Work WOWS!

[TheWalrus]

Starting a general thread of interesting works stories because, well, I wanna hear em.

My latest is a weird, but funny, old lady that drives a Mazda 323 hatchback from like...mid 90s I think. Can't remember year now. Anyhoo, she has it towed in from about 25 miles out, said it got hot. It starts, and runs, but no oil and no coolant. Open the radiator and  it looks like a white russian. Notice the split in the top of the radiator thus explaining why/how it got hot. Theorize that the head gasket has blown mixing the oil/coolant thus spelling death for the vehicle.

Now, she's already talked about getting another car, which sounds to me like a great idea. My dear mother, however, says the ever popular words, Lets see if we can save your baby. Shit, says I. So we stuff a radiator and new hoses on it. (The old ones were so brittle...this engine had been seriously hot.) Put new oil and filter in it and fire it off. Runs without missing a beat. We do a couple heat cycles and hill climbs to test, and performs just fine. Absolutely incredible. This engine should have been dead. Now we did tell her not to take it out of town, but she didn't really listen to us last time we did major work, so we'll see. Just amazing.

[Yegolev]

There's a shell script that some people run about once every six months.  Suddenly it stops working, or a bit of it does.  It's an archaic bit that does something like:

SYSTEM=$(expr subst $(hostname) 1 3 | tr [a-z] [A-Z])

That's not how I'd do it since I'm using the "new" ksh (1993), but whatever.  Bourne is a classic.  Anyway, the bit that stops working is the tr.  What? says I.  What could be wrong with tr?  After several trials and advising the guy that it works if you use quotes like so:

ts "[a-z]" "[A-Z]"

I figure out what it must be.  There must be files with single-letter names in the cwd of the script when it runs.  The unquoted square brackets are processed by ksh every time but normally don't match a filename due to the dearth of single-letter filenames (except in my own directories; I have a fondness for single-letter filenames).  Quote them and they fall through the ksh into the tr every time.

I haven't explained this to the guy yet.  Hopefully tomorrow he will tell me that he has updated the script.  He doesn't want to, but there isn't any better way to have this work every time.  Remember kids, don't write sloppy code.

[lamaros]

One of these stories I was able to understand without having to scratch my head for a little bit.

I have a co-worker who thought that emoticons in her email were causing her computer to crash, so she sent emails to the people she was in contact with to kindly ask them to stop including "little people" in their correspondence with her.

[UD_Delt]

A friend of mine works for a greeting card company doing PR and received the following unsolicited email:

Megan To whom this may concern
I don't know if I have the right employee but if I don't you can point me in the right direction. I have contacted different people for my beautiful most gorgeous 6 year cat, Fluffles. Fluffles loves being in front of the camera and is adorable. Fluffles has no background with modeling.....but is EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA TALENTED. I have tried another company that I wont mention but they said if they had open spots for my little kitty (Fluffles) they would have used her in a sec. They didn't have any open careers for pet modeling so I thought I'd contact you. I was hoping you can find anything. My family friends and I purchase many American greetings stuff like cards. We love your products! back to cat Fluffles. She is so FANTABULOUS you or the person you send this to would fall in love with her.  We live in NJ. I know older 6 old cats 6 year old cats like being in home. Thank you so much, Meg. Megan, please email back with an long response if you have time at REMOVED. Thank you. Reply ASAP.*
** *Sara RC *

Of course my friend has absolutely nothing at all to do with anything remotely related to the design of the cards...

[stray]

I could help Fluffles maybe. The company I work for prints and designs greeting cards.

[SnakeCharmer]

My very first day on the job, some guy that they said was a spitting image of me stole 197,000 bucks from the agency he worked for..

My third week on the job, I was stopped by the FBI, DEA, US Customs, and ICE on the way to a ship that had just arrived.  The captain and the stevedore had apparently been bringing in cocaine in fairly large quantities.  Once DEA and Customs 'raided' his ship, he was trying to sling bags and bags of cocaine out a small porthole window that was barely open. 

A Filippino crewman fell 90 feet from the top of a hatch cover to the tank top bottom after failing to make sure his rigging and safety equipment was properly rigged and safe.

Watched a 738 foot long panamax vessel with a deadweight of about 78,000 tons shift on it's drydock supports 2 minutes after I walked down the gangway. Promptly threw up after that one.

