When I woke this morning, I was ready to take on the day. The feds, on the other hand, required that I sit with my thumb up my ass for a few more hours. Soon enough though, I walked across the street and checked in with the shipper. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my load was already ready already. The load assignment had not indicated a drop/hook. Cutting out the loading time helped to make up for some of the morning's mandatory rest that I didn't really need.
With a manly 45,000 pounds hooked up and ready to roll, I received my dispatch to deliver in Austin, Texas on Tuesday morning at 7am. The run is only 1,121 dispatched miles, so four full days seemed a little excessive, but no worries. I could take it easy this weekend and still have plenty of time to do my job. A Monday afternoon delivery would have been ideal, I thought to myself. Never been a fan of those early morning deliveries in big cities. And given my opinion of Austin, well, you know...
The stretch across the middle of Florida was beginning to get awfully tedious, what with all of the red lights and my heavy payload dragging me down. I got a phone call from work to lift my spirits though. It was a gentleman informing me that my new delivery appointment would be 2pm on Monday. He said that he tried to get an earlier one but this was the best that the consignee could do. Say no more, my friend. 2pm on Monday sounded perfect to me.
Once I caught up with I-75 the rest of the drive was smooth and easy. I was able to mix in a few short breaks along the way and even snagged an Italian BMT with double meat at the Pilot in Midway. By the time I got to Marianna the sun was going down and my attention span was lacking, so I pulled into the Pilot and called it a day.
I'm not really sure how the weekend will play out from here, but I certainly intend to spend tomorrow at one of the Corleone family's southeastern estates. I saw a hundred billboards for hotels with truck parking as I was driving today. I'm sure I'll be able to spot something decent before tomorrow afternoon. Despite the almost nuclear meltdown among the Notre Dame faithful following yesterday's scheduling announcement, we still have some unfinished business. The home losing streak to Michigan State has been handled. The USC situation will have to live on for another year, unfortunately. But tomorrow can bring an end to the losing streak to these bastards, and the world will be a better place for it.
Keep on truckin paisan! LOL
ReplyDelete[i]..........Swift has had to add to drivers' paychecks to ensure they are paid at least $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage........... ~dailybreeze.com[/i]
Barzini
What in the scheduling announcement caused the nuclear meltdown among the Fighting Irish faithful?
ReplyDeleteyoyo
We're allowed 70 hours in 8 days, right? So that's 8.75 hours a day. 8.75 hours at $7.25 an hour, then multiplied by seven days equals... $444.06? Dude, if you're driving a truck for under $500 a week then you deserve exactly what you get paid. I made more than that delivering pizzas when I was in college. As for whether or not I'm working while I sleep or type these amazingly insightful blog posts, well we'll just agree to disagree.
ReplyDeleteYoyo, do you really want to get me started on this one? Grab a sandwich then. Here goes...
The meltdown has to do with the inclusion of Western Michigan on next year's schedule, but that's merely the latest symptom of an insidious disease.
There was a time when Father Ted told Lou Holtz that Notre Dame would schedule the best teams that they could get every year, and that they intended to beat those teams. Now where are we? The administrators talk about "aspirational peers" and "monitoring the landscape," while reminding us that you can't schedule "heavyweights" every week if you want to compete for national titles. They're essentially validating the bullshit approaches of Texas and Florida - play a few tomato cans and try to go undefeated in your conference. Most of us hate seeing conference teams do this and it's even worse when you are an independent. What happens when you lose a tough game to one of your two good opponents and then the rest of your schedule is garbage?
The prior athletic director (now at Duke, thank God) instituted a scheduling model with seven home games, one road game, and one neutral site game. Since the neutral site game is to be on NBC and the revenue split is in Notre Dame's favor, it's an eighth home game as far as I'm concerned. So we'll have four actual road games a year. In any given year, either Michigan or USC will be one of those road games, so we're down to three. Purdue just got extended and we usually play Michigan State or some other Big Ten team, so one of those will be on the road every year. Now we're down to two. Navy is a road game in even years and Stanford or some other West Coast team fills the spot in odd years. Now we're down to one. There is a handshake agreement to try playing three Big East teams every year as part of home-and-home matchups. So, depending on the year, now we're either down to zero or negative one.
When you're all out of road games and you still have four slots to fill, well, here we are then. You get teams that are willing to give you a one-off home game in exchange for a paycheck (like Western Michigan next year and Washington State this year).
It's one thing to aspire to greatness and fall short. People can accept this as long as the mission is clear. It's quite another thing to aspire to maximum revenue enhancement at the expense of those things that once made the school great.
Gotcha. I never liked the idea of any team with aspirations of maintaining or becoming a perennial national powerhouse scheduling traditionally weaker opponents for the apparent purpose of providing an easy kill. Conference teams invariably will have some weak opponents within the conference.
ReplyDeleteTraditional rivalries are great for the fans of both teams even if the totals in the won/loss columns may be lopsided.
Teams seeking to be ranked among the best should endeavor to schedule the strongest opponents possible for all available open dates, rather than looking for weaker prey in order to make their stats look good.
Your final paragraph is right on.
yoyo