The ramp at night is a crazy place. The activity going on around the aircraft really makes me dread going up to the cargo ramp for an uplift. When we fuel you guys earlier in the evening we don't have an issue with loaders, people, and strings of containers while we're trying to back the truck under the wing to fuel up.
Please get your dispatchers to give a minimum of 40 for DC-10s out of STL, unless there's bad wx along the route, we will rarely have to uplift with this amount. I think Tony C or somebody told me it had to do with filing an alternate that is close to MEM and not realistic to use if you had to divert.