6/28/07

After a quick nap at the Indiana scales, I woke up and finished off my run from yesterday. The customer, as I had hoped, was a 24/7 outfit so there was no problem getting rid of my loaded trailer and picking up an empty one at 6am. I pulled into a neighboring parking lot and was quickly kicked out by the rent-a-cop on duty, so I had to roll down the highway to a truck stop.

We get paid twice a month, with the pay periods ending on the 15th and the last days of each month. Since this pay period has been fairly slow for me, I am hoping to jam as many miles into the last few days of the month as possible. The past three or four days have been helpful to my cause, but today was not. After sleeping the morning away outside Indianapolis, I received a dispatch to head for Fort Wayne and pick up a load for tomorrow morning. Since this is a time-sensitive load, I'll need to relay it to another driver in Ohio at 10am tomorrow. The only way to make these runs possible under the DOT guidelines is to arrive at the customer the night before and take a 10 hour break at the customer's location. So here I am. I'll get some sleep and then start work promptly at 3:30am.

The deadhead up here was only 147 miles and tomorrow's run is only 260 miles, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a good run out of Ohio. I'll have some time available on my log book when I make the relay, so hopefully the planners will have something lined up for me. Lately it seems like they don't really do any planning at all. In a perfect world, knowing that a truck was on the way to a location to make a drop, the planners would be lining up the next pickup. It seems to me that they only begin looking for the next load after I have made my delivery and sent in my empty call. This often leads to unnecessary waiting. The last time I relayed at the location to which I'm heading, I had to sit there until the following day before receiving my next assignment. A repeat of that occurrence won't make me a happy camper.