Had a crewman get cut in half when the hatch covers closed on him.  Threw up for DAYS after that.

During Hurricane Katrina, the Rig Chemul broke loose of it's mooring lines/drydock, and proceeded UP river whereby it hit two vessels in port, destroyed a coal barge loading spout, the wedge itself under a suspension bridge.

Had a tanker lose power midtransit, and the captain came within a hair of dropping 2 15 ton anchors on top of the I-10 tunnels (that he didn't know was there).  If he'd have done that, it would have caused the tunnels to collapse, flood with water, and anyone in the tunnel to drown, or get smushed.

Lessee...

Had a ship stay here so long due to USCG restrictions that the absolute ugliest guy on the ship got married to the absolute ugliest, nastiest dockwhore in town.  He couldn't stay, as he was Nigerian.

Two Columbians rode for 5 days in one of my tanker's rudder housing, exposed to the seas with only 3 feet worth of space to sit in and try and hold on.  The rest of the space was taken up with 240 lbs of cocaine.  That was an interesting experience, seeing that ship come up river with about 5 helos, and an uncountable number of police, flotilla, USCG and other LE boats surrounding it.

Some old Greek captain, who hadn't been off the ship (at all) in four years finally snapped and locked himself in his room.  This was after he greeted me and the other government officials in the nude during arrival formalities.

One of the three times I've had to pull out my pistol...INS detained a Turkish crew on board (no Visas), and the captain didn't seem to like it.  And neither did the crew (all 26 of them).  To say they got a bit aggrevated is an understatement, which was met by my .40 cal, the INS officers pistol, as well as the two Customs inspectors.  The police were called during the "standoff", essentially taking the ship over in riot gear.

I was introduced to Fish Head Soup about a week into the business. It's exactly what it sounds like, and it's even nastier than it sounds.

Watch a guy lose his hand as it was crunched by mooring lines being winched up against a ballard.

Had to arrange medical assistance for a captain that complained of having an itchy anus for 2 weeks prior to his arrival.

I could go on and on.

[bhodi]

There's a shell script that some people run about once every six months.  Suddenly it stops working, or a bit of it does.  It's an archaic bit that does something like:

...

I haven't explained this to the guy yet.  Hopefully tomorrow he will tell me that he has updated the script.  He doesn't want to, but there isn't any better way to have this work every time.  Remember kids, don't write sloppy code.

It made ME laugh, but I suspect your "target audience" is pretty limited. Most people here are just going to scratch their head :)

Remember kids, quote EVERYTHING. Single quotes if possible.

[Moosehands]

Remember kids, quote EVERYTHING. Single quotes if possible.

Hey kids, it's time for Adventures in Quack Scripting with Moosehands!

I've got a Perforce depot that is too big for the hardware it is on, which led eventually to our weekly depot verifications failing for lack of memory.  So I dig into the script to break the verifications up into a series of smaller jobs.  Of course I don't have a sandbox instance to play around in so the best I can do is wrap everything in echo commands to let me see what the output is going to be, get it to look right, then remove the echoes.  This is how I learned a New Thing (tm) about Bash.

p4 verify -q '//${foo}/...'

vs.

echo "p4 verify -q '//${foo}/...'"

My dry runs were expanding ${foo} but the live run not so much.  I'm constantly amazed that people keep giving me jobs that involve scripting.

[Yegolev]

I'll give Snake more time to write some things before I make with the dork talk again.  Actually much of it is more about the people who shouldn't be doing or making decisions on things.  It is still fairly inscrutable to normals.  Best to just read Dilbert.

[Nebu]

Snake's job sounds like something I'd see on the Discovery Channel. 

[Miasma]

It happened before I got there but the bank where I worked was involved in the then biggest corporate buyout in Canada which involved a transaction in the billions of dollars.  The old mainframe system couldn't handle a number that large all at once so they had to break it up into two smaller pieces.  Code was added to say that once a transaction greater than a billion dollars was found set a flag and first debit/credit nine hundred million dollars from the accounts, then do the remainder.  It worked just fine and the transaction went through without a hitch.

One slight problem though, they forgot to unset the flag.  Every single transaction that went through after that also got debited/credited with nine hundred million dollars so everyone else's account was either in the hole for almost a billion dollars or they had this insanely large balance.  They had to pull in people from all over the place and work right through Christmas to manually fix it all.

