"Somebody doesn't like Sara Lee"

(Sung to the tune of their jingle one often hears on TV)

My drop in Tyler, Texas was at a food warehouse. It was tedious, involved lumpers and a lot of waiting. 'Nuff said.

After waiting for three hours after I was empty, the satellite unit beeped and I was assigned a load from Haltom, Texas to Rochelle, Illinois. I had been to this particular location before: a Sara Lee refrigerated warehouse of one sort or another.

My available hours are a bit strange until Wednesday. Basically, I have to work two half days which works out very well for me. I had needed to run by the house to pick up some mail and packages and presto, this will let me do that, see the relations and still make this delivery on time.

When I arrived in Haltom, which is a suburb of Fort Worth, I pulled up to the guard shack and they started filling out paperwork. Soon, one of the guards went outside to look at my trailer and came back, tut-tutting about the fuel level in the reefer tank.

"Can't drop that trailer here, son" the elderly guard said. "Reefer has to be at least three quarters full."

I innocently asked if that applied to all reefers, and he said yes. "So, if I had a 50 gallon tank and it was three-fourths full, that would be okay?"

"Sure, why not?"

Well, half of a 75-gallon tank is 37.5 gallons of fuel. By an amazing coincidence, 3/4ths of a 50-gallon tank is 37.5 gallons of fuel. So the larger tank has the same physical amount of diesel in it but because it can hold half again as much as a smaller tank it still has to be filled.

I'm not sure he grasped the math, but he called his boss who intoned The Company Line: Thou Shalt Have Three-Fourths Fuel.

I didn't pass any authorized fueling locations on the way in to the pickup so it isn't like I just shirked my duties. I called in to my dispatcher to see if someone at our HQ could gently massage someone at their HQ to let this happen, but apparently that wasn't in the cards.

So, I had to head out ten miles away (twenty round trip) on my dime to fuel the reefer. Better yet, when I arrive at the Pile-It their computers were down and the line of trucks went out almost to the street. Its hot, I'm frustrated and the load has plenty of time so I called my dispatcher back and made sure it would be okay to blow them off until tomorrow morning. No problem he says, so long as I can deliver on time.

Somebody doesn't like Sara Lee.