Sunday, January 18, 2009

The 17th Freaking Hole

So I get planned on a trip to the Birthplace Of The King, Tupelo, Mississippi from Council Bluffs. I don't accept it immediately since I wanted to brace my dispatcher in his lair office and see what happened to that California trip.

"Don't have anything headed that way," I'm told.

Now, the problem going from Omaha to Tupelo is the Ozarks between them. There are a variety of state routes that take you from the Kansas City area down around Springfield, then over towards Memphis but they aren't really designed for big rigs, and especially not during winter. Thus, the 740 miles you're paid for doesn't come close to the 800 actual miles you end up driving to deliver the load.

Then there is the shipper. For some reason the people at Plumrose USA can't manage to figure out how to load a trailer properly. The one I was stuck with was so heavy towards the rear I had to move back my tandems three times to get the weight right and it took the freaking 17th hole on the slide to even out the weight. In non-trucker parlance, that means the tires on my trailer were damn near the very back, making turns very wide and potentially giving me legal grief since some states don't allow tandems back past a certain point.

I was called in to scale twice in Missouri but the weights were (barely) within limits and I don't think they care about where your tandems are unless they really want to bust your chops.

This load also had an usual 2100 delivery time. I arrived an hour early and am currently on the dock ahead of three other Hill Bros trucks waiting to be unloaded.


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