10/22/08

Pretty eventful day, I suppose. Of course waking up at 4am, in and of itself, qualifies as eventful for me.

I shot up to the WalMart DC in Gas City and checked in. They assigned me to a door and instructed me on the procedures (slide tandems, drop trailer, chock wheels...). I set up in front of my dock and hopped out to slide the tandems. Damn things wouldn't break loose. So I hopped in and wiggled the truck back and forth a little. Second try, broke 'em loose. I got back in the truck and locked down my trailer brakes so I could slide the wheels back. No. What? I got out and checked to see if the handle had slipped and the tandem pins had locked back out. No, the pins were still pulled in. I hopped in the truck and tried again. No.

When I crawled under the trailer to see what was going on, I found that the handle was pulling the pins from the left side of the trailer but the bar going to the right side was disconnected. Must have broken a bolt or something. I guess I'm pretty powerful, or something. So I dropped the trailer with the wheels as-is and headed inside to check with the receiving clerk. I was sure not to mention the tandem thing. What they don't know won't hurt 'em. They gave me a beeper and told me that there would be no charge for the unloading. That's always nice. A couple of hours later, my beeper went off and I retrieved my trailer.

I had delivered 1,232 cases of various food items. One case of chocolate animal crackers was torn in the corner and rejected by WalMart. That's a new one for me, so I wasn't exactly sure what I had to do. I called my fleet manager but the safety people who handle cargo claims weren't in yet. After 8am Central, we got everything squared away and I somehow wound up as the proud owner of a case of animal crackers. Who wants to bet my snobby little niece will give Uncle Joe a hug this time when he gets home?

I was due in Fort Wayne by 1pm. On account of starting so early today, I wanted to see if I could get rolling a little sooner. I knew that the 14-hour rule was going to play a role one way or the other. I headed straight to the shipper and they loaded me immediately. Beauty. Next up was the Petro in Stony Ridge. I needed to get the tandem arm gadget thingy on my trailer fixed. I also had a pair of marker lights out on my truck. One that I fixed a while ago had stopped working (most likely on account of the fact that I can't fix shit). The other one just stopped working last night. I called the road service dudes to see if I was due for preventive maintenance on my truck while I was at it. Yep.

We have some newfangled Qualcomm protocol for requesting purchase orders, so I sent my message to the shop. I'm not sure which repairs are supposed to use that protocol and which ones are not, but they sent me the PO numbers so I guess it was all good. Then the chick at the Petro had to call and wait on hold to verify them with the road service dudes anyway. In that sense I'm not sure what was the point of using the Qualcomm, but anyway... I was there for a couple of hours and then rolling east again.

I got out of Ohio and through Pennsylvania with no major slowdowns. Even Cleveland was pretty smooth this afternoon, aside from a brief construction zone. Once I got to the service plaza east of Buffalo, I was 14-houred and forced to stop for the night. It looks like I'll have a few hours left to cover once my ten hour break is up in the morning. Then we'll hope for something down the east coast. That would leave me a good distance from home with time to make a few bucks on the way back up.