6/17/08

Shortly after I got rolling this morning, I happened upon a slow-moving vehicle in the right lane on I-35. There was a nice long parade of traffic in the left lane. As I began to think, "Here we go...," he took the next exit and I kept cruising along. That's pretty much a metaphor for how my day of driving went. Merging, exiting left, exiting right, construction zones, hills, all of it. I was one with the motoring universe. Beauty. Once empty, I was assigned to my next load even before I finished inspecting my new trailer. I caught a nice steady 400 mile run to deliver tomorrow morning. Crossing Illinois on US-50, there was hardly a car in sight. Things just seemed to fall right into place all day. I like that.

Even better, I was actually on my game today. This happens a handful of times over the course of the year, if I'm lucky. My timing for passing and such was impeccable. I didn't miss any exits or make any wrong turns. The consignee, located down some skinny street after a ridiculous U-turn from the exit ramp, was a piece of cake. There was one very tight spot left in the drop yard. I nailed it on the first try, without even pulling up to straighten out. When my intended route to the next pickup proved not to exist, my instinctive re-route on the fly worked perfectly. As I approached St. Louis on I-70, I saw the traffic getting pretty heavy so I dropped down I-170 to I-64 and ran that through town. No traffic in sight. Everything I did was solid today. I even found the shitty little truck stop in Olney, Illinois to have plenty of parking this evening. Beauty.

There was one minor snag that may prove to be a major one in the morning. Once I made my drop/hook in North Kansas City this morning, I had to bounce over to our drop yard in Kansas City and swap my empty trailer for a loaded one. The trailer was there, but the bills were not. The security guard guessed that they had been sent to Joplin. You see, the security people at the drop yard use TripPak envelopes to hold the bills. Perhaps, he surmised, someone had inadvertently placed the TripPak envelope holding my bills in with the actual TripPaks being sent to Joplin. Here's a thought - Go to Office Depot and spend a few dollars on some fucking envelopes. Anyone think a standard white envelope might not be mistaken for a TripPak to be mailed? I swear you can't make this stuff up.

The security guard called some guy at CTL. That guy said that I should head east and that they would work on getting a copy of the bills to the consignee. Not satisfied with that, I called operations and spoke with a nice young lady to make sure that they were aware of the situation. If someone was getting the paperwork to the customer, I wanted to know names of the people involved in the communications. "Harry spoke with Sally at 11:30am yesterday" sounds a lot better than "Uh, they said it was okay." She checked on it and, while not really having any solid answers for me, at least confirmed that CTL was aware of the situation.

As I rolled across Missouri, I got a message saying that I should definitely not try to deliver this load early. Apparently this would cause major problems with the customer. I replied that I don't plan to deliver early, and asked if there was any news on the paperwork. I never got an answer. If the customers are going to be pissheads about an early delivery, why should I think they'll be any happier about my having no bills? What am I hauling? Dunno. Where did the load originate? Dunno. Who is the shipper? Dunno. How much does it weigh? Dunno. Pretty damn heavy. I can tell you that much. I've had the 'no bills' thing come up once before, in Seattle. The consignee up there kicked me out and wouldn't take the load. Tomorrow? Dunno.

Notwithstanding whatever I'll face when I get there, I have a little over thirty miles to cover by 8am, taking me to Vincennes, Indiana. I'm now sitting at a little over 1,000 miles for the week and it's only Tuesday, so we're definitely poised for a decent week. I know better than to expect too much, but it's nice not to be using half of this week to finish out last week's miles. If and when I get empty in the morning, I'll have about seven hours or so left on my 70. Then I start picking up the long hours from the days when I left home last week, so I should be set up to run pretty well.

Z