4/4/09

Grinding gears before I even start moving... that's the way to start a day. Looks like the good old clutch brake gave up the ghost. My clutch had been feeling a little weird for the last couple of days but it was working fine. Now the clutch feels normal and it still works fine, but the brake is no more. Damn. I'm heading home pretty soon, so I think we're just gonna have to make do until then. I can leave it with those peckerheads at the Kenworth dealer in Dearborn while I take some time off.

My drop/hook was the usual routine down in Palatka, so that part of the day was okay, aside from the rather unpleasant grinding whenever I had to change from forward to reverse. Then I-95... whatever dude. I think an accident in Boston can cause a traffic jam in Miami on that damn road. The whole of Georgia was stop and go. I hopped off at Exit 5 in South Carolina and ran US-321 up through the middle of the state. That wasn't a bad ride at all. It was a two-lane most of the way but there weren't any red lights. Since my delivery appointment is Monday evening and not Monday morning, I decided to stop and call it a night once I got past Columbia. I was actually relieved to see that I wouldn't have to do the full 1,000 miles by tomorrow night. An easy day here and there is nice to have when I've been running pretty hard for a while.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that this load is only 8,000 pounds. Usually the loads out of that paper mill are wicked heavy. I have some mountain climbing to do tomorrow, so I'm sure that my truck will be rather grateful for the lighter payload as well.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a battle with the Carthagenians to conclude on my most recent foray into good old Civilization III.

4/3/09

We'll get you going this evening with a couple of questions. What would be the standard play from the CTL playbook after I make a delivery in Jacksonville? Did they follow the playbook today?

So another early morning for me - 4:30am as I hit the freeway. This got me out of Nashville before the traffic picked up and things were quite reasonable as I got through Chattanooga. The first of today's many clusterfucks came as I approached the exit for the Atlanta bypass. It looked like a box truck ran into a trailer being towed by a pickup truck, but I was too busy dodging cars to get a good look. I wasn't sure if I would get back to the exit in time after making my way around, but there wound up being enough room. No need to test my luck going through on I-75 if I didn't have to, so that was nice.

The traffic on the loop itself was moving along smoothly, but the stretch of I-75 between Atlanta and Macon was bumper to bumper. I'm not sure what that was all about. The prevalence of trailers and luggage would lead me to believe that Spring Break is involved though. Just as things started to shake out, I got a quick reminder of those old driving school lessons - keep a safe following distance and leave yourself an out. A guy pulling a travel trailer cut me off so I slowed down to open up a gap. Then one of the tires on his trailer shredded. I was able to dodge the tire as it flew up in the air by moving onto the shoulder for a second. Then the dude kept rolling along with the trailer riding on the rim.

There couldn't be a good outcome from that arrangement but my truck only goes 65mph. I wouldn't be able to pass him and I had no desire to stay behind him. I got lucky when he had to slow for a merging vehicle and I was able to get next to him and blast my horn. My knowledge of highway sign language consists mainly of my fully extended middle finger, but in this case I used the good old thumb to the rear gesture in an effort to get him to pay attention to his trailer. He looked over at me and then pulled off onto the shoulder. I don't know. Maybe a disaster was avoided or maybe he would have been fine without a tire. Either way, I was glad to be past him and back on my merry way.

Five minutes later, I shit you not, two tires exploded on the rear trailer of an ABF set right in front of me. This time my out was in the left lane, but again it was the good old safe following distance that saved the day. Those big rig tires would have done considerably more damage than the little travel trailer tire from the first incident and they bounced quite a bit higher too. At least the ABF driver noticed his misfortune and pulled over right away, unlike the other guy. Okay then, continuing on down the highway...

I caught a nice ten mile backup from mile 59 to mile 49, but never did see the cause of the mess. The northbound side was backed up through the same stretch and I didn't notice any issues on their side either. Then suddenly everybody was going the speed limit again. Weird.

Everything was relatively normal through the rest of Georgia and onto I-10 in Florida. In an odd twist, the worst accident of the day was on I-10 and it didn't affect the flow of traffic at all. A truck pulling a trailer with one or two cars on it had gone off the road and into the trees. The emergency personnel at the scene were setting up some kind of tent, so one might conclude that they were investigating something worse than property damage. Hopefully not, but it sure didn't look good.

After slugging through all of that, I got a pre-plan for my next assignment. To answer your intro questions, the standard playbook calls for a load of paper out of Palatka and yes, that's exactly what I got. It has to pick up by tomorrow afternoon and deliver in Perrysburg, Ohio on Monday morning.

I got to the ConWay yard in Jacksonville a few minutes later for my drop/hook. Back it into Door 32 and leave the doors closed? That's a weird one. Whatever dude. I just do what I'm told. I grabbed an empty there and then headed down to the south side of Jacksonville to spend the night. My dispatch to Palatka included the number of the loaded trailer that I am to pick up, most likely meaning that it's ready to go, but the sequence of traffic jams didn't leave me with enough hours to get there tonight.

