Providence

This morning our people got together with their people and did... well, whatever those people do with each other. Lets just say it isn't pretty.

Anyway, I was eventually offered a few choices. The first choice was to stay put and continue with this load, though the rest might not be loaded until 2300 hours or later. The second choice was a short 250ish mile run in the Texas area. The third choice was one of those live load runs from Irving, Texas to Springfield, Missouri that loaded at 1500.

After careful thought I decided to stay put on the current load. I thought it likely I could get worked in before 2300 and the other loads would require me to first drag my partially-loaded trailer to the far side of Dallas to our yard, then find an empty, then go run one of the other loads. Sounded like a lot less work my way, was the thinking.

Before I could even get on the "work in" list I had to pony up a $60 extortion "work in fee." Funny how another company screws up and I get to hold the bag for a while to get it fixed.

By late morning I was backed into a door and after about an hour's wait the six (yes, six) pallets that this load was missing were hoisted aboard and I got a call to come to the office for the paperwork. Right at high noon I departed, heading east towards Little Rock, Arkansas. Aside from a couple quick stops to take the Browns to the Superbowl and drop off some trip packs I didn't stop driving until I got to Tennessee.

My first attempt to find a place to park was at the oddly-designed Pilot at exit 47. There were a set of three parking spaces, all blind backs that I considered briefly then discarded. I know I could make it into one of them just fine but the problem would come in a few hours when two other tired drivers would attempt the same feat only with less space and a better chance of my truck being hit.

I continued down the road, missing an opportunity to park at a Huddle House at exit 56 (I didn't see if the lot had any free space until I was past the turnoff). My next chance would be around mile marker 73, so I thought, at the first rest area but suddenly a sign for a T/A truck stop popped up at an exit marked "Providence Road."

Feeling providential, I took the exit and moved slowly into the parking area and saw three parking spots open along the back row. BAM! Now there are just two left.

... and then the wheel came off, literally and figuratively

Early on, I knew today would be a bad day.

On my way from Big Cabin, Oklahoma to Garland, Texas to drop off the trailer I picked up yesterday I was passed by a pickup truck towing a trailer with some construction items piled on top (trusses, two by fours, sheet rock, etc.). A few miles up the road I see that same pickup pulled over to the side of the road so I do the safe thing and pull into the left lane to give them ample room and I go about my business.

A while later, the same pickup passes me again but this time it is swerving slightly from side to side and it seems like the driver is having difficulty keeping it on the straight and narrow. Pickup pulls to the side of the road again, I go around again.

A short time later I'm passed again and the pickup is having a hard time of it and I'm getting worried they are going off of the road or they will ram me or another vehicle. Suddenly, the pickup swerves to the right shoulder and the driver slams on the brakes just as the right rear tire departs for the greener grass on the far side of the shoulder and the rear of the truck droops down to the right, ending in a shower of sparks. Three or four people pour out of the truck as I go by again and this time it is for good.

The thought went through my mind right after this that I hope my day today won't come apart like this. Then my satellite unit beeped and I received a preplan.

Now, I thought when I left the house yesterday I was heading down to our Dallas yard to drop off one trailer then pick up a different one and take it to Springfield, after which I would be grabbing a load from Buske to take up to Omaha on Wednesday. This preplan has me doing a live load in Irving, Texas then driving the whopping 420ish miles up to Springfield and sitting on it for a day, then unloading at a local food warehouse the morning of the 12th. Oh. Hell. No.

I write one of my usual witty sonnets to the dispatcher explaining my position and shortly thereafter I'm told the preplan is banished to the netherworld. Score one for me.

Then my phone rings and it is a friend who tells me that one of my ex-girlfriends has been in a big scrape and could use some money sent to her via ComCheck. For those of you not in the industry, ComChecks are typically used to pay for things like lumpers, washouts and other miscellaneous items on the road that are reimbursed to a driver. Some drivers also take some or all of their pay in this form while on the road, though I myself never have.

For good reason, as it turns out. In order to get a couple hundred bucks shorn from my next paycheck and advanced to me via ComCheck took my dispatcher going to his boss, the head of operations, and the lady in charge of the owner-operator and lease-purchase program at Hill Bros. I almost felt dirty, like being required to prove I had money to be seated at a restaurant. We're in tough times, I'm sure, but c'mon I've been here for more than 18 months and I have a fairly good track record of making money. How humiliating.

