3/22/08

This morning was a foggy little bugger. There were some stretches where it was hard to see one truck length in front of me. Luckily there wasn't a whole lot of traffic that early on a Saturday so I made pretty good time. I stopped in Freer for some breakfast (aka donuts) and then finished off the run into Laredo.

Since I was dispatched to arrive in Laredo at 10:30am local time, you could probably guess that the broker receiving the load is closed on weekends. So I had to get up at 5am, why exactly? Dunno. The bright side was that a closed broker meant that I could drop the trailer at the terminal instead of delivering it. I got on the board and I was number... zero? No board? At Laredo on a Saturday? Nice.

The dispatcher had a load that needed to be picked up from a broker down the street from us, but had nobody to pick it up until I got there. Sure thing dude. I'm your Huckleberry. He gave me an empty number and sent me on my way. Once through the yard - nothing. Second trip around, a little slower - nada. Then I found a bunch of empties on the repair aisle. Yep, there was mine. I checked the tag to see what was wrong with it and I found that it just needed the plastic skirts removed from the bottom. Dumb ConWay legacy trailers. So I walked over to the mechanics and told them I was taking it with the skirts on it. Screw it. Someone can pull them off the next time around.

Over to the broker... "They're closed buddy," said the security guard. I called the Laredo dispatcher, who then asked to speak with the guard. A non-English conversation ensued, after which I was sent to the loading dock. Beauty. One pallet and thirty seconds later, I was on my way north.

Every time I have to go up I-35, I remember how much I hate I-35. Sitting behind a senior citizen or a church group blocking the right lanes as I watch the traffic fly by in the left lane (where trucks are not allowed) just makes my blood boil. Traffic wasn't even heavy today, but of course it had to come to a dead stop in Austin. I think a bunch of those degenerates from Leander must have gone down there for breakfast or something. Eventually things loosened up and I made it up to the Dallas area before my hours ran out.

This run is going up to the Chicago area, which makes it interesting in a variety of ways. One is that it will require every hour I have coming to me for both tomorrow and Monday in order to deliver by Monday morning. That will leave me sitting Monday with no hours and picking up four and a half hours Tuesday. Sounds like a restart is in order. Second is that apparently I have to cross Noah's flood tomorrow. Hopefully the waters are down enough to get through by the time I get into Missouri. Third is that Illinois just got pounded with snow. I'm actually pretty confident in their ability to clean things up before Monday morning. Since I'm only hauling 700 pounds, I hope there's not much slippery stuff.

Those are interesting, but here's the most interesting part to me:

You can interpret the $0 in additional pay as meaning $0 in layover pay, which will likely lead to another unpleasant discussion in the near future. That's not the point though. Check out the miles. I'm sure I've had a 4,000 mile week at some point in time, but I've never had one since we went to weekly pay. That looks pretty cool. We're not talking 3,999 here either, by the way. I'll be hamstrung in terms of hours once I deliver, but until that time I am to be addressed as "Super Trucker."