I'll come in under 3,000 miles for the week, breaking my little mini-streak, but 2,927 ain't half bad. I'm not doing quite as well as George Soros during our little recession here, but I seem to be holding my own.

4/2/09

42 extra miles for today, a pre-plan for tomorrow, and a tornado warning just for good measure. How about that.

I got an early start when I checked in an hour ahead of schedule and my load was ready to roll. Beauty. This allowed me to get out of Illinois ahead of the morning rush, although there really hasn't been much of a morning rush on my last few trips through the Chicago area. In any case, I was well out of town by the time the sun came up. Then I hit Indianapolis after the fine Hoosiers had all settled into their cubicles for another morning of working for the man. Skillful timing on my part, I'll go ahead and say.

As I approached Nashville on I-65, I got a call from one of the fleet managers in Joplin. He was in charge of the team to whom I would be passing off my loaded trailer. It turned out that the empty they were pulling had a bad wheel seal and needed repairs. They were taking it to the T/A shop in Franklin so I would need to head down and make the relay there instead of in Nashville. 20 extra miles and I didn't have to go to that Godforsaken Pilot in Nashville? You can imagine my disappointment. Plus it was nice that they didn't do what most of my coworkers do and stick me with the bad trailer.

After that phone call had concluded, I received a pre-plan for tomorrow. I'll stick with my playbook analogy for now and add that they called an audible at the line of scrimmage. My origin will indeed be the ConWay in Nashville but the destination won't be the T/A in Troutville this time around. Instead I'm heading down to Jacksonville. So I get 600 miles tomorrow instead of the 400-whatever that I get when I go to Virginia. And I got 22 miles coming back to Nashville today instead of the zero that I would have gotten for cruising down to the yard from the Pilot. Not bad.

The inbound truck with the damaged trailer got to the T/A in Franklin after I did, so I told the driver to go ahead and drop it off so he could get rolling with the load. I wasn't going to be able to leave until the empty trailer was fixed anyway, so there was no point in both of us sitting there. The guys in the shop worked fairly quickly, but I was down there just long enough for a nice little thunderstorm to roll in. I fought the slow traffic back into Nashville and then checked in with the ConWay dispatcher. And that's when the tornado sirens started going off. (Yeah, I think we'll hold off on that 'dropping the trailer' bit for a little while.) Time for a powwow in the break room.

I guess it was around a half hour or so before the dock workers got the all clear to leave the break room and get back to work. I waited a few more minutes and then headed out to drop my empty trailer. The wind had let up as quickly as it arrived, but the rain hasn't stopped yet. I got some decent sleep last night after having pulled an all-nighter coming out of Michigan. Tomorrow's schedule is another blue hair special and I'm not quite tired yet. Hopefully I can nod off for a while before too much longer.

My week will be standing somewhere just under 1,900 miles by the time I'm empty tomorrow. Per usual, the weekend will determine the 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' aspect of my paycheck. Tomorrow's check does have a ten dollar tax cut figured in though. Woo hoo!

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.

3/31/09

It is clearly an indisputable fact at this point that my bed is the most comfortable place in the world. I actually slept for a solid six hours last night without waking a single time. Beauty. I called the terminal this morning, once my ten hour break was over, and got on the board at #3. The dispatcher said that he would have some freight ready to go "in a little bit." Taking this as a sign that I most likely would not be getting the day off, I got my act together and went back to work. I was up to #1 within an hour and then a half hour later... I was #2. Hmm. Must have been a cancelled load or something.

My assignment finally came through this afternoon. "In a little bit" apparently meant tonight at 10pm, as I was the proud recipient of another of those overnight beer loads out of Howell. So I got most of the day off after all. I had a chance to go out and get some lunch with my brother. (To be clear - This was the younger brother who is going to the football game, not the one who is skipping out on a weekend of tailgating in favor of a wedding shower.) He drove me over to Home Depot so I could get a new push broom to replace the one that snapped in half as I swept out my assigned empty trailer today. Yeah, I'm a regular Charles Atlas... or something.

By the time I got back to the yard, the Royal Red Robin Burger in my belly was convincing me that a nap sounded pretty awesome. The rainy cool weather also seemed to help. Beauty. A good couple of hours of rest can work wonders sometimes. I may not fall asleep at the wheel on my way down to Illinois tonight.

My trip out to the shipper was nice and easy, nothing like the last time around. I'm not exactly sure how I'll run the schedule once I leave here. I'll just play it by ear. I'm due at the consignee on the northwest side of Chicago by 7am Central. I'll probably be there at least a couple of hours early if I drive straight through. I'll either have to hope there's room at the consignee for me to hang out and wait or I'll have to take a break somewhere along the way. Depends on how tired I get during the drive, I suppose.

