9/3/10

One of the timeless metaphors that everyone can recognize is that of the glass half full (or empty, as the case may be).  The 'half full' analysis of today would be that I caught a second run and earned enough extra money to pay for my new FloTV unit.  The 'half empty' would be that I wound up working until 1:30am, so I never got a chance to buy a FloTV unit.  Probably just as well though.  It looks like I'll be working pretty steadily tomorrow, with a one-stop load to Howell followed by a three-stop load to Jackson, Holt, and South Lyon.  I'll be sure to take my 12v charger and a pair of headphones so that I can listen to my Irish on my cell phone.

My nice and easy scheduled run went smoothly, aside from the fact that someone crashed on US-23 this afternoon and the cops had the freeway shut down before I got to Flint.  Once I made my way around, I unloaded four and a half pallets at my first stop and then headed up to Saginaw.  Dixie Highway was closed the last time I went to the store up there, so I took the detour route that had been posted.  Turns out there was no detour this time around.  I was just cruising through the neighborhoods for no reason.  After dropping off sixteen pallets of milk at that stop, I took the direct route back to the freeway and looked forward to wrapping up a quick day of work.

As I sat in the office and finished up my paperwork for the trip, the dispatcher got a call from a guy at the Country Fresh dairy.  This is the dairy for which we pull trailers to Grand Rapids on a regular basis.  Apparently there was a trailer over there waiting to ship out.  The problem was that it wasn't on our dispatch board.  Therefore our guys hadn't assigned anyone to make the run.  The night dispatcher was a little distressed about the whole deal, but I told her that I would have enough hours to cover the load as long as they didn't jerk me around on the Grand Rapids end.  The turn usually takes between 5.5 and 6 hours.  I had 7 hours left on my 14.  She was grateful.  I wasn't exactly thrilled, but $150 is $150.  Plus I get an extra $15 thrown in for pulling a second load, so that should cover the sales tax.

By the time I got over to the dairy, they had decided that they wanted to throw some more shit into the trailer before I took off.  I had to grab my loaded trailer from the yard and back into a door, then wait for the updated paperwork.  There went a half hour of my wiggle room.  Better get a quick drop/hook on the other end.

Out in Grand Rapids, the lady in the receiving office didn't seem to know a whole lot.  I had her sign my copy of the bills and then asked if she had anything for me to pull back to Livonia.  Sometimes we return with freight.  Sometimes we return with empty cases.  Sometimes we just bring back an empty trailer.  She couldn't find anything that needed to be sent to Livonia, so she directed me over to the neighboring drop yard for an empty trailer.  There were no empties over there and my log book's margin of error was damned near gone, so I wound up bobtailing back to Livonia in order to make sure I was off the road before my 14 ran out.  Good enough.

With a pull time of 12:30pm tomorrow staring me in the face, I should have headed home and tried to get to bed.  Another of those recognizable metaphors involves putting one's nose to the grindstone, however.  Off to the gym we go...  My workout was rather quick and efficient tonight.  When you roll in at 2am on a Friday night, you don't tend to find many people lifting weights.  Just a few people with odd work schedules or shitty social lives (or both, in my case).  Now that I've stayed on schedule with my weight training for the week, I can get by with only cardio tomorrow as I watch the ESPN hacks review the day's college football action.  Hell, maybe even my Irish can provide a highlight or two.

Heh.  You bring the green job talk and the Cadillac SUV... Detroit will smack you in the face with the irony.