[SnakeCharmer]

Snake's job sounds like something I'd see on the Discovery Channel.

Heh.  It's interesting at times, that's for sure...

Occasionally have to brave one of the local seamens clubs (i.e. whore houses) to try and find some crew man that is late getting back to the ship...

Middle of the night phone calls from overseas because the person can't comprehend that I live in a different time zone and haven't replied to the email they sent me at 2 am local time...

Seeing the following come up the river, and wondering just how in the world that it made it all the way here from the other side of the world:



Looking down into the tanks of an OBO carrier that's loading diesel fuel or paraxylene and seeing the static electricity sparks as it's being loaded...

Laughing at a (fat ass) CBP inspector for balking at an 'unsafe' gangway because they're insurance wouldn't cover them if they fell.  She couldn't, however, come up with a reason why if he was after a terrorist or somesuch it would then be justifiable since it was part of her duty  .

Yelling, cussing, screaming, and anything else I could think of at union stevedore labor that wouldn't work past 1800 hrs by 2 hours and subsequently delaying the ship for 14 hrs, costing the ship (and in the end, consumers) untold amounts of money.

Yelling, cussing, screaming, and anything else I could think of at CBP officials because their inspectors were an hour late to boarding/clearing a ship.  That one hour delay caused the ship to be delayed an additional day because the union stevedore labor would not work past 2300 hrs, costing the ship (and in the end, consumers) untold amounts of money as a result of future delays.

Laughing at the head of the local CBP for saying that they didn't have the technology to roll the main phone line to the on duty CBP officer (72# is apparently too hard).

In general, laughing at the stupidity of CBP on a regular basis.

[rattran]

My work stupidity is all pretty simple, as I deal with the public. Last weekend's gems were the following two phrases:

"Are these real, or do you make them?"
"How much do the $13 pendants cost?"

[Morat20]

Yelling, cussing, screaming, and anything else I could think of at union stevedore labor that wouldn't work past 1800 hrs by 2 hours and subsequently delaying the ship for 14 hrs, costing the ship (and in the end, consumers) untold amounts of money.

Yelling, cussing, screaming, and anything else I could think of at CBP officials because their inspectors were an hour late to boarding/clearing a ship.  That one hour delay caused the ship to be delayed an additional day because the union stevedore labor would not work past 2300 hrs, costing the ship (and in the end, consumers) untold amounts of money as a result of future delays.

I once noted that union rules -- like those "won't work past X" rules -- tended to be ludicrous in practice, but were often founded in past abuses (often long past). I don't know about stevedores in particular, but I know many of those "won't work past X" rules came about for one (or both) of two reasons: Because management started requiring long-ass (and unsafe) hours (like routine 60+ hour weeks in an enviroment where fatigue-based mistakes could get people killed), or because management worked out that it was cheaper to hire one guy to do two guy's work and just make him stay until it was done (which, admittedly, is a fucking incentive to work fast since you'd like to go home).

It's  real pisser when you're on the other end of it, and I know for a fact that it gets brought up in response to purely reasonable requests (Like: "Dude, is working 9 hours this once instead of 8 going to kill you? Come on!") and you still get the "No, I don't work past X" response. It's infuriating, but I try to bear in mind that -- well, as ridiculous as it fucking sounds right this instant, there actually is a reason for it.

Although you are making me glad I don't have to deal with that sort of shit in my own job. :) I just have to deal with people who can't grasp that I, a highly trained and educated software engineer, who is there purely to support our own products during critical events, am not trained, authorized, or have the accesses required to fix their goddamn laptops.

As it is, I'm nice enough to unjam their fucking printers and explain to them that their monitor isn't working because, well, some fucker hit the "input" button for unknown reasons. I regret that much, some days.

[NiX]

It happened before I got there but the bank where I worked was involved in the then biggest corporate buyout in Canada which involved a transaction in the billions of dollars.

Was that the TD/Canada Trust merger?

[Strazos]

Just some random stuff from my jobs:

I worked for Sears for awhile. Big part of the job was loading big items into vehicles. Far too often, people would not believe me when I said item A would not fit into vehicle B. Exchange goes like this: "Ma'am/Sir, this isn't going to fit in your civic." "Oh come on, lets just try! How about out of the box?" "Well, no, it won't, but if you insist..." *item does not fit* "Oh, I guess we'll have to come back for it later."

