1/16/10

Sometimes it all just falls into place. I'm not a big enough NFL fan to get excited about games in which my Redskins won't be losing playing, but the playoffs are still fun in their own way. I was hopeful that I would find myself somewhere with a fast internet connection and a place to park by the time today's games began. And here I am.

After a quick hop over to the shipper this morning, I found that my pickup was a drop/hook and that my loaded trailer was waiting for me. Beauty. From Pittston I was headed to Gordonsville, Virginia. Nice and simple route, right? Head south and catch up with US-15, then ride it all the way to Gordonsville. Not so fast though. My Swedish buddy Sjoe once drove down US-15 from Maryland into Virginia. According to him, it was a good thing that he didn't pass any cops. Apparently the Virginians don't like vehicles longer than 65 feet or something. Sjoe says that he saw no legitimate reason for trucks not to take that route, but I decided to keep it legal today.

So I could either stay with freeways down past Baltimore and D.C. before angling across or I could take I-81 to I-66 and then make my way southward from there. Gee, I wonder which route sounded better. Boo! I-95. Boo! I caught US-17 southward from I-66 and then joined up with US-15 a few miles down the road. I'll have to take a circuitous route from here, rather than stay with US-15 the rest of the way, but it shouldn't be too bad.

In the lovely sounding town of Opal, I saw a big truck stop on the left. I was in the right lane though, and the truck stop looked pretty shitty, so I continued along. After a mile or so, I saw another truck stop on the left side of the road. This time the traffic was clear for me to move over, so I turned in and called it a day. In proving that all is right with the world, this second truck stop has a SubWay. I know. I know.

Assuming that I can get back to the southbound side of the road in the morning, I should have around 65 miles to go from here. In addition to their fetish regarding 65 foot long vehicles, the Virginians have a weird system of delineating their towns. My destination is a good 10-15 miles south of Gordonsville, right along I-64, but it's in Gordonsville by golly. Kinda like the Pilot truck stop in Greenville that's considered to be in Staunton or something like that. Whatever. I don't draw the maps. If it works for the locals, then it works for me. I'm just hopeful that, since I'll be taking off bright and early, I can catch a break in the traffic and get back onto southbound US-17/15/29 from here. That doesn't seem to be a sure thing at this point.

I don't suppose we'll be doing any cartwheels to celebrate the 1,894 miles this week, but at least the extra $60 or so in additional pay will help out some. I came into this winter expecting things to be similar to last year, so I can't pretend that I'm terribly disappointed. Believe the talking heads on TV if you want to. I have my own economic views and I'm not sold on any of what they say. Incidentally, for anyone interested in the topic, these guys have a few thoughts on what lies ahead for those of us who hold steering wheels for a living. Sounds pretty reasonable to me, so I guess you bankers out there need to hurry up and start running some of these deadbeats out of business.

1/15/10

The experience for a Con-way Truckload driver dealing with the folks at a Con-way Freight terminal varies widely from one trip to the next. I find that the vast majority of our corporate brethren are friendly, albeit frazzled, people whenever I visit their terminals. Then again, some of them totally suck. I haven't reached a definitive conclusion yet, but the assholiest bunch of them all would have to be those at either the Chicopee, Massachusetts location or the Newark, New Jersey location.

So, after leaving Ohio before dawn and cruising all the way across Pennsylvania and New Jersey without any major issues, I pulled into the Newark yard and expected the worst. Well I'll be damned. This time the guy behind the counter was a Russian dude and his manners were impeccable. He took my paperwork and assigned me to a door. Then, after I hooked to an empty trailer, he was right there waiting to sign me out and bid me a good weekend. I guess this moves Chicopee to the front of the line for now. I've been told that they call themselves "Massholes" up there, so I'm sure they're glad to be in the lead.

I had two driving hours available after making my drop so I didn't have any great expectations. Hopefully I could at least get an assignment for something picking up tomorrow, I thought. I pulled off to the side of the Con-way driveway and, after around 45 minutes, this is exactly what I got. My next load will pick up in Pittston, Pennsylvania and head toward Virginia for a Sunday morning delivery. We're nickel and diming it just like last January thus far, it seems. At least quite a few of this week's miles have come with northeast pay.

I really didn't feel like spending the night parked in the Con-way driveway but I wasn't entirely sure if there were any parking options that I could reach within my remaining two hours. My truck stop directory showed a T/A at Exit 4 on I-80. My rather limited experience with truck stops in New Jersey has taught me one thing - Stay away from truck stops in New Jersey. I decided to head out and give it a shot anyway. Exit 4 couldn't be more than an hour away from Newark, I thought, and it was still fairly early in the day. They should have at least a few open parking spaces.

I guess I didn't think that one through very carefully, did I? Yeah. Newark at 3:45pm on a Friday. That's a real treat. After I managed to fight my way out of the traffic, I got to the truck stop and found that it was damned near completely full. 'Damned near completely' isn't the same as 'completely' though, meaning that there were a few spots left. I only needed one. Beauty.

My pickup is scheduled for noon tomorrow and it looks like I'm a little more than an hour from Pittston, so thankfully no repeats of that 5am nonsense are in store for me. The trip down to Virginia is an easy 300 mile deal, so maybe I'll get a chance to watch some football. I would say that tomorrow holds bad news for New Orleans and Indianapolis, but it looks like the majority of our scientifically selected poll voters agree with me. Scary. It's worth noting though that I'm not quite as good at being wrong with respect to NFL games as I am with respect to college games. Close, but not quite.

