8/4/08

Quite a long day, given how little I actually accomplished. I knew that my consignee receives shipments between 8am and noon, Monday through Friday. I shot a phone call to the terminal, asking if I could deliver at 11am instead of 8am today. Sure thing, no problem. Sweet.

So that gave me a chance to get a little more sleep this morning. Right before I got to the customer in Midland, I received my next planned load information. I would be picking up in Midland and going to... Newark, New Jersey. I assumed that I would be relaying the load in Taylor in order to start my home time, but there was no way to know for sure. The plan said that I was heading to Newark.

At the customer, I dropped my loaded trailer and located an empty. I didn't bother hooking up to the empty, since I had a suspicion that I would be picking up at the same place. I've been down that road once before - left with an empty, drove to a truck stop, got info to go back to the same place and swap the empty for a loaded trailer. I sent in my empty call today before I went through any of that process, in order to see if my hunch was right. Yep. Picking up a pre-loaded trailer at the same place.

I went back out to the traffic office to see which trailer I needed to take. They gave me my trailer number and sent me back into the drop yard. The trailer wasn't there yet. Bummer. It did give me a lot of time for a nice long nap though. After I woke up and went back into the drop yard, my loaded trailer was ready to roll. When they sent my dispatch through outer space and into the satellite gadgetry, I was sent to Taylor and not to Newark. So the folks were on top of it after all. No worries.

I dropped the trailer and paperwork at the terminal not long ago, so now I'm actually on real home time for a couple of days. When I consider how early I started today and how late I got home today, in order to earn $48 today... that's at least a little depressing. Oh well. The Tigers are off so they can't lose tonight, the Redskins are the only NFL team in the whole universe with a win this season, and I have 24 cans of delightful malt brewed goodness in the fridge. Life could be worse. Life could be a whole lot worse.