I did photos in Walgreens for awhile. People REALLY don't understand how film exposure works, or that shitty $1 disposables re-use name-brand disposables, and use shitty film, and that's why they get shitty pictures.

When I worked security, my manager was a real fucking trolly of a bitch. Also, her supervisory role was the best job she had ever had. She was also an idiot, who could not comprehend that I could both read something, and listen for door chimes/radio calls/PC alarms, at the same time. And that expecting a person to sit around and do NOTHING for 8 hours is fucking torturous.

Gamestop....lol. "Do you have Wiis!? Why don't they just make more? Are those Wiis sitting up on that little shelf, easily within reach for the taking? What games are good? Have you guys played (random girly/child/movie game)?"

The bank I work for now....you wouldn't believe what sort of people they having working in their facilities that deal with your vital documents. Like the fucking morons working in the collateral dept, whose only jobs are to deal with collateral, and they can't fucking keep track of random mortgages/titles - as in, they lose shit daily. Or that cannot tell if the document they are looking at is a copy or original...as in they cannot tell if the signatures are photocopies or ink.

In other departments, people just generally cannot understand/write proper English, or properly fill out their forms. Clownshoes, I say.

[Miasma]

It happened before I got there but the bank where I worked was involved in the then biggest corporate buyout in Canada which involved a transaction in the billions of dollars.

Was that the TD/Canada Trust merger?

No it was when Rogers purchased some smaller cable company and we were their bank.

[SnakeCharmer]

I once noted that union rules -- like those "won't work past X" rules -- tended to be ludicrous in practice, but were often founded in past abuses (often long past). I don't know about stevedores in particular, but I know many of those "won't work past X" rules came about for one (or both) of two reasons: Because management started requiring longass (and unsafe) hours (like routine 60+ hour weeks in an enviroment where fatigue-based mistakes could get people killed), or because management worked out that it was cheaper to hire one guy to do two guy's work and just make him stay until it was done (which, admittedly, is a fucking incentive to work fast since you'd like to go home).

Sure, they were needed at a point in time.  These days?  Not so much.  

It's so bad, that most of the time they aren't willing to accept a 4 or 8 hour guarantee even if they only work 1 hour past their cut off point.  The ILA unions cost the public an unGodly amount of money in my line of work.  Add incompetent CBP officers?  

And it's a financial Molotov's cocktail disaster.

I ran the numbers based off educated estimates of the costs, and it really would surprise you.  The daily rate of your average panamax sized vessel (738' LOA, 105' beam, 75,000 deadweight) is around 55,000 USD per day right now.  An aframax tanker (850' LOA, 145' beam, 90,000 DWT) is roughly 95,000 USD.  Factor in fuel costs, crew costs, stand by or overtime labor for stevedores (union and nonunion), the potential to run into another day's dockage charge, it all adds up very fast.  All those costs get passed right down to the consumer.  Those charged with facilitating trade are, in fact, making trade more expensive every day.

[Dtrain]

Agreed - unions themselves are mostly holdovers from past abuses.

My turn. I would occasionally get emails from a poor individual in another department who's parents had decided it would be a good idea to name them "Courvoisier."

After a while I finally met Courvoisier - and I was privately shocked to discover that he was a man.

That's a girl's name, amirite? 

[Nerf]

I "tutor" (read: Underpaid student teacher who babysits class so the real teacher can leave for 3 hours) at an "urban" middleschool in Fort Worth..you would be amazed at the names I see.  We have a kid whos name is TrshTrck.  Thats right, no vowels, vowels are for honkeys.  Oh, and how could I forget "Trashauna" we have 3 or 4 of those, although they do a get a bit upset when I don't call them "Tra-Shauna".  Sorry darlin, but your first name starts with "trash", deal with it.

[Furiously]

What's CBP stand for? My acronym dictionary is failing.

[DraconianOne]

SnakeCharmer wins this thread.  Everyone else can stop now.

[Tebonas]

What I don't get. Why isn't there a seperate night crew working the off hours if its that important? Can't cost more than having the ships wait another day. Doesn't the union support that solution? If so, are they daft?

