S-Mart. Smart. Get it?

A couple days ago I picked up a load of Petsmart stuff headed to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I could have driven the roughly 510 miles in one day but I had to shuttle some trailers around for over a hundred miles before I left to make sure other drivers had some for their loads today and tomorrow.

The trip was unremarkable except for the follow up load, which was pre-planned again. I had to run down I-29 to the Tyson plant at Dakota City, Nebraska and grab a pre-loaded trailer, then bring it down to Omaha. Everything went great until I left to scale it and no matter how far I moved up the tandems it was still 700 pounds nose heavy.

So I return to the facility and get put in line with all the other drivers who have similarly messed up loads. Each of us drops off his or her trailer inside, then bobtails outside for a few hours until they fix the problem and notify us. Almost four hours later, I'm ready to go... again.

Now this isn't some teensy-tiny operation here. They probably load and unload several hundred trailers every day at this one plant. They have dedicated trailer washout docks, yard dogs running this way and that hauling trailers around, the works. You would think with this degree of experience they could avoid making this type of mistake with such regularity. But you'd be wrong, I suppose.

Anyway, made it back to HQ in Omaha without any more incidents and passed off the trailer to a different driver to take it back to Ottawa, Illinois about a block or so from the Petsmart facility I just left yesterday. As for me, I'm taking a much-deserved 34 hour reset and resuming my tour of the midwest Friday morning.

That is all.


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