11/15/07

Dude. No, seriously. Dude. I feel like I had a football game last night. The morning's damage assessment only showed one visible bruise on my lower back and another on my left elbow, but I'm pretty sore all over. I even got my shoulders a good workout lifting the people who wanted to do a little surfing. I guess I just need to do a better job of staying in shape.

I called in this morning to report for duty and have them put me on the ready board. The dispatcher in Taylor told me that he would put me on the board, but the computers were down. So I went back to bed for a while.

I headed up to the yard around 10am and got situated in my truck. Around 11:30, the CFI website finally let me log in and I saw that I was #1 on the board. That was welcome news, as it meant there would be a good chance I would get out of town without one of those late pickups and overnight runs. At 12:30, a guy came out to my truck and handed me printed directions to three different places. Apparently I was to make three pickups and then my drop, all today. The first pickup was scheduled for, let's see... 9am. Nice. The phrase "haul ass" came up in our brief chat, so I grabbed an empty and took off for stop #1.

Halfway there, I got a message indicating that stop #1 had no freight for me, so I was to head for stop #2. At that point I had only gone a mile off the direct route to stop#2, so it wasn't a big deal in that sense. Of more concern to me was the fact that I get paid an extra $52.50 for a 4-stop load, but only $22.50 for a 3-stop load. Given the pay situation this month, I wasn't too thrilled about losing the other $30. When I logged in to my account later though, I saw that I got paid for all of the miles and stops, including the stop that I didn't make. Excellent.

On the way down I-69 to my drop, I got a pre-plan for a load picking up in Fremont, Indiana tomorrow morning. Fremont usually means ConWay, but this one said it was going to a ConWay terminal in Pennsylvania... 534 miles away... for Monday morning. Bogus.

Since my route would be straight across the turnpikes, and I would have three days to drive one day's miles, I was going to have some time to kill. I could stop outside Toledo tomorrow and do whatever I wanted to do, so I decided to call up a friend of mine and see if he wanted to head to the football game this weekend. I'm officially retired as a Notre Dame fan for the rest of the season, but I could be a Navy fan and root for Notre Dame to help Navy's strength of schedule, right? Work with me here.

Anyhow, I got a message a short time later indicating that I would be going to Providence, Rhode Island instead of Pennsylvania. That run will be a little over 800 miles, so I guess I'll just take it easy heading east for a few days and skip the stopoff in Toledo. I could still have pulled it off, but that would mean some hard driving from Saturday night to Monday morning. My first few days back on the road, it's usually better to take it a little easy until I get settled back into my driving routine. So, no football game for me. Rhode Island will be state #48 on this little joyride of mine though, so that's pretty cool.

I'll have trouble sleeping tonight, having been on my juvenile schedule for the past several days. The good news is that I can stop and rest, pretty much whenever I feel like it, for the next few days.

The miles I got today, combined with the stop pay, should be enough to get my gross pay over $1,100 for the paycheck (depending on how many NE miles I had). That's pretty lousy but, considering how much time I wound up spending at home and the way things were going until that point, it's better than I thought it would be.