[Merusk]

I don't get out in the field enough these days, but that's where things are rife with story opportunities as Snake illustrates.   I've got two from my latest job and two from a previous job, however.   I've got a bunch of AutoCAD stories, too, but those fail to convey the idiocy if you aren't very familiar with the program. (like the code ones  )

First, we were building a park shelter that was on a prominence in the community.  Since it's an open sided structure in a windy area with a big enclosed roof on it, there was some concern over uplift when the wind conditions were noted in the field.  To combat the roof flying off there were several very strong 'hurricane' ties added at the beam/ truss and beam/ post unions.  These worked fantastically the night we had a big wind storm and kept everything together.  Too bad nobody followed through on the structural logic and did a post-to-slab connection.  The shelter was lifted up like a kite and flew about 5' off of the foundation.

The day before we close a new house there's usually still a few touch-up and clean-up (Punch-out) items to be done.  The punch-out showed up for work at 7 on a particularly stormy day and was standing in the driveway unloading his tools when lightning struck the house.  In addition to knocking him on his ass and dazing him for a minute or so, the house caught on fire.  He was able to call the Fire department, but the house was ruled a loss and we had to rebuild it.   I wonder where the customers lived for the 3 1/2 months it took, since part of our sales contract is that their original house must be sold prior to closing (if they can't get financing for 2 mortgages, that is.)

In Cincinnati there's very clayey soil, and sometimes you find a super expansive patch.  This stuff can be shrunk for years, but then get wet and shift 3 to 4 feet or more, or reverse and dry out then shrink by the same amount.  The few soil samples you pull in an entire development or a lot isn't always enough to locate this as the patches can sometimes only be 10' across so you'd completely miss them.   The worst such example was a house my old company had to buy back because the soil heaved enough to raise the back wall two feet.  The rear door (steel) was bowed about 6" and the entire floor system was ruined to the point even furniture wouldn't stay in place.

Then there's the subcontractors.  My favorite story is walking around a site in Dallas and seeing one of the framing crew tugging on an air hose for his nail gun.  He was trying to get some additional slack, and was visibly frustrated that it wouldn't budge.   Without moving, those of us inspecting looked into the next room to see his coworker standing on a ladder nailing something into place with his buddies air hose wrapped around the leg of the ladder, still being yanked on from the other room. 

[Sky]

I remember my introduction to the dark side of the american workforce. I've had a solid work ethic ingrained in me forever and my first job was road construction, which put it to good use. One winter I did some work with a cleaning company, cleaning out airplane hangars. It consisted of sweeping the hangars while my partner emptied garbage and the supervisor vacuumed offices. This took about an hour. Then they'd go into an office and sleep for 7 hours.

I couldn't take it, so I would just leave and forge my timesheets. Worked until I was leaving one day as the boss pulled up. Used to work so many of those shit jobs, where you can laugh and walk away because you can get more pay at another job the next day.

When I was working at walmart, I had a habit of transferring the best-looking cashiers to overnight shift and then shagging them everywhere in the store. Changing rooms were so tame. Best was probably behind some bags of dog food while the store was open. In a closet in the gaming room while the unloaders were playing games. On the boss's desk. In the back of the truck while the guys unloaded the front. Outside in lawn&garden during the summer. Good times.

[Yegolev]

Merusk, I didn't realize you were in residential.  My sympathies.

[ClydeJr]

In the summer between my high school senior year and my college freshman year, I worked as a pipe fitter helper at a chemical plant. It was decent money but it was a shit job. My days were spent cutting pipe, putting a bevel on the ends, helping the welder weld them together, helping the pipe fitters install, and then cleaning up after. One day one of the fitters wanted to get a couple pieces of metal, about 3" x 3" out of about 1/2 " thick metal. Unfortunately we didn't have any flat plates to cut that from. His solution: Cut a chunk out of the end biggest diameter pipe we had. Since it was from a big pipe, it had just a little bit of a curve to it. In order to flatten it out, he set it on the worktable and smashed it with a big hammer. After hitting it a few times, one blow caught the piece right on the corner causing it to fire off the table and hit him right in the nuts.

He fell to the concrete ground and started rolling around, clutching his crotch. We were having a hard time asking him if he was ok because we were laughing so hard. He eventually got up and staggered off to the bathroom. When he came back, he had this haunted look on his face. "My nut went back up into my body... I had to pop it back down..."

[Merusk]

Merusk, I didn't realize you were in residential.  My sympathies.

