After the plates were dry
Notes from the depot table
These are accounts of particular rounds, not stars on a board. One of them includes a reservation we still agree with.
None of these notes are from a marketplace widget. They come from firms that sat at the same table as the plates. If your round looks nothing like Saburtalo parcels or Kakheti wine, say so in the enquiry — we will not pretend a coastal Batumi string is the same drawing.
The Saburtalo plate showed a left onto a one-way that sent us past the same bakery three times. I used that drawing with the owner. The first week of the new order felt slower until the drivers stopped improvising at the bakery corner.
They rode with Giorgi toward Rustavi and wrote down the factory gate that never opens at the hour printed on our sheet. We still cannot make the guard punctual. At least the ledger stopped us blaming the driver for a wait that belongs to the gate.
I asked for a map of Old Tbilisi drops and received a sheet that forbids our long van from three lanes we had been forcing. Useful, and a little bruising. We had to hire a smaller car for Sololaki, which I had hoped to avoid.
The briefing ran long because two drivers disagreed about Dezerter Bazaar on Fridays. Lela made them mark the stall line on the plate instead of shouting. The one-page order for the next Friday was dull, which is what we needed.
Longer accounts
How a study actually ran
Wine cases, Tbilisi to a Kakheti cellar door
A small cellar in Tbilisi sent mixed cases east on Thursdays. The kilometre log looked tidy. The study found the delay in the village lane where a truck cannot pass a marshrutka, so the driver waited in Telavi for a gap that sometimes never came. We redrew the Thursday to use a wider approach and to leave Tbilisi an hour earlier. Cases still move; the argument at the cellar door is now about cork, not about why the van is late.
A Gldani depot with four vans and one shared list
Four drivers were working from a single photocopied list, which meant two vans sometimes climbed the same stair street. The plates split the doors by slope and by receiving hours, not by who shouted first at 6 a.m. One driver disliked losing a familiar street. The depot kept his old cluster for a fortnight, then moved him once the waits dropped on the shared stairs.