveller has not moved against the wall since the chain went up, and the unload still happens, and the shadows still go in and out, and I have come to think that what was needed at dock twelve was never a trailer and never a driver but a person who would stand at the edge at half past one and make sure nobody walked through the gap, and that the person is me, and that I was twelve years late for it.