Regurgitated Chicken Ass

Now, regular readers of my blog (Hi Mom!) know that I don't write a lot of foul words in my posts. I try to avoid them when I speak as well but there are some times that you just have to tell it like it is. Details on the title of this post will be given later in this entry.

This morning I got started about 0330 and finished my run into Americus, Georgia. I had forgotten that when I set up this trip on my GPS I neglected to enter the actual street address for this consignee, just the name of the town. Garmin lets you do this and it routes you to the center of that town if you do, or close enough. I realized my error when I passed an exit I realized I should have taken, it being partially concealed in the rain and light fog present in the early morning hours.

Americus is like many small towns across our great nation, in that it has very few places for a tractor-trailer rig to park off the roadway or for one to turn around. This was not helped by the fact I was vainly trying to make out road signs, slowly navigating the streets and punching the address into the GPS unit. Before I got everything set I had made a turn heading out of town in the right direction, but along the wrong road.

Fortunately, the road I should have turned on in the first place actually intersected this wrong road a ways outside town and I began to breath easier. Then, just as I was a few blocks away from my consignee a train blocked the road and it took almost 15 minutes to finish crossing. Eventually traffic cleared up and I pulled in to the same consignee I had delivered to a few weeks ago. I opened up and backed up to the dock, a lumper did his thing, then I sent in my unloaded macro on the satellite unit.

I quickly got back a message from the load planners asking if I had, indeed, unloaded early. I told them yes, I really had and in the future anyone coming to this particular place can get unloaded any time after 0700 local no matter what the appointment says. Lumpers willing, naturally.

In less than 30 minutes I had my next load zapped to me: deadhead up to Chattanooga, Tennessee then take a load from there up to Macon, Missouri - another place I have been to in the past few weeks.

At this point, I would like to state for the record I am a big fan of chicken. I had some chicken tenders to wash down my DQ Blizzard when I stopped along the way to pick up this load, and I had a crispy chicken sandwich tonight at the Huddle House restaurant where I parked.

The reason I say this is that when I pulled up to this plant in Chattanooga the most vile smell ever assaulted me. My eyes began to water, my saliva tasted like bile and my nose burned. The only thing missing were the four horsemen of the apocalypse charging down the parking lot and the grisly scene would be complete.

Apparently, this is a slaughterhouse of the fowl kind right in the heart of Chattanooga. Ironically, it is right next to the bus station and the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" attraction. What a wonderful thing to show your kids; must be right up there with Disneyland.

I dub the scent "Regurgitated Chicken Ass". So there.

As I stumble inside the warehouse another driver shows me the cute little phone-booth sized sauna drivers get to use to talk with the shipping people. Imagine a Turkish jail cell made out of plywood and you will be in the right zone. There was a small sliding window and every five or ten minutes someone would walk by and accept or dole out some paperwork.

"Door three", I was told. I had to back up half a block or so, do a fancy bootlegger turn then slap it in to place. Well, something like that, anyway.

In 90 minutes my stay in Purgatory was complete and I had the paperwork in hand after another stint in the "boo box". It turns out the entrance to the plant I used isn't supposed to be used for truck traffic and I get sent out the back way. Only problem is, there are no directions back to the highway and I picked one of the three directions to go. Unfortunately, that one was the one with the bridge five inches to low for me to pass under and blocked-off side streets so I couldn't turn around. On the plus side, I had a nice audience of street people watching me maneuver back out of the mess I had gotten myself in to.

I got back on to I-24 westbound after a circuitous tour of the greater Chattanooga downtown area (HVAC set to recirculate, naturally). A short distance down the highway there was a microscopic Pilot to scale out at -- the shipper lied about the weight of the load, but I realized this and was legal anyway.

After another hour-and-a-half or so I parked it for the night in close proximity to Nashville which will fall like wheat before a scythe to my early morning start.

Any questions?


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