8/29/10

What's that old expression?  Another day in paradise?  Yeah, I think that one fits.

Sundays usually involve two loads and around $280-310 in earnings, so today's one load and $180 sounded pretty easy by comparison.  Then I woke with a wicked toothache.  Ever have that happen?  It's not a lot of fun.  I'm now in the odd position of hoping that I have an infection under the gum line.  If so, I'm confident that I can fight it off before too long with a steady stream of antiseptic and extra-aggressive flossing.  If not, then I suppose I'll have to get to a dentist at some point.  Pretty handy timing, dontcha think?  I had dental insurance until five weeks ago.  I'll have dental insurance again in another five weeks.  We'll see how it goes.  I have a hefty supply of ibuprofen at the ready, just in case.

I got to work and checked in with the dispatcher, then hopped into a truck.  I saw that the gas tanks were damned near empty, so screw that.  I don't mind making a fuel stop during a shift, but it's a lot more convenient for me to do so on the way back to the dairy at the end of the day.  I wanted a truck that had enough fuel for me to make my run.  My paid route today was 309 miles, so I would need close to half a tank.  I hopped into the next truck and then realized that its air conditioning wasn't working.  Screw that.  It was hot today.  Third time's the charm and so forth.  I found one with a full tank and a functional A/C.  That'll do.

As I rolled up to the guard shack at the dairy, another guy was rolling out with his loaded trailer.  He pulled up next to me and rolled down his window.  "Which load do you have?" he asked.  I told him my load number and he shook his head.  Then he informed me that my trailer had a flat tire.  Excellent.  He had already called to notify the dispatcher, who in turn had notified the on-call mechanic, so I prepared to wait for a new tire to arrive.  Then I got inside and saw the trailer for myself.  You've got to be kidding...

The first photo shows the flat tire in question. I'd say that it was well beyond flat, but you know, semantics. The second photo is the axle right behind the flat tire. If we pull out our CSI: Livonia script, we'll go ahead and conclude the following; The front tire exploded, the driver kept going, the fragments of the shredded tire blew out the glass on the end of the rear hub seal, oil spewed everywhere, the driver kept going, the side of the trailer (not pictured) was beaten to hell by the shredded tire, the driver kept going... all the way back to the dairy. Simply stunning.

I asked the shipping dude at the dairy if he could move my load onto another trailer. Nope, I was told. They were running too far behind. I called my dispatcher to let him know about the further damage to the trailer and that I still was waiting for a mechanic.  He seemed a bit disturbed about the notion that the dairy wouldn't move my load to a better trailer.  A few minutes later, the yard dog put my trailer in a door.  Then I saw the telltale bouncing that signifies the presence of a forklift inside.  Guess the dispatcher made a phone call, eh?

After a little while the yard dog walked over to where I was standing and told me that I should make a note on my bills.  That broken trailer had pulled Load #164 on Friday and then returned to the dairy.  "You sure that didn't happen in the yard here?" I quipped.  He was visibly offended at the question so I had to specify that I was kidding.  Obviously that tire had bashed the shit out of the trailer at a high rate of speed.  This wouldn't happen in the yard.  I had been hoping to hear that the trailer had been pulled from the dead line by accident or something.  Maybe it was the victim of a long-ago mishap and the mechanics had forgotten about it, then someone typed the wrong number into a computer and here we were.  Nope.  There was no reasonable explanation this time around.  One of my colleagues simply brought it to the dairy and dropped it off after his run.

My scheduled route was going to take me to Frankenmuth, Midland, and Mount Pleasant.  The unloading and reloading process changed the story though.  Rather than take everything off the old trailer and then put everything into the new trailer, the forklift guy was just moving the pallets straight from one to the other.  Therefore the pallets at the tail end of the old trailer wound up in the nose of the new trailer.  Reversing the trip wasn't a huge issue for me.  I already knew where each of the stores was located and the overall distance wouldn't change.  The only bummer was that I would end up coming down I-75 at the end of my shift, rather than going up I-75 at the beginning of the shift.  We all know about I-75 on Sundays in this state.

I got out to Mount Pleasant and took the exit for the business route where the Kroger store is located.  Kaboom!  Would you believe that I blew a trailer tire?  I didn't think to take a picture of it, so you can go ahead and assume that I'm lying about this part.  That's fine, except I'm not lying.  I blew a fucking trailer tire as I came off the ramp.  Unreal.  I was only a mile from the store so I went ahead and limped the rest of the way on my seven good trailer tires.  After yet another call to the dispatcher to report yet another blown tire, I headed inside to unload the seven pallets of milk for that store.

The dispatcher worked with the Michelin people and got me all set up with a shop in Saginaw before I was done with my unloading.  That wasn't bad.  The two and a half hours that it took for the guy to get to me - that was pretty bad.  He had my new tire installed within a half hour and I was back on the road once again. 

My last two stops went fairly well.  One ancillary benefit of the reversed route was that the Frankenmuth store was only getting three pallets of milk.  It was easier to get theirs rotated to the back of the trailer than it would have been to move Mount Pleasant's.  And the breakdown delay was long enough that the I-75 traffic had lightened up by the time I got over there.  Good enough.

My tire blowout had damaged a mud flap and severed a wire leading to a corner marker light on my trailer, so I took it to the terminal and dropped it off to be repaired.  After a conversation with the night dispatcher I was able to confirm that I have around $70 in extra pay coming for the time that I was detained - 1.5 hours at the dairy to start the day and 2.75 hours in Mount Pleasant in the middle of the day.  That's funny.  A couple of mishaps and suddenly my Sunday pay will be back up there where it usually is.

The only thing left to do now was to head over to the gym for a... what?  I forgot to grab my gym bag this morning?  Son of a...  Driving all the way home to get my workout clothes and then driving all the way back out to the gym is not exactly what I felt like doing tonight.  But that's exactly what I had to do.  As the dude from The Program once said - "Perfect ending to a fucked up day."  And my tooth still hurts.