4/1/09

This blog won't be the place to find phony stories about President Obama withdrawing GM's involvement with NASCAR, giving Queen Elizabeth an Ipod, or any of that other stuff on this April Fools Day. Wait a minute... That Ipod story was true? Get the hell out of here. I still won't believe it until tomorrow.

I caught my first break nice and early today when the consignee's gate was open, so I could pull into the lot and park alongside the building. I was leaning toward taking a break along the way and then arriving closer to my 7am scheduled time but I couldn't resist the empty freeways around Chicago in the middle of the night. I waited around until 7am and headed inside to check in with the receiving people. A sign on the door said that their receiving hours began at 9am. My paperwork said 7am. My dispatch said 7am. Whatever.

I caught my second break when the guy told me to go over to the east side of the building and wait for him. The docks were pretty tight on both sides of the building, but the ones on the west side (where I checked in) were all occupied. There were two trucks backed in and there were dropped trailers in each of the other docks. Over on the other side of the building there was only one dropped trailer and no trucks, so the room to maneuver was much more reasonable. The fella came out around 9am and told me to back in. Then I was unloaded in short order and on my way.

I was #1 on the board once I was empty. There was a service plaza on I-90 a couple of miles away so that's where I headed. By the time I ate some breakfast, I received one of those weird assignments. I was to drop my empty at the ConWay yard in Des Plaines and then bobtail up to Harvard and retrieve an empty. Okay then. Easy enough. I was already on the eastbound side of the freeway and the exit that I take to reach the ConWay yard was a couple of miles to the east. Good deal. Yeah, that exit is only accessible from the westbound side of the freeway. My atlas did not seem to indicate this little detail. Damn. So I wound up taking some other exit toward the airport instead. I didn't know exactly where I was going, but I did remember that I got lost by the airport on my first trip to the ConWay in Des Plaines. Wherever I would end up headed, using the airport as my Polaris seemed like a pretty decent starting point. It worked out pretty well in fact. I caught some other road and then some other road and reached the yard without having gone too far out of the way.

So then it was off to Harvard. That was a tedious freaking drive. It was around 50 miles and there were around 75 red lights. I grabbed the first empty that I saw up there and pulled around the corner into a vacant lot to see what would come next. Five minutes later I found out what came next. Back to Des Plaines we go. I have a load leaving here in the morning and relaying in Nashville at that damned Pilot. Standard page from the playbook whenever I'm in this area, it seems. It used to be that I always took tires from Belvidere to Lafayette, Indiana. More recently it tends to be a ConWay load from Des Plaines to somewhere else. Good enough. All miles are good miles in my little world. I'll tack on another 500 tomorrow and then, if our standard playbook analogy holds true, I'll run another ConWay load from Nashville to Virginia on Friday.

If our comrade from around here wants to chat for a bit, just shoot me a message through the contact link. I'm not sure if and when I'll be awake tonight, as I'm feeling rather exhausted at the moment. If I do wake up in a while though, I'll make sure to check my e-mail.