1/12/10

I've had a handful of meals at Waffle House restaurants over the years. To the best of my knowledge, every one of them came shortly after I had consumed copious alcohol. I seem to remember enjoying the food quite a bit on each occasion. Tonight I grabbed some grub from a Waffle House next to the truck stop where I'm parked (completely sober, obviously). You know what? The food really ain't all that good.

{The preceding public service announcement was brought to you by the Fenian Godfather Institute for Culinary Excellence.}

Given the number of things that failed to go as planned today, I must say that the day overall didn't seem too bad. I was able to sleep until 10am without interruption. That's probably the biggest factor, since I'm convinced that nothing good can come from waking before 10am. In any event, there was a lot of tedious stuff but it all worked out fine in the end.

I received a message at some point late in the morning directing me to head toward Homerville, Georgia. More information was going to follow but I needed to be in Homerville ASAP. So I grabbed my atlas and found Homerville, then hit the road. I received the rest of the load information just as I was turning onto the freeway. I reached over and pressed the button on my dashboard to have the computer voice lady read everything to me. The directions to the shipper were fairly vague and useless, so I guess it didn't make any difference that I was already driving and couldn't write them down.

I angled over on some county roads into Georgia and then caught US-441 up to Homerville. The stop location information for the shipper was as follows: "2 miles east of town on Route 84, on the right." Okie dokie then. I hung a right on US-84 and, after a mile and a half or so, started looking for some sort of factory or warehouse. Nothing of the sort. Just a bunch of trees. I was looking for a mulch production place though, so I guess the trees would make sense. I'm sure the people behind me were pretty pissed at one point when I slowed to 25mph, only to find that the driveway that I was approaching belonged to a different business. I was looking for a place called Ohio Mulch and the driveway belonged to some other mulch outfit.

A little further along I saw a sign with "MULCH" in big block letters, in addition to some sort of smaller writing at the top. I couldn't make out what the smaller writing said but I played a hunch and turned into the driveway. As I entered I saw that the smaller writing said "Ohio" so that was good. Aside from the sign though, I didn't see much else. Just some hick dirt driveway in the middle of nowhere. The driveway wound back around toward the west though and there I saw a scale house and a couple of trucks. Beauty.

We were just getting started. My load assignment had included an order number and a pickup number. I went to check in with the secretary inside the scale house. Order number - no good. Pickup number - refers to an order that shipped two weeks ago. Okay then. I made a call to Joplin and hung out in my truck while the customer service people got things squared away. After a half hour or so, I received a satellite message with a new pickup number and headed back inside. The new number was a good one so the lady sent me back to the loading dock. The forklift guy worked fairly quickly and sent me back to the scale house.

Not in the clear just yet. Front axle - 12,000 pounds. Good. Drive axles - 32,670 pounds. Good. Trailer axles - 40,440 pounds. Umm. My truck is not a heavy one and these newer Con-way Truckload trailers are designed to be lighter than the older ones. Super single tires all around, thin walls, and so forth. As far as I have been able to learn at various shippers through various conversations, I have one of the lighter rigs on the road. I've scaled 47,000 pounds of freight with no trouble more than a few times. My fuel tanks were only half full this afternoon. And yet these guys had me weighing over 85,000 pounds? Seriously, what in the hell could they have been thinking? The forklift guy drove around and pulled two pallets out of the trailer. Still overweight. Another guy brought some fancy tractor thing with a telescoping arm and forks at the end to pull off one more. That did the trick. 78,000 pounds, good on all axles.

Not in the clear just yet. My load assignment (with the wrong numbers) said that I was going from Homerville to Pickerington, Ohio. My bill of lading said that I was going to Lancaster, Ohio. So I got to make one more call to Joplin and get that part sorted out. My new pickup number matched the number at the top of the bill of lading, so I was inclined to think that I would be going to Lancaster. Better to find out before I started driving though, just in case something was wrong. After a brief conversation with my fleet manager, I got the go-ahead to proceed to Lancaster and I was finally on my way.

After a few hours of angling across Georgia, I stopped at the Pilot in Port Wentworth to get some fuel. Debacle. There's just no accounting for the stupidity of some drivers. I got my fuel eventually. Moving along...

At long last, I was on the open road and ready to do some driving. I was feeling a little tired and a lot unmotivated by the time I got through Columbia and onto I-77, so I decided to find somewhere to park for the night. The first truck stop in my directory was a Shell station at Exit 24. No empty spaces there. Par for the course today. Nothing seemed to go right on the first try. So I continued on to the Exxon at Exit 34. Plenty of spaces here, so I was finally ready to grab a bit to eat and relax for a while. The truck stop must close at 10pm, as the doors were locked when I tried to go in, so we find ourselves walking over to the aforementioned Waffle House. One more thing that didn't go quite as planned today. Oh well, it could always be worse.

The net result of the day is that I covered some decent miles and I'll only have around 475 miles left from here, ahead of a Thursday morning delivery. Looking forward to a long day of slugging my way through the mountains with a heavy trailer, I'm sure. At least I can sleep until 10am tomorrow if I want to. And I got to say "mulch" a bunch of times in this post. That doesn't happen very often. Small victories, my friends. Small victories.