5/7/10

When I checked in with you folks last night, a few things seemed apparent to me.  First was that the folks at the Fenian Godfather Routing Service had done a good job.  Second was that there was something amiss about my dispatched ETA, if my delivery was in fact a live unload.  Third was that there was something other than erroneous trading behind our skittish stock market.  One out of three ain't bad.

Notwithstanding the New Braunfels detour, which really wasn't their fault, my routing consultants did a fine job yesterday by keeping me out of San Antonio without slowing me down too much.  Today, I took their advice and went around Houston on TX-6 and FM-1960.  The 'shortcut' was something like twenty miles long.  Even with some traffic, how bad could it be?  To quote my man Pete Clemenza - "Pretty Goddamn bad."  How does an hour and fifteen minutes sound?  Yeah, really.  Red lights every quarter mile and bumper-to-bumper traffic.

My intent had been to arrive at the consignee a little early and see what would happen.  This afternoon's little slice of driving Heaven changed the story completely.  My dispatched ETA was 15:18 rather than 15:38 (as I thought last night), but the same general concept regarding apointments held true.  Or so I thought.  I got to the distribution center at 14:30 and checked in with the security guard.  She promptly assigned me to a door, told me that I would have to unhook from the trailer, and handed me the paperwork that I was to take to the receiving office.  My appointment time was stamped on the paperwork - 15:18.  I'll be damned.  You learn something new every day.

The Wal Mart DC in New Caney charges $50 to unload a trailer, so I had to do that least desirable of all things and call Joplin.  Just needed a Comchek though, right?  How bad could it be?  You simply never know.  I got the recorded message saying that my fleet manager was away and that I would be connected with the next available team member.  Okay then.  My fleet manager is generally a fairly competent fella, but now my fate was in the hands of the telephonic roulette wheel.  Who would I get?  I'm leading you down a phony rhetorical path here, of course, since I wound up being connected to the wisest and most enlightened operations person in the long and storied history of Con-way Truckload.  A Comchek is mere child's play for our man Bob.  Good deal.

As I sat in my truck and filled in the express code on the Comchek, I heard a noise behind me and saw that the red light had turned on, indicating that my trailer had been locked into the door.  I looked at my clock and saw 4:18pm.  Subtract an hour to bring us down to the level of these savages who operate on Central time and there you go.  15:18.  Efficiency.  No wonder those guys can sell underwear for a dollar.  I'm impressed.

I spent most of this afternoon listening to tales of more wild swings in the stock market.  This is where it appears that I was probably right about something, at least for one day.  I placed some trade orders last night before I went to bed.  I have always been far more conservatively invested than the "conventional wisdom" would dictate, but it works for me, so I've had a lot of money in safe havens lately to hedge against my equity positions.  Anyhow, the question that I had to answer last night was whether or not I wanted to move some more money into equities and lower my overall baseline equity cost.  (You know, buy fear, sell arrogance, that sort of deal.)  To distill the question a little further - would the market finish today higher or lower?  Since I invest mostly in mutual funds rather than stocks or ETFs, my orders are executed at the end of the trading day.  A day that finished with the market heading lower would be better for me in this context, since I would be a net buyer of stocks once everything was rebalanced.  For today at least, I win.  I'm a long way from retirement so the big picture questions are far more imporant than a few timely trades, but each little bit helps.  Now the market will probably crater another thousand points on Monday or something.

I know that nobody really gives a shit about my retirement funding situation, but I included that paragraph in order to set up this next video.  You look at what I wrote there and it's what?  Boring, right?  Completely boring.  That's how investing is supposed to be, as far as I'm concerned.  Get a load of this next guy though.  I don't give people financial advice anymore but I will tell you this - Never take any sort of guidance from anyone who sounds like this dude...



I have no idea what sort of scam they try to sell at that website, but I'll bet my last dollar that this goofball did not "tell you" that the Dow would drop eight hundred points in twenty minutes and then rebound six hundred points in the next hour.  He did, however, make me chuckle.  And that counts for an awful lot in my little world.

I cruised over to the Flying J in New Caney once my trailer was empty and found that I was #1 on the board.  Really no need to request home time in order to get to the front of the line then.  I was already there.  Time to kick back and wait it out.  And wait it out.  And... you know the deal.  Weekends in the Houston area - no bueno.

They got rain in Cleveland tonight, so the ballgame was only in the fifth inning by the time I got around to finding a video stream.  That was pretty cool.  Apparently the Red Wings and Tigers have done quite a bit of losing in the few days since I last paid attention.  I'm gonna have to start rallying the troops or something.  Then it turned out that my video stream wasn't functioning very well, so we're stuck with the magic XM Radio tonight whenever the game gets going again.

Until then, we browse the web and read some news...

Old folks ain't gettin' it on like they used to.  Bummer.
Waitresses with bigger boobs get bigger tips.  Shocking.
Companies are thinking about dropping insurance coverage now that we have Obamacare.  Obvious.
Parents are in a state of denial about their teens and sex.  Yep.
A massive mosque is going up near the World Trade Center.  Diversity.
Germany signs on to the Greek bailout.  Neighborly.
Lord Jesus Christ hit by car.  Umm, hang on a second.  What?

Maybe I'll catch some kind of assignment tomorrow and get out of this ludicrous heat and humidity.  I always thought the whole 'dry heat' thing was horseshit.  I gotta say though, I'm starting to come around.  After hanging with J.T. in Phoenix on a 90° day, I wasn't sweating.  After lifting weights in El Paso on an 80° night, I was only sweating a little.  Here, if I so much as open the window on an 81° night, sweat starts dripping down my forehead.  Do your own calculation on what it was like when the sun was shining.  A nice long dispatch to the Midwest before the pay period ends tomorrow night would be pretty sweet.