10/31/07

Despite what various people in various places would have you believe, I don't very often work a full eleven hour driving day. The 70 hour rule, the 14 hour rule, customer schedules, rest stop locations, fuel stop locations, and traffic patterns usually conspire to keep the days much shorter. Today I drove eleven hours and it feels like it. I'm pretty tired.

I was sleeping soundly last night. I didn't set an alarm before I laid down. I trusted that the West Memphis dispatcher would beep me when the load arrived and that the beep would wake me. He did, and it did, just before 2am.

The paperwork said that the load was due in Mesquite by 3:18am Central. Two hours and change to go 435 miles? Somebody screwed up. I already knew it was late, but I didn't realize just how early it was due at UPS. I made pretty good time heading down there, only taking a quick potty break along the way. My directions were easy enough to follow, and I only caught a couple miles of the Dallas traffic on the way in. My assigned spot already had a trailer in it, of course. I made my drop, hooked to an empty, and called the Lancaster terminal. My instructions said specifically to call in when I was empty, so I expected them to deadhead me to the yard where I would sit for a while. Nope. I was immediately dispatched to Roanoke, outside Fort Worth, to pick up another load.

My empty trailer had a small hole in the floor, but apparently it wasn't small enough. The security guard at the shipper rejected it. So... I got a 20 mile dispatch from there to a trailer shop in Fort Worth, where I would drop the damaged trailer and then bobtail back to the shipper.

The trailer shop had an empty that had been repaired, so I hooked to it. I figured I might as well save the Lancaster local driver a trip since I was there. The shipper was scheduled to get an empty, so somebody would have to bring an empty over there sooner or later. As I cleaned out the garbage and checked over the trailer, another CFI guy pulled into the lot. I asked him if he needed an empty because I was hooked to the only one. I told him I didn't need it so he could have it if he needed one. He did, so I unhooked and pulled out from under it. As we wrapped up our brief conversation, he mentioned that he was going to the same shipper, but he needed to drop off a damaged trailer first. So technically, I guess either one of us could have pulled the good trailer over there. I don't know if it was a dick move to leave it for him, since it still needed to be swept, but I figured we might as well leave things in order for the people doing the paperwork shuffling. The guard was expecting me to bobtail in and the CFI people were expecting him to pick up an empty. I had already cleaned out most of the crap anyway. So I bobtailed back over to Roanoke.

I got my loaded trailer and headed to the yard in Lancaster to top off the tanks. I tried to be a good little employee and use terminal fuel, even if it took me a little out of the way. No biggie. After that I was able to make it an hour and a half out of the Dallas area before my hours ran out, so here I am for the night. I deliver in College Park, Georgia at 6am Friday. I pick up nine hours tomorrow, so I'll have to use them up as soon as my ten hour break is over here and then finish the run after another ten hour break. Back to the graveyard shift for me...

I get calls from a lot of recruiters for various trucking jobs. Some work for big companies and some are independent headhunters. A pretty common theme seems to prevail: They have OTR jobs, in which I'm not interested since I already have a good one. They have regional (home weekend) jobs but can't come anywhere close to the money I make now. Plus 'home weekends' means getting on late Friday night or early Saturday morning and leaving Sunday night. I'd rather do what I do now and just take a week or two off whenever I feel like it. Or they occasionally have day cab jobs, again with far less money than I make now. A while back I got a call for a job that actually piqued my interest. It was a Monday through Friday day cab job, paying $1,150-1,250 weekly. That I could handle. I like to play baseball in the summer and, to be perfectly blunt, I don't get laid nearly often enough working OTR. Neither factor would convince me to work for less money, but if the money is pretty close it wouldn't be bad to have a day cab job. So anyway, that job required a face-to-face interview and I was a thousand miles away, so no dice. It really didn't concern me, but it would have been interesting nonetheless.

Today a different recruiter for the same company called and said he had the same account open up recently. Again, face-to-face interview, I'm in Texas, thanks anyway for calling. It did make me pretty skeptical though. Why does that job open up again after only a few months? Are they bullshitting about the pay, did they hire an idiot, or does the job just suck? If the job just sucks, I could probably handle that. I'm pretty low-maintenance so I don't imagine it would bother me too much. If the pay doesn't add up, I couldn't handle that. I already make a lot less than I did as a financial advisor, so I don't plan on taking any more pay cuts any time soon. Maybe I'll never know the whole story, but it aroused my curiosity.

The pay period closed with a pretty good bang, getting the deadhead miles and the run to Georgia dispatched before the end of the month. I won't deliver until the 2nd, but I get all of the pay today. So I finished up with 7,473 miles. That falls just short of the Fenian Godfather record, according to our archives on Long Island. The gross pay will most likely eclipse the previous high mark since I started with CFI. I logged quite a few northeast miles and received a decent amount of ancillary pay, so I'm thinking it will gross right around $3,000. Better than a kick in the balls, as they say. Or as I say. Either way, I'll take it.