10/27/07

I'm pretty sure that this job would be completely awesome if I could do all of my driving on weekends and holidays. The traffic is light, the fuel stops are not crowded, and you can even find a parking spot in a rest area late at night. Add in XM Radio's wall-to-wall college football coverage and today was a pretty enjoyable one.

I took the 'divide and conquer' approach to this run, driving half today and leaving half for tomorrow. My dispatched mileage was 1097, but truckmiles.com says it will be 1177. 80 miles is a pretty wide variance. 99.9% of the time, CFI's miles and truckmiles.com's miles are within 2% of each other, either way. Sometimes I get paid a few extra and sometimes I get paid a few short. The very few times that I see a significant variance, Houston and Louisiana always seem to be involved.

After one such instance, when I was coming up with about 100 miles off, I posed a question on the CFI Drivers' message board. I got a bunch of replies, none of which answered my actual question. In point of fact, to this day I have no idea what program CFI uses to calculate it's 'practical miles,' which is how we're paid. 'Practical' is just the fancy trucker way of saying 'quickest.' Some people think it's the shortest legal truck route, but they are mistaken. 'Truck shortest is actually a third category (in addition to 'practical' and 'HHG'). It's not a matter of someone looking at a map and saying, "That looks practical to me." It's a matter of entering a pair of ZIP codes and a computer program spitting out a mileage. Every truck program out there will tell you that the practical route out of Texas and into the midwest is to run across Louisiana and then up. For some reason, CFI's program has other ideas, but nobody seems to know what that program is. They're not paying the 'truck shortest' route, as that would only be 1066 miles, but they're not paying the commonly accepted practical route either. 80 miles is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, especially in light of the fact that I am only around 2% out of route over the long run. I just wish someone could say, "We use Program X to figure your miles." Instead it's some kind of closely guarded secret.

Anyhow, my route will be somewhere in the neighborhood of the 1177. My deadhead was dispatched at 17 miles and it was actually only 9, so I got a few back on the front end. From there I made it to a rest area just short of Batesville, MS tonight. Google Earth seems to indicate that the customer should have room for me to park there tomorrow night, so I can leave whenever I wake up in the morning. Not having to be concerned with late-night parking is a huge advantage when deciding how to run a trip. Sometimes, epsecially in the northeast, I have to alter my plans to make sure I'm off the road before the parking spots fill up. This time around I'm pretty sure I won't have any issues.

So... I've always been a bit of a movie buff, but I don't really make any effort to see a lot of movies. I guess that makes for a bit of a contradiction, but it is what it is. As such, I finally got around to watching Dick Tracy today. Has Madonna ever looked better than she did in that movie? In the words of Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar - Shwing!!! You cn have the skanked-out, muscular, weird accent version that came later. I'll take good old Breathless Mahoney any time.

Now it's time for the war to end all wars. Civilization III is calling. The damn Romans keep trying to cross my borders in order to get at the Greeks. If I attack the Romans, the Egyptians will get in on the action and that will draw the Indians into the fight. This could be a long night.