1/9/10

We received a fleetwide message several months ago, telling us that we need to notify the dispatchers if our route has to be altered on account of the rock slide in North Carolina. So the first message that I sent this morning said, "Please adjust mileage to account for I-40 closure in North Carolina." I advised them that I would be going to Florida by way of Chattanooga and Atlanta. Seems simple enough, right? After seeing that the official detour is 53 miles, I thought that I was doing a decent job by finding a shorter way around. The route down I-75 is around 822 miles and the original route with I-40 involved would have been 796 miles.

The final message that I sent this morning said, "If I'm not getting paid properly, so be it." For the record, we're talking about a difference of roughly $10. It's really not worth my time to argue the point any further and it's also not worth the company's time to screw me out of the extra miles. Unfortunately though, this is exactly what happened on both fronts. First I received a reply saying that the detour was already taken into account and no adjustment was necessary. Bullshit. Try again.

Next I was told that getting around the rock slide would only add six miles to my route. Bullshit. Try again.

Then I was told that I-75 to I-26 to I-95 was 802 miles. Yeah. Grab a map, find I-75 and find I-26, then take that one for a spin. I don't even know what to say.

At this point I asked for whatever magical route they thought I should take. I got a long detailed turn-by-turn list of directions... complete with an illegal stretch along US-25 into North Carolina from Tennessee. Bullshit. Try again.

Then I was told that I could go down I-75 and it would be 811 miles. Bullshit. I ran the route through a few programs. It's 822 miles if you go straight through Atlanta, which I'm not allowed to do. (I already was ignoring the extra miles on I-285 for the sake of simplicity.)

So what was I being told here, in essence? It appears that, instead of paying my extra 26 miles, they would rather fall back on the notion that they were only cheating me out of 15 miles and this was somehow legitimate. Does anyone else see how asinine this whole exercise was? If I take a shower at a T/A tomorrow instead of a Pilot (where I get free showers), they won't hesitate to reimburse me. But detour around a road closure and get paid for the correct mileage? No no, that's a federal case. Believe me, I piss away ten bucks every time I open the door of my truck. The money sure as hell wasn't going to make or break me. That's not the issue. It's the series of halfassed excuses that piss me off. If we hadn't been told to advise them of the routing issues in the first place, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it. Now I'm agitated by the stupidity of the whole thing. Normally this would be something that my fleet manager would handle, but it's Saturday so there you go. The pay period will end tonight with my 2,132 miles for the week. By the time Monday comes around, the prospect of resurrecting the argument and trying to get a retroactive mileage adjustment won't sound like much fun at all. Whatevs.

I had to hang around the Con-way yard in Cincinnati until my ten hour break was over this afternoon, then it was time to head southward. My timing was perfect... for getting stuck in football traffic heading downtown, so that's always nice. Once I got into Kentucky I found that everything was moving smoothly and the weather wasn't bad. Unfortunately, I also found that I didn't feel much like driving. I decided to duck off in Mount Vernon and call it a day. I'm somewhere around 690 miles from Jacksonville at this point (or ~663 miles on the Missouri system), so a couple of steady days of work will get me there in plenty of time. Good enough. Time to watch some football.