8/4/10

I don't want to disrupt an ongoing narrative, so I'll go ahead and share the following info with you - my ankle is fucked.  Fortunately though, I wouldn't have to lump any pallets of milk today.  All I had to do was take a trailer out to Grand Rapids and then bring another trailer back to Livonia.  In related news - if you think I went to Grand Rapids today, you're wrong.

My shift wrapped up last night at 1:45am, so I was available for work today any time after 11:45am.  I saw that my Grand Rapids run was scheduled for 11am, so I notified the night dispatcher before I headed home.  She adjusted my start time from 11am to noon and sent me on my way. 

So I rolled into work this morning and checked in with the main dispatcher dude.  I knew what was in store for me, of course, but it's SOP to make sure everything is still a go.  Heh.  Yeah.  As seems to be the case every day at this place, someone called in sick.  Flashbacks to my pre-trucking life are inevitable.  Every day, without exception, someone calls in sick.  That's just the way it goes.  By becoming a long haul trucker, I was able to insulate myself from having to deal with the inherent laziness of people, at least to a certain extent.  As long as I did what I was told to do, the scheduling nonsense and all the rest would be someone else's problem.

Now it seems that I'm right back in the thick of it all.  I still don't have the responsibility to deal with employees who call in sick, but I do end up getting caught in the chain reaction that results.  A guy gets sick and can't make his run today.  Another guy can cover that one as a second run, but only if his first one is changed to a shorter route.  He gets the shorter route and the sick fella's run is covered, so now we're left to deal with the longer route that the second guy gave up.  None of the more senior guys want it, since they like their quick and easy runs.  One of those "brothers" of mine was more than content to tack on my Grand Rapids turn at the end of his shift though.  Of course.  So I lost my easy schedule and wound up with two stops in Jackson and one in Hillsdale.  The run paid $148.68, which is somewhere in the ballpark of what I would have made on my originally scheduled run.  It just took a little over an hour longer and involved a lot more work.

I shuttled a few trailers over to the dairy for a quick $15 once I was legally allowed to work again, then made my pull and headed out to Jackson.  The first two stores didn't really seem to have their shit together, so I was at each for around an hour.  During the second stop though, I did manage to get the milk for my last stop rotated to the back of the trailer.  That last stop went very quickly and easily, so the bit of extra time at the earlier stop was well worth it.

As I rolled across US-12, back toward home, I got a call from my dispatcher.  There was a one-stop special order that I would need to deliver once I got back.  Those special orders are the cat's meow as far as milk deliveries go.  Stores occasionally find themselves in a jam and call the dairy for a few pallets to hold them over until the next scheduled delivery.  Today's special order consisted of three pallets going to the store at the corner of Wyoming and 8 Mile.  The thirty mile round-trip paid $49.99 plus my $15 incentive for taking a second load.  An extra hour and a half of work and an extra $65 in my pocket.  That's a pretty solid deal.

By the time I got home and got my shoes off tonight, there was quite a lot of pain and swelling in my recently sprained ankle.  It's less colorful than it was last night, seeming to indicate that there wasn't a ton of internal bleeding, so I'm hoping that a day of rest tomorrow will do a lot of good.