3/20/09

Welcome to spring, my friends. I hope that your winters were all delightful, but baseball season is just around the corner. Beauty. The sooner people stop talking about basketball, the better.

I had plans to enjoy an extra leisurely pace up to tonight's consignee, since I had a late delivery appointment and only about 325 miles to cover. About an hour into my drive though, the planners changed my outlook for the better. A pre-planned load going from the Minneapolis suburbs to Salt Lake City over the weekend would be just the thing to break my string of weeks fizzling out at the end. Good deal. The plan said that the weekend run was to pick up at 11pm. My delivery appointment for tonight was also 11pm. Hmm. Since I'm never informed as to whether the scheduled times on those pre-plans are firm appointments or flexible windows, I decided to head straight to the consignee and try to get unloaded early. If I really had to pick up by 11pm, it wouldn't do much good to be sitting at a dock an hour away. Odds are that they wouldn't assign the second load to me in such a case, but you never know.

After missing a turn and backtracking a few miles once I found a place to spin around, I checked in with the rather friendly young lady at the receiving window. I was way early but it was worth a shot. She called the warehouse guy on a walkie talkie. "Send him away," came the response. The young lady explained that I was too early and there were still three trucks scheduled ahead of me. Fair enough. I asked her if there was somewhere that I could park and wait. She said that I couldn't wait on their property and there was no place in town either. They used to allow people to park on their property, but now they don't. She said that she didn't know why. Given that there were three trucks scheduled ahead of me and only fifteen open docks, I can certainly understand. Bastards.

So I had to head back up to I-94. I could go east to the Pilot at exit 171 or west to a rest area. Both were roughly the same distance (~20 miles) from the customer. I had stopped at the Pilot for fuel on my way through and its lot was already looking pretty full. Instead I went west to the exit past the rest area, flipped back around onto the eastbound side, and then parked at the eastbound rest area for a few hours. The young lady had said that I should return around 8:30pm. Given the rude nature of the dickhead's fine gentleman's voice on the walkie talkie, I half expected to get kicked out again if I went back that early. Isn't the expression supposed to be 'Minnesota nice?' Maybe he never got the memo. Whatever.

When I headed back over, the receiving office was locked up but the warehouse chick who answered the doorbell was much more friendly than the guy from my first visit. She directed me to a dock and, in an unnecessarily apologetic manner, said that they probably wouldn't get to me right away. I was still over two hours early so this came as no surprise. See, she got the memo. Maybe 'Minnesota nice' is gender specific. I don't know. They did start unloading my trailer before too much longer and I was done before my original 11pm appointment time. Beauty.

I wouldn't be able to make it to the next pickup before 11pm, but that turned out to be a non-issue. The pickup in Mounds View was a drop/hook and everything went smoothly and quickly. I got about an hour and a half down the road before the eyelids started to get heavy, so that's a wrap. It looks like I'll have quite a bit of driving to do this weekend. Better than sitting around and waiting for work, I suppose.