2026-03-12

Late gate is not the same as a missed window

A late gate is a truck that reaches your yard after the hour you published for inbound check-in. The freight may still make the outbound appointment if the dock door is free and the seal is intact. A missed window is a failure to arrive at the consignee inside the booked slot, whether the delay started at your gate, at a weigh station, or in a customer’s receiving line.

When both events share one stamp, the morning board cannot tell which calls still have a chance. Detention math also splits: yard detention and consignee detention rarely share a clock. If your notes say only “late,” the person who inherits the radio has to reconstruct the story from memory.

A workable split is three columns on the exception slip: time at your gate, time promised to the consignee, and the last known cause. Cause should be a short list you already agreed in the workshop—weather hold, customer delay, equipment, driver hours—not a paragraph. The reviewer who sits your desk will usually find that one of those clocks is missing on most slips.

Georgian transit lanes toward Poti and Batumi add a fourth clock when a ferry or a customs hold sits between the yard and the port gate. That hold is not a missed window until the vessel cut-off has actually passed. Mixing the two produces panic calls to drivers who are still legally waiting in a queue.

Write the distinction on the wall above the radio. New clerks copy what they see. If the wall still says “late,” they will keep stamping “late.”