1/14/10

My truck has been idling an awful lot lately. When it's at least 30° outside, I do okay with a sleeping bag. Any colder than that and I need some heat. Quite a bit of the country has been quite a lot colder than 30° at night this season. So, in that situation, I go to bed with the bunk heater running. Then, after a couple of hours, the battery rundown warning thing starts beeping and wakes me. So I start the truck, go back to bed, and forget about it. I used to be able to run the bunk heater all night without killing the batteries, but this is no longer the case. Net result - lots of idling over the past month or so.

Last night my temperature gauge said 31° and I wasn't cold once I climbed into my sleeping bag, so I thought we were all good. Might as well leave the truck off, or so the theory went. This wasn't one of those times when I was completely fooled by the weather, going to bed in my underwear when it's 60° and waking to find that it's 25°. No, this time I had pants and a sweater on, to go along with my very warm sleeping bag. It was all good, for a while. Yeah... it got freaking cold last night. 12° when I woke this morning. As soon as I reached over and flipped the switch to turn on the bunk heater, the battery rundown thing started beeping at me. Bastard. So I had to get out of bed and fire up the engine. Luckily I had time to go back to bed and wrap myself up in the sleeping bag until my truck got to its operating temperature and started kicking out some heat.

Once I finally decided to get rolling, the drive up to Lancaster was quick and easy. I found a locked gate at the consignee (I was 45 minutes early) but this would turn out to be the least of my issues with respect to making the delivery. After finding a spot along the road to pull over and wait for someone to arrive, I saw a pickup truck pull into the driveway around 7:30am. I gave the guy a few minutes to get settled in and then walked over. He asked if he could help me. I told him that I had a load of mulch. "For here ?!" Yes sir, that's what the bills say. "In that (pointing at my trailer) ?!" Yes sir.

It's very early in 2010 so I'm hesitant to name a frontrunner, but this guy will be tough to beat for pissed-off customer of the year. Good grief. There was no loading dock or ramp or anything, so the fella went off an a profanity-laced tirade about how there was "no fucking way" he could unload my trailer. Whatever dude. I do what I'm told and I was told to deliver the mulch. He called his company and got no useful information, so I tried calling my company. The customer service people hadn't gotten to work yet so I went to my truck and awaited further instructions.

After fifteen or twenty minutes the angry guy waved me into the driveway. I drove in and asked if the freight was in fact being delivered to his location. Yup. He had received a phone call from his boss. I was at the right place. (The F-bombs were flying by this point in time.) Homeboy had to drive a little tractor up to the back of my trailer, hook a chain to a given pallet, back the tractor up until he had dragged the pallet to the tailgate, unhook the chain, drive a forklift up to the trailer, and then unload the pallet. He was livid.

I sent a satellite message informing anyone who might be interested that I would be getting unloaded after all. I received a reply from my fleet manager acknowledging my message and then kicked back to wait for the unloading. After I had sent the satellite message saying that I was getting unloaded, my fleet manager caught wind of my earlier phone call saying that I wasn't getting unloaded. The time-shifting of the information left him a little confused, for obvious reasons. After another exchange of messages we were all squared away and all I could do was wait. And wait. And wait.

A little after 11:30am, the disgruntled chap pulled off the final pallet. I walked over with my copy of the bill of lading so I could get a signature and get the hell out of there. I was forced to ignore another vulgar diatribe in the process. That guy needs a shrink or something, man. I've got a temper of my own and I'm no stranger to some creative language, so I'm not gonna judge anyone, but for Christ's sake. He was acting as a representative of a company in the conduct of a business transaction. That was extremely excessive.

I had to decide where to go once I was empty. The place where I delivered had no room for me in the first place, so I certainly couldn't hang out there. The choice came down to either going back southward to the rest area on US-33 or going northward to the truck stop in Hebron. The distance would be roughly the same in either direction and I had no idea which way I would be going for my next assignment. I decided on Hebron since it's at least along the freeway. We also have various customers in the Columbus area, so it seemed like my best bet. Anything picking up to the east would be good. Anything to the west would mean that I had gone a little out of the way.

After settling in at the Pilot, sweeping out my trailer, and enjoying an Italian BMT with double meat, the waiting began. I was #1 on the board when I left Lancaster so I was optimistic about getting something quickly. It only took about an hour or so. I guess that part ain't so bad, but the assignment itself leaves something to be desired. Deadhead to Columbus for a Con-way load leaving tomorrow morning, headed to Newark, New Jersey. So yeah, I had gone out of the way, but the real kicker is the 5am departure from Columbus. Boo! 5am. Boo! Oh yeah, and Newark pretty much sucks too. It's a solid run though - 524 miles. Since my paychecks aren't exactly setting any records at the moment, I'll just appreciate the work wherever I can get it. I've caught some good weekend runs out of that part of the country in the past, so we'll see how it all shakes out.

For what it's worth - I tried one of those old-school Pepsis with the real sugar today. I'm unimpressed.

1/13/10

I often hear truck drivers refer to how hard they work. Usually this would be in the context of saying that they deserve higher wages and so forth. Quite frankly, I think they're full of crap. 99% of the time we don't work hard at all. We drive down the road and stay awake, occasionally buying fuel or opening the doors of a trailer. That's about the long and short of it, at least in my experience. Perhaps some people really do believe that we're working hard out here, but I've done side jobs (construction) with my father a few times. That's hard work. I've run a restaurant that was serving $4,000 worth of burgers in an hour. That's hard work. What we do out here is just boring. So it's interesting to me when certain days (like today) leave me feeling like I actually worked my ass off.

I haven't figured out the mechanism yet, but pulling a heavy trailer through the mountains feels more physically demanding to me, even though the truck is the one doing the work. Sure there's more shifting and braking and all of that, but come on. Moving my arm or my leg a few inches would hardly be considered strenuous. I