Nobody really should live life without an intimate knowledge of containers, as ninety percent or more of what we needlessly buy arrives in one. Accordingly let me take you by the digital hand to walk you through what that says on the back whilst you whisper "Captain, oh my captain".
I hope you recognised this mighty 45G1 straightway: the most numerous on Earth. The original container, invented by a US haulier to ship down the Eastern seaboard, measured 20' by 8' by 8'6" though why the extra height? Maybe to get a handle on which way is up? This one is twice the length though, and stretches to 9'6" in height so as to be known as a 'high cube'.
Max Gross is not a wrestler as I first thought, but a measure of how much the entire container should weigh including contents. Among the heaviest I have known have been marble kitchen worktops, several hundred off. TARE derives from Arabic (and later French) for 'that which can be ignored' in any sale, like the carrier bag used to contain what you pay for by weight like potatoes i.e. weight of container, here four metric tonnes.
Finally volumetric capacity, which is vast and a reason they may make apartments. The floor though is not metal but wood, usually bamboo, that is stretched over metal joists. Meanwhile the numbering is preceded by the lessor's code, and runs to six digits plus a form of check-digit at the end. With this it can be tracked around the world, which is exciting and something I organise for the family to pass the time on holiday weekends... a gentler pastime than dragging women out of cars and shooting them in GTA, as I tell my son.
Stickers on the side warn firefighters what's inside, in this case a mildly flammable resin, so that they can dig out extinguishers marked 'For mildly flammable resins and inflammation in adults'. That's a problem with containers, what is inside them unknown and provided with a manifest often so vague as to be pointless, like 'rolls' of either sausage or steel.
Another problem being there is no knowing how or indeed whether the load is secure. Rounding a bend once in the turn onto the M57 motorway I was interested to feel the steering lighten and see the container start to roll at a precipitous angle in the mirror. Whether all off-side wheels cleared the tarmac the way Red Bull steer cars down narrow passages I do not know, though it stopped the truck on the inside dead in its tracks. Hashtag gosh... roll on a car and it's road-kill.
One tale of note includes wine, which you may think arrives in bottles from across the world but is more sensibly bottled locally. In some cases the container would be filled with a giant plastic bag in which 2700 cubic feet could be transported for decanting on arrival. Drivers at Liverpool's docks would gladly take it home later to hang on the line and decant the litre or two remaining.
