3/16/08

Waking up in western New York and seeing snow falling... where have I heard this story before? It didn't turn out anything like last weekend's drive though. Some snow, some rain, some snain (I get to make up words in my own blog sometimes), but nothing to really slow me down. I headed east across I-90 and ran the speed limit all day.

After a nice hearty lunch at Sbarro I got across Massachusetts and up into New Hampshire. I passed a few places along the way, where I knew there would be parking. I had my eyes on a rest area that my atlas shows on US-3 just outside Nashua. In the back of my mind, I was thinking I might be better off stopping short. If the rest area were full, I would have no other options between Nashua and Manchester. The smart thing was probably to hedge my bets and stop sooner, allowing for the possibility of finding a full lot. I don't generally do the smart thing though, so I rolled the dice and headed up to New Hampshire anyway. The rest area is down along some little side street. It has parking for five trucks... and there were four trucks here before me. Beauty.

When I started at CFI, they made a big deal of saying that many of the people in Joplin used to be drivers so they know what it's like out here. Runs like this one lead me to call bullshit on that topic. I was dispatched to deliver at 5am tomorrow. The ConWay paperwork says that the load is due at 5am Tuesday. Obviously I had plenty of time to cover 925 miles this weekend, so there is no reason to wait and deliver on Tuesday. I have no issue with them scheduling me for tomorrow, but here's the rub. No parking, right? We're ConWay employees now, but not really. So the ConWay terminal is closed for the weekend, set to open at 5am Monday. Say I show up at 4:30am and nobody is there. I'm on some bullshit little street with a big old truck and nowhere to go. (They showed up after 5am in Providence the last time I had a Monday drop at a ConWay.) Say I show up at 5:30am and somebody is there. I'm late, according to my dispatch. So I have the fun task of driving into a major city before the sun comes up and trying to arrive at exactly 5am. Hopefully traffic flows exactly the way I foresee it with my all-knowing mind.

Why not just schedule me into Manchester at 10am or something like that? Then I don't have to wake up at 4am, I know the yard will be open, and I'll still be a day ahead of ConWay's schedule. To someone who "knows what it's like," this shit is just common sense. Whatever man.

I got tired of the news talk after a while today, so I checked out XM's Irish music on channel 76. They're playing it all weekend and through St. Patrick's Day. As long as you can wade through the overabundance of cheesy singalong nonsense, they mix in some pretty good music. I even heard a handful of the old fenian ballads, which surprised me a little given today's PC climate. If you have XM, it's a decent change of pace worth checking out. Anyhow, it's time to wind down for a little while, since I don't make the rules and I do have to get up at 4am. Cheers.