3/30/09

Believe it or not, my employer gives me bogus information every now and then. Yeah really, who knew? This morning's version included slightly inaccurate directions. My directions said to bear right on such and such, when the correct route was to stay left. I wound up at a dead end in an airport, but I found enough room to turn around and sort it out. Then I got to the consignee just ahead of my 7am scheduled arrival time. The place opened at 8am. Yeah really, who knew?

On the other hand, sometimes mistakes made by my employer turn out pretty well in the end. I sat at the dock waiting for the unloader people to show up for work. By the time they did get started, there were four other trucks lined up single file waiting to get at the prime dockfront real estate occupied by your humble blogger. An 8am arrival likely would have caused me to wait longer than the hour caused by my wrongful dispatch. Good enough.

I was #1 on the board once I was empty and found myself in the usual 'which way to go' quandary. There is a Pilot in Wilmington, near this morning's consignee, but that place is not really a viable option for parking. I could head east to Jeffersonville and park at a truck stop or head back west to the rest area on I-71. No telling which way my next assignment would take me. I was in the mood for some breakfast so that made the decision an easy one. I bounced over to the T/A and kicked back for a few minutes. By the time I logged onto my computer to check my board status, the web portal said that I was #0. Given the dumbass power down feature on the Qualcomm, I had to fire up my truck to get the assignment. That feature is part of a tired old commentary on this blog, I suppose, so we'll leave it at that.

Yeah, I had to go back to the west for my pickup after having gone east to find parking. Story of life. I had time for a nice long nap before I had to head to the shipper. Since we know that I don't sleep very well at night (last night being no exception) and I had to get up early this morning, this was welcome news. And twenty minutes later I was wide awake. Oh well, if it's good enough for DaVinci it's good enough for me.

My 14 hour clock was already ticking so I came up with the bright idea to head over to I-75 and park at the southbound rest area outside the Cincinnati suburbs. From there I could head down the road a few miles to the next shipper once my appointment was closer. I was told not to arrive early, so this seemed like the next best option. Haha, the joke's on me. I-75 is under construction and the rest area is closed. Well, shit. Turn around and park on the northbound side? Go past Cincinnati and look for somewhere on the west side of town? Go to the shipper and ignore my instructions? While I was weighing the options, I spotted a few trucks parked at a WalMart. I turned off and pulled into the lot, nestling myself comfortably between the 'No Truck Parking' signs and the parked trucks.

As one might imagine, things were abuzz in Michigan today. I spent most of the afternoon fielding phone calls from friends and listening to the various postulations about what the latest news means. The folks around Detroit (of every philosophical stripe) don't seem to be impressed, to put it mildly. I don't know man. I just don't know. I must just be a simpleton or something because things don't seem to add up. Most of the people I know are hanging on for the ride and hoping for the best. I just don't know.

After killing enough time at the WalMart I hopped over to the shipper and picked up my load heading to... wait for it... wait for it... Taylor, Michigan. How about that. Actually it's headed to Canada but my end of the deal took me to Taylor. They had me at the dock for quite a while and then it was homeward bound. A quick five hour drive up I-75 put a nice finish on the day.

It's pretty nice to get out of the truck for a bit, even if it is only for a ten hour break. I'll give the terminal a call tomorrow morning and we'll see what the freight gods throw my way.

3/29/08

I may have mentioned my prescription for the nation's unemployment situation before, but I was reminded again today as I saw all the orange barrels and cones. I can't think of a single time in my life that I haven't seen orange barrels and cones all over the place. The roads are perpetually under construction, yet there never seems to be a whole lot of work getting done. So, if I have mentioned it before, here's a replay; If you want to collect public money, then you will go to a road construction site at 7am every day and do whatever you're told. If the closest site to you is fully staffed for the day, they'll send you to the next closest site where you can be used. They'll pay you whatever is the going rate for unskilled labor, in cash, at the end of the day. Your state will reimburse a percentage of your wages to the construction company, drawing from a combination of unemployment insurance funds and highway funds. Come back the next day and the next day and so forth, until you find another job that you like better. With a few million unemployed people chipping in, I figure we should be done with road construction within 150 years or so.

Okay, now that we've handled that, let's see about your (currently employed) blogger. Another day without much going on, really. I headed north on US-51 out of Memphis, as is my custom. Then across Kentucky on the parkways, up I-65 and I-71, through Cincinnati, and into the first rest area in Ohio. Cloudy, windy, cool day. Light traffic from start to finish. Nothing good on the radio. And so on and so forth. Maybe I've been out here long enough this time around, as all the days are starting to seem the same. Couple more weeks... I have about fifteen miles or so to drive in the morning. Then we'll get cracking on a fresh week of wealth and leisure, or something.