3/1/10

I'm gonna go ahead and post this one early tonight. Assuming that some people get to work pretty soon here, there's a distinct possibility that my vision will be too blurry for typing in a little while. 2am is closing time in the good old Wolverine State and I'm hoping to get my money's worth before then.

It just wouldn't be a trip back home without some inefficiency and shoddy planning, would it? After a quick drive up to Coldwater this morning, I found that the receiving folks at my consignee were all out of sorts. Go to this door, no, go to that door... you know the drill. I finally got a door assignment and dropped my trailer, then proceeded to the bobtail parking area to wait. The lady in the office said that she would call my cell phone when my trailer was empty and my paperwork was ready. During the time when I sat watching other trucks come and go, hour after hour, I received an assignment for a load that would take me home. That's nice, right? Yeah, nice, as long as I could get out of that consignee's parking lot within a reasonable time.

Four hours later... I got my call and went in to retrieve my paperwork. Surprisingly, they didn't bullshit about the arrival and departure times. Usually those peckerheads will stamp the paperwork as being available to me a half hour before they actually tell me it's ready, in order to dodge some of the detention pay. Not this time though. They kept it all on the level.

Now for the planning/communication/nuisance part of the deal. The load going to Canada (by way of Taylor) was one picking up in Fort Wayne, Indiana at 9pm tonight. 9pm would be well over 14 hours after I started work this morning (at 4:30am). And I got out of the consignee's lot in Coldwater at 11am, with Fort Wayne still 65 miles away. So there was no way for me to take a ten hour break and still make my appointed pickup time. If this particular sequence of events sounds familiar to you, then either you're really astute or you pay way too much attention to these daily ramblings. It sounded quite familiar to me though. There's a reason for this. It comes as no surprise that tonight's shipper, sending the load to Canada, is the same one from the infamous Wisconsin debacle.

As before, I got the pre-plan after my hours had been updated to reflect the work that I did in the morning. I got the same 'driver instructions' saying that the freight is time sensitive and must be delivered on time. I got the same 14-hour and 10-hour issues once the previous consignee had me at an unloading dock for several hours. The only saving grace this time around was that I could get by with an eight hour break in the bunk, allowing me to hang onto enough hours to make the short drive from Fort Wayne to Taylor. Had this run been a little longer, say, from Wisconsin to Michigan, then the split break option would have done me no good and we would have had another argument on our hands.

As it stood today, I was going to be inconvenienced a little but the hours would work out. I drove down to the shipper and checked in at noon, letting them know that I was picking up a load later in the evening. The guy in the shipping office told me to drop my trailer on the yard and come back after 8pm. Since my assignment said that the shipment was a drop/hook and I was due at 9pm, this worked fine for me. I dropped my trailer and went down the street to a truck stop to spend my eight hours in the bunk.

At 8:30pm, with six hours at my disposal, I rolled back over to the shipper and checked in again.

"Go ahead and back into Door 19."

"I was here earlier and the guy told me to drop my empty on the yard."

"No, it's a live load."

"I guess I'll go pick up my trailer and bring it over then."

No big deal, obviously, but it's just one more minor nuisance at the end of a day full of minor nuisances. All's well that ends well though. My dock light just turned green and I'm heading home. Save me a spot at the bar, boys.