Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Overnight Urinary Tract Infection

One of the things that I like least about trucking is the occasional load that requires you to change your sleep patterns. I normally get up around 0400 or so and run for the day, shutting down in the afternoon. The load I was buzzed with next picked up that evening about a hundred miles away and was due in Omaha the following morning at 0600. A night trip, in other words.

I don't use caffeine or nicotine so altering my sleep to the other side of the clock like that is a problem. I could have turned the load down and waited for another but I flipped a mental coin and decided to give it a whirl.

The facility I was sent to is for a company called UTI, thus the title of the post. Seems we haul tires for them out to Nebraska for the LTL operation of a company called NTC. Yes, I know, too many acronyms.


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I had to finagle my logs a bit to be down during the day then run the night trip. The trip itself was uneventful but tiring: I had to pull over several times for power naps when I began to feel woozie. My arrival in Omaha was on time and I took the rest of the day off to recover and reset my sleep patterns.

Some potential good news: the $4,000 tire bill is looking more like $1,500 when the return of the tires and rims my truck was originally equipped with factored in. I may have to adjust my target weekly income up a notch or two to compensate.