Why dock appointment windows slip on Georgian floors

An appointment window is a social contract. The carrier promises a gate. The yard promises a door. Between those two sentences sits a trailer that is still being stripped from the previous hour. In Tbilisi that previous hour is often a late Poti run that looked “on time” when it left the terminal.

We keep seeing the same pattern. The 08:00–10:00 window is staffed. The 10:00–12:00 window inherits the overflow and is written as if it were empty. By noon the sheet still shows green blocks. The floor shows two trucks in the apron and a hostler choosing which promise to break.

ASN timing makes it worse when the carton list arrives after the truck. Pickers cannot stage what they have not been told exists. The dock then performs a live sort that the calendar never budgeted. None of this is mysterious. It is rarely drawn.

If you only keep a daily on-time percentage, the slipped window disappears into a respectable figure. If you keep door occupancy by hour, the argument becomes specific enough to restaff or to refuse a carrier who consistently eats the next slot.

A practical check before the next peak: print yesterday’s calendar beside yesterday’s gate times. Where they disagree by more than thirty minutes, that is your first dwell picture — no special method required, only the honesty to look at both pages at once.