Yeah, thanks.  I went in this direction initially because 1) the pay was a lot better than commercial and 2) I really like working on houses a LOT better than industrial complexes/ office rehabs/ mega supermarkets and business hotels.   

Over the last year or two, however, I've begun to rethink that because.. my god it's a clusterfuck in this little corner of the industry.

[Morat20]

What I don't get. Why isn't there a seperate night crew working the off hours if its that important? Can't cost more than having the ships wait another day. Doesn't the union support that solution? If so, are they daft?

I can't speak for Snakecharmer, but a generally similiar situation has come up in the -- heavily unionized -- refineries I am familiar with.

There were two general cases wherein union rules preventing overwork kept costing the refineries money -- there was one-time, seasonal, or otherwise unusually high work loads that simply required more hours on rare occasions problem. This was fixed early on wherein the union was quite happy to accept overtime (well compensated and subject to sane limits, since refineries are dangerous places) pay for things like turnarounds, emergencies (when shit blows up, breaks, or has to be fixed yesterday).

The other problem was -- the company didn't want to hire an extra person when what they really needed was just an extra five or six hours a week out of a handful of folks. The union held their ground on that one, reasoning that their workers shouldn't be required to do two people's worth of work just so the company didn't have to hire someone else.

I'd imagine Snakecharmer's business is more like the former -- it seems like it'd be slow/busy cycles -- but apparently they're not losing THAT much money if they're not willing to hire more hands.

Snakecharmer:

You honestly think those past abuses wouldn't occur again? Hell, I've got a friend at Fed-Ex who has been eagerly watching a lawsuit against the company -- he wears their uniform, drives their truck, works the hours the post, drives the routes they say -- but they claim he's an "independent contractor" so they can save money by making him pay the company's share of his FICA taxes (among other things). Of course, the IRS is in the process of bitchslapping those fucks silly for it -- but it's quite obviously in management's best interests to push the limits are far as humanely possible. A company isn't in business to treat their employees well -- it's in business to make money. They'll only refrain from fucking over the employees when forced to, either by law or the simple fact that there's generally a line SOMEWHERE in which you can't hire employees (that line, of course, gets moved pretty far when you hire illegals or during economic downturns).

[SnakeCharmer]

No, I really don't.  Not in this age of instant information and such.  There's hundreds of thousands of lawyers waiting in the wings to take it to the man in a lawsuit regarding (perceived or real) unfair labor practices.  (Edit:) These are the same lawyers that don't charge a fee unless you win, so the person making the allegations/lawsuit doesn't have to come out of pocket.

The FedEx thing seems like a different issue altogether.  And if they're union (no idea on this), their union should have sniffed this potential problem out a long time ago - if it didn't, it's a textbook example of the union failing the employee.  I'm not a lawyer and didn't spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express last night but it doesn't look like it's a union relevant thing (for lack of a better word).  I don't know enough about the FedEx thing, honestly, to even hazard a guess - I'm just sort of speculating blindly.  I can't imagine FedEx not having some sort of idea that their accounting practices (which is what it really is, at the core) regarding this wouldn't bite them in the ass at some point.

If the IRS reams FedEx, how would this affect the employees, in a nutshell - beyond layoffs?  Would the employees THEN be required to pay some sort of back taxes?  It seems all of it's falling into the lap of FedEx.  And FedEx is going to jack up their rates to make up for the 4 point some odd billion dollars in penalties and back taxes if all this goes through.

I'd guess though, that FedEx lobbyist and lawyers will cop some kind of deal with the IRS in the end.

[SnakeCharmer]

What's CBP stand for? My acronym dictionary is failing.

Our illustrious Customs and Border Protection.

(insert laugh track)

As someone that sees what and how they do it on a daily basis, it really is laughable.

[Teleku]

I'm actually still curious, as Tebonas asked, why the docks don't seem to have a night shift for this sort of work, Snakecharmer.  Do the unions prevent it in some way?

[Morat20]

The FedEx thing seems like a different issue altogether.  And if they're union (no idea on this), their union should have sniffed this potential problem out a long time ago - if it didn't, it's a textbook example of the union failing the employee.  I'm not a lawyer and didn't spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express last night but it doesn't look like it's a union relevant thing (for lack of a better word).  I don't know enough about the FedEx thing, honestly, to even hazard a guess - I'm just sort of speculating blindly.  I can't imagine FedEx not having some sort of idea that their accounting practices (which is what it really is, at the core) regarding this wouldn't bite them in the ass at some point.

FedEx employees are not unionized, as far as I know. As far as how it would effect the employees -- FedEx would be required to treat them AS employees, including paying the employer part of the FICA match. (There are a number of other things -- like, I would imagine, unemployment benefits, protection from wrongful termination, and all sorts of other goodies that employees get that independent contractors don't. Independent contractors tend to charge a lot more for that very reason.)

As for not biting them on the ass at some point -- dude, businesses don't care. They saved hundreds of millions a year for at least five years (this has been ongoing since 2002 at least). The guys who started this stuff already exercised their options, made their buttloads of cash, and are probably working for another company now.

[SnakeCharmer]

I'm actually still curious, as Tebonas asked, why the docks don't seem to have a night shift for this sort of work, Snakecharmer.  Do the unions prevent it in some way?

Short answer:  Mostly because the maritime industry is STILL very archaic and backwards and very resistant to change.  The overall line of thinking is "this is the way it has been done, this is the way it shall always be done".

Long answer:  It mostly depends on the type of cargo.  Bulk cargo (coal, grain, oil, etc) is discharged around the clock.  General/breakbulk/project cargo is discharged (usually) from 0700 hrs to 2300 hrs.  It's extremely expensive to work past 1800 hrs, even for non-union labor/stevedores. 

And, logistically, it can be a nightmare due to heavy load permits.  Mobile is a very project cargo centric port.  By project cargo, the definition is "cargo that does not meet traditional standards of measurement", in a rough way.  Once the ship is in, the goal is to get the cargo to the receiver as quick as possible.  And often it's discharged direct to truck.  These loads are such that the DoT only allows daytime transfer across our interstates.  When is the last time you saw a double wide trailer being moved at night?  Same principal / DoT laws.  (Edit to clarify) If you can't move the cargo, you don't need to waste the labor cost in double handling it (discharge to dock to wait for daylight, then load the trucks after you've already touched it once).

The new DHS/USCG/TWIC laws are going to make it even harder on stevedores (and by extension ships/shippers/receivers/etc).  It's an expensive one time fee for someone to get a TWIC card, and the brutal reality of it is that many longshoremen won't be able to qualify for one due to past transgressions of the law.  Labor is going to be at a premium, and that premium is going to cost people (consumers) money.  Even qualified stevedore foremen are going to be tough to come buy.  Most stevedoring companies pull from the same pool.  And it's a risky financial proposition for these companies to pay for TWIC applications for people that probably won't qualify, and further, there's no guarantee that these same workers are going to be reliable and show up consistently.  The non-union stevedores are going to be hit particularly hard from this because they hire from Labor Force or Labor Finders or some other employment service on a need basis.  Basically a van goes to these places, and the driver yells "Who wants to work!" and boom, there's some of your grunt labor. 

Stevedores, agents, and towage are contracts and rates that are typically negotiated down by charterers, owners, shippers, and receivers.  In the mid 90's, there was a HUGE influx of Mom and Pop companies (except towage) that utilized low overhead to barter extremely low rates, and that effect is still being felt today - despite these Mom and Pops pricing themselves into poverty, as well as being swallowed up by bigger companies.  The net effect is that nearly everyone started lowering their rates to compete, and the quality of work declined by an inexperienced (read: cheapest available) workforce.  There is a resurgance in the local shipping community for those of us that work together (despite being competitors) and in turn not lowball the hell out of projects just to get the business.  The result is that we can pay better, hire (and keep) qualified individuals that do top notch work.  If a company hires mine to represent them, it's going to be expensive.  But you're going to get quality work and service.  I would rather pass over three shitty paying jobs/contracts, and get one great one that pays the same or more.  And to be fair, the work I (my company) does is slightly more specialized than your average ship agency.  We are moving away from traditional cargo ships (whilst maintaining and picking up ace clients), and have moved towards about 75 percent offshore support with the oilfields and research vessels.  I've got enough contract work right now for the next 14 years to keep me busy.

Anyway, don't know if I answered your question or not :P

[Yegolev]

I can't get enough of your job talk.

Also a dumb guess: TWIC = To Work In Cargo.