12/11/09

The light at the end of the tunnel has been spotted. It will take a few more days of work to reach it, but I can see it by golly. And no, I'm not talking about Brian Kelly. He may be the next Frank Leahy for all I know, but I'll just let him prove it to me. You could say that I've grown rather skeptical over the years. No, the light at the end of this particular metaphorical tunnel is the light above the bar at Kelly's Pub (no relation). I can see it from here. Mmmm... Guinness.

I got my loaded trailer in Charlotte a half hour early, then saw from the paperwork that it had been ready for at least an hour. Bummer. I never did manage to sleep yesterday, so getting on the road an hour sooner would have been cool. The drive itself turned out to be surprisingly easy though. I-81 usually tends to be a tedious pain in the ass, but that's the flip side of working overnight - there's hardly any traffic. My 31,000 pound payload did have me dragging ass a little bit on some of the longer climbs. Nothing too bad though. I rolled into the Con-way yard in Greencastle just before 4am and made my drop.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that we've commandeered the vacant Yellow Freight terminal next door for use as a drop lot. This means that I had a place to park and go to bed. Beauty. I forgot to shut off my phone though, so the first call in the morning had me cursing the caller rather vehemently. After that I managed to sleep for a few hours and all was right with the world.

Upon waking at some point later in the morning, I checked my board status on the company's web portal. It said that I was #0, meaning that I was assigned to a load. I fired up the truck for a minute, forcing the Qualcomm to turn on, so that I could see what kind of messages were waiting. None. That's weird. It was around twenty minutes later that the message notifications started coming through. The news was pretty good though. I would be picking up a load in Pennsylvania and passing it off to another driver in Richmond, Virginia. Then I would be getting a load in Richmond and heading to Saginaw, Michigan. Sometimes there's southbound freight from Central Michigan and sometimes they just send me home empty, but either way I'll be drawing nearer to a few of those delicious bubbly pints before too long.

The only catch with the assignment was that the first load was scheduled to pick up at 3pm in Mountville, Pennsylvania. That, as nearly as I could guess, would be around a two hour drive from Greencastle. My 14 hour clock (going back to last night) wouldn't allow me enough time to make it there, since it ran out at 11:30am today. Thus, I would have to stay in Greencastle and complete a ten hour break. I went off duty at 4:30am, making the ten hour mark 2:30pm. So add two hours for the deadhead and you see the issue. 3pm couldn't happen. I could have used a split break and left for Mountville at 12:30pm, but then the next couple of dispatches would have been screwy. It doesn't seem to me that the dispatching software is equipped to account for split breaks very effectively. Long story short... I sent a message asking if I could pick up at 4:30pm. I received a reply in the affirmative. Good enough.

So I had a few more hours to kill, then it was time to shove off for Mountville. I'm not sure if there's a specific cause or not, but for some reason big trucks are not allowed through Gettysburg on US-30. Since US-30 is the main thoroughfare through that part of Pennsylvania, this can make for some tricky routing. One option was to take I-81 up to Harrisburg and then angle back down toward Lancaster. Harrisburg, the last time I went through in the afternoon, was a damned parking lot. That route didn't sound very good. Another option was to take PA-16 to the east, drop down into Maryland, then catch US-15 up to US-30. Despite the fact that I had no idea what kinds of roads I would encounter, I chose to give this second route a try. I would have exactly two hours to cover ~80 miles. Couldn't be too tough, could it?

It turned out that my expectations were backward. I was a little concerned about how long the first part of the trip might take. It was on a winding two-lane road up into the mountains and through a few towns. That part of the drive turned out to be quick and easy. I was less concerned about the last part, along US-30 toward Lancaster. I rolled into York at 3:55pm. With a 4:30pm ETA, I had 35 minutes with which to cover the last 15 miles. No worries, right? I rolled out of York at 4:28pm. So I had 2 minutes with which to cover the last 12 miles. What a joke. There was traffic lined up on US-30 in both directions as far as the eye could see. At each red light, there would be one or two cars along the side streets. So it would be perfectly natural then that the lights were timed to give the side streets equal treatment with the main drag, right? I mean, why on earth would they let the miles and miles of traffic on US-30 have a couple of extra minutes to move through? One more in a long list of examples of bureaucratic idiocy, as far as I'm concerned.

I fired off a message as I sat at one of the red lights, advising the operations people that my 4:30pm ETA wasn't looking too good. As I pulled into the shipper's lot at 4:45pm I received a reply from my fleet manager. 5pm was my new ETA and that was the latest he could go. Good enough then. I was already there. I sent in my arrival call and everything was fine.

The drop/hook at the shipper was quick and painless, after which I headed southward with my nice and easy 13,000 pound payload. Traffic going back to York wasn't quite as bad as it had been on the eastbound trip, but it was pretty heavy. Then I got the pleasure of Baltimore, D.C., and Northern Virginia, all on a Friday evening. That's about as good as it gets if you're into the whole 'road rage' thing. Two or three lanes (depending on the location) moving at 45mph and the 'no trucks' left lane completely unoccupied. One more in a long list of examples of bureaucratic idiocy, as far as I'm concerned.

By the time I got out of the traffic, I still had not received any information regarding the outbound truck with which I would be making the relay. I sent a message asking for some information and then rolled onward to the T/A in Ashland. (The dispatch setup calls it Richmond for some reason, but I'm glad to accept the 15 free miles.) My loaded trailer had been left to me with a torn mud flap and I didn't want to stick another driver with it, so I proceeded straight to the shop. The guy at the counter said that it would be "a while" before they could put on a new one. I asked him to define "a while" and he informed me that it would be around two hours. You've got to be shitting me. So I bought a mud flap (on sale for $10.99) and installed it myself. It took five minutes. We all know that I have mad mechanical skills, what with my two adjustable wrenches and such, so I'm curious to know what the T/A shop would have billed the company if they had actually installed the mud flap for me.

I still had not received a reply to my request for information about the relay, so I headed into the truck stop to see a man about a dog... or something to that effect. Once my business was concluded, I walked back out to my truck and found that I had two satellite messages and a voice mail waiting for me. The other driver was at the T/A, looking for me, yada yada yada. Armed with the other driver's truck number, I pulled out of my parking space and started to drive off in search of him. Just then a dude walked in front of my truck, waving his arms. The other driver, clearly. He told me where he was parked, so I drove up and found a nearby spot. We made the swap, each of us taking a minute to complain about the fact that neither of us had been given any specifics about the relay. He had gotten the worst of the deal, as far as I can tell. The load going to North Carolina was his ticket home for the weekend and he had been waiting at the T/A since 5pm. After a few more choice words about nights and weekends and dispatchers and such, he was on his way.

As for me, I was going nowhere. When I received the assignment this morning, I thought that I would be swapping my loaded trailer for an empty, then picking up a load bound for Michigan. It turns out that the other driver and I were actually swapping two loaded trailers. I had picked up his ticket to North Carolina and he had picked up my ticket to Michigan. Good deal. I didn't have to go and get another load tonight after all. My patience for driving had long since reached its breaking point so I decided to stay at the T/A and call it a night.

I'm due in Saginaw by 6:30am on Monday and the trip is somewhere around 700 miles, so I'll probably use the 'divide and conquer' approach, covering roughly 350 miles a day over the weekend. This trailer is a lot heavier than the one that I gave away, so the drive up through Maryland and Pennsylvania will likely get to be annoying after a while. I can handle six or seven hours a day though, especially since I will be going sans alarm until Monday morning.