My dispatcher finally got the go-ahead on the ComCheck and I sent a SMS message to my ex (another first) with the details. That sorted out, I arrive at our Dallas yard and drop my trailer only to find out the only reefer we have at the yard has a red tag on the air hose connectors saying not to use it because it has been sold to another company. Being in a rush at that point, I had naturally hooked up to it and had the gear up, so I got to winch it back down and disconnect. Bad driver.

Sent in a message asking for guidance and waited. This new trip they offered after the first aborted preplan has me picking up in Pittsburg, Texas at 1630 and also picking up in Fort Worth, Texas at 1630. Clearly paradoxical. My dispatcher is on top of the game and tells me to go ahead and take that red-tagged trailer and the folks in Fort Worth will load me when I get there sometime in the early evening hours.

Wonderful, I don't have to traipse across the hell of the Metroplex to find a trailer and I can make my own hours. Better yet, my fuel stop is along the way and the fuel there is just $2.48 a gallon for us today, compared to a nationwide average of $2.80 or so this week. I decide to hold off fueling until I return from Pittsburg and putter on down the road.

After narrowly avoiding an accident on the freeway I arrive in Pittsburg at the Pilgrim's Pride meatpacking plant. Oh no, I'm informed, that trailer is not clean enough for our products, go down the road a few miles and there is an industrious fellow who will wash it out for you. Thirty minutes and thirty-five dollars later, this is done and I'm given the paperwork for my new load, and I exchange trailers.

Now I'm heading west to Fort Worth which is an odd direction considering my first drop for this load is east of here in Ohio. I'm being paid to make an almost 300 mile u-turn so some of the load can be put up front in the trailer and the rest in back. Whatever, I'm not paid enough to drive and think.

Back to the fuel stop where the next problem rears its head. See, for the past few months every time I take home time my ComData card gets shut off. I assume our crack team at HQ does this so it can't be used if its stolen when I'm away from the truck. Anyway, this means that unless I forget to tell my dispatcher to turn it back on I roll up to the pumps and it will refuse to take my card. Like tonight, for instance.

I get that resolved only to find that the stupid pump I'm at will not pump, even after I've entered all the information it asked for. After a bit of trial and error I determine that the pump on the passenger side of the truck is the master pump and the one on the driver's side won't start until that one has its handle lifted. Since I was also filling up the reefer tank (which at our company is always located on the driver's side) this made for a number of circuits around my truck to turn off and on the pump at the proper time.

But wait! It gets better!

After driving 150 miles or so west to the far western side of Fort Worth I arrive at the facility that will load the other half of this load on to my trailer. Naturally, even though I'm given no fewer than six different sets of pickup numbers, P.O. numbers, confirmations numbers et cetera absolutely none of them is relevant to this particular location. After a tedious series of round-trips to my truck to send in satellite messages to HQ then back to the shipping department of this company it eventually comes out that the Pilgrim's Pride people have made a boo-boo and haven't set up this part of the load to leave until ... wait for it ... wait for it ... Thursday.

So now I'm back in the truck parked down the street munching on a bag of six dollar grapes telling the world about my bad day.

There, now you know.

The wheel in the sky keeps on turning

I phoned HQ twice over the weekend, once on Saturday and once on Sunday. No go on a preplan, which was slightly irritating.

I pestered my dispatcher this morning when he got in then again a few hours later. I asked if freight was running slow enough I would need to wait another day before heading back out but he assured me they would have something for me soon. After some consulting with the planning demigods I was told they have a load up in the Kansas City yard that needs to be sent down to our Dallas yard for a local driver to deliver sometime next week. Then, there is supposed to be a load at our Dallas yard that needs to get delivered back to Springfield, Missouri (wasn't I just there?) on Tuesday then a Buske load heading from there to Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday.

If it sounds like I'm doing a big loop back to the house then heading up to Omaha, that's a pretty good version of events.

I got back to the truck and it was still in one piece so I pretripped then headed out. About 180 miles deadhead up to KC where I swapped my empty reefer for a loaded van then chatted with one of our newer drivers who came on with HB three months ago. He lamented some of the common complaints of drivers (dispatchers not recognizing the Hours of Service limits when they send out loads, some loads with lots of downtime before pickup or delivery, etc.) and I mentioned the blog and what I'm doing as a lease operator. Its kind of funny watching the expression of a driver when I explain how I operate a truck and the kind of money I make, and this was no exception.

I went over some of the numbers with him for my first year and how it is looking so far in my second (for the record, pretty close to the first). I'm only averaging about 2,400 miles per week so far in my second fiscal year as compared to 2,564 per week in my first but my take home pay is actually a bit ahead of where I was last year.

Anyway, we chatted for a bit then I took off with my loaded trailer and headed south. I stopped at the Walmart in Lamar, Missouri to pick up supplies for this run and managed to spend six bucks on one (large) bag of seedless grapes. I never let the price of healthy food stop me from buying but that brought a wince at the register when I saw it get rung up.

A few hours later I'm in Oklahoma at Big Cabin, having just left the interstate and I'm feeling a bit tired and out of sorts. The first day or two back in the truck from time off is frequently like this so I stopped a few hours earlier than I had originally intended and will finish the trip to Dallas tomorrow morning. Knowing ahead of time that my next load is waiting there and I can make that schedule is a big help!


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Hometime over the weekend

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The drop and hook in Rochelle was routine and I was given a preplan to pick up a load from nearby Aurora, Illinois to take to Kansas City, Kansas. Along came a note: deadhead home after the drop in Kansas City.

Just one problem: there were no empty trailers at the food warehouse I dropped at so I had to search around for a while to find an empty. By the time I found one and got back on the road I was too far away from the house to get there before my hours ran out so I stopped in Peculiar, Missouri for the night and finished up first thing yesterday morning.

Olathe, Kansas to Russellville, Arkansas to... where again?

The drop in Olathe went to plan and I had a preplan ready to head over to Independence, Missouri on a load heading to Russellville, Arkansas. It took a while to get called below to get loaded since there were other trucks in line but it wasn't too much of a wait.

On the way south of Kansas City my cell phone rings. Caller ID shows that it is from HQ, which most likely means my dispatcher. This is typically not good news, but I answer anyway.

He wants to know when I can deliver a load the following day in Atlanta. I say 2100. We hang up and eventually the trip is taken away and replaced with a trip to Rochelle, Illinois. I like this one better and send in the proper code to accept it.

Belatedly I notice that the Rochelle trip originates in Batesville, Arkansas which is a bit of a pain to get to and quite a pain to get out of, heading north at least. I quickly phone in to my dispatcher to see if the Atlanta trip is still unassigned. After some back and forth with the planner and my dispatcher I end up on the Batesville trip to Rochelle.

The trip this morning to Batesville isn't too bad and the loading only takes two hours, which isn't bad for this ConAgra facility. However, the hundred-plus miles of driving narrow and winding state highways made up for it.

Tonight finds me at the Pilot in Troy, Illinois. Tomorrow I'm very short on hours so that will be interesting.

I do believe this makes me the fastest truck driver... evah!

I was resetting my Garmin the other day on this screen which shows things like average speed during a trip, distance remaining and that sort of thing.

Then it caught my eye. Look at that freaking Max Speed number! No, that isn't photoshopped or anything, my Garmin actually has me going over 166 MPH at some point! And yes, this is in my truck. Heck, when I went through flight school I never flew a plane that fast!

So if the question ever comes up about who the fastest trucker is, you now know the answer. And Garmin even provides the evidence.

Thank goodness, not a FedEx! But wait...

So my load out from Colorado (after dropping my FedEx load a day early yesterday afternoon) was a load of beer from the Bud plant in Fort Collins to the distributor in Olathe, Kansas. It is about 700 miles total which I rarely do in my truck in one day, but it has enough lead time so I can run the majority today and finish up tomorrow morning or early afternoon as I wish. Not bad.

After I get to the Bud plant I find out the catch. Not only is my load not yet ready but one of the outbound scales they use in this very busy system of theirs is non functional. By the time my trailer gets the green light and I get hooked up I'm back at the rear of the plant behind, I kid you not, 25 or 30 semis in line for the single, solitary scale. What a cluster.

I finished in Salina, Kansas for the night, about three hours from my drop tomorrow. Time for a nice long shower and some quality time in the sleeper.