Chapter 2: Three Records Agree

The control room sat on a mezzanine above the dock floor, glass on three sides. Steve Wilson had the middle chair.

He held up one finger when Robert came in, not rudely, and finished what he was doing. A driver’s voice on the speaker was complaining that he had been given Door Nine and there was already a trailer on Door Nine. Wilson looked at one screen, then another, typed for a few seconds, and said, “Take Eleven. Your paperwork will catch up to you before you’ve got the doors open. Sorry about that.” On the floor below, a tractor began to swing its trailer toward a different door. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

“That happens about six times a shift,” Wilson said, turning his chair around. He was perhaps forty, in a company polo shirt, with the easy manner of a man who liked being asked things. “The schedule’s right. The yard’s the yard. Somebody has to stand in between. What can I show you?”

Robert asked how the three record systems related to one another.

“They don’t, much. That’s the idea.” Wilson brought them up in turn. “Routing assigns the carrier and the destination, and it records the dispatch against that assignment. Inventory keeps the stock balances; when cargo’s dispatched it comes off the count. Dock monitoring records loading activity bay by bay. Different services, different databases, different vendors if you go back far enough. Each one does its own job and keeps its own books.”