3/11/10

A sleepless night in a rest area, on account of the fact that the parking space next to my head must have had a sign saying, "Everybody ignore the other ten open spaces, pull into this one, set your brakes, leave your piece of shit truck running while you go inside and take a dump, come back out, rev your engine like an asshole for a few minutes, release your brakes, roar out of here like a drag racer, call your buddy down the road, and tell him to do the same thing five minutes later."   Check.

The forklift dude at my consignee waiting until I was almost asleep, then bouncing my trailer to unload one stack of freight, then waiting until I was almost asleep again before unloading the next one, repeating this process until the trailer was empty.  Check.

A route taking me down through West Virginia on I-77 for the third time this week, with a 44,000 pound payload, constantly getting passed on the way up the mountains and then cut off on the way down, by a bunch of douchebags whose parents probably hated them since they suck so bad.  Check.

Big signs on every overpass, underpass, highway, byway, on ramp, and off ramp, naming every inch of West Virginia's pork barrel spending in honor of everyone's favorite former Klansman.  Check.

The weather forecast for Tuesday finally turning out to be right on Thursday, making a potential crash victim out of each driver who cut me off on wet roads in heavy fog without allowing any following distance, all the while reminding me that nobody knows what in the hell the weather will actually be like next week, let alone a hundred years from now, as I curse the bastard motorists and hope for Cap and Trade to become law and run those coal mining pricks all into poverty, creating an internal conflict within my mind since I really kinda like having a somewhat functional economy and I burn lots of oil every day in the process of earning a living myself. Check.

Delivering into a state that bans 53' trailers on a bunch of U.S. highways, for no apparent reason, just because they freaking can,  forcing me to go all the way through West Virginia and come across on US-460 in order to stay somewhere close to my paid mileage, and finding that US-460 makes I-77 look like a rolling meadow, with a few red lights at the bottom of mountains in 65mph zones just to make it interesting.  Check.

Very few parking options within a reasonable distance of my consignee, combined with an asinine federal regulation that purports to know the exact minute when I'll be too tired to drive, even though I've been tired all damned day and that was perfectly legal, thus preventing me from driving all the way to Lynchburg and parking at the industrial park tonight, meaning that I had to stop in Elliston since there was no guarantee that I would find anything closer, so now I have to get up at 5:45am and drive the rest of the way in order to keep my 8am appointment.  Check.

I guess we've got all the bases covered.  So... how was your day?  Mine, I must admit, was rescued at the end by that magical little sign above the entrance to the truck stop where I'm spending the night.  Small victories, my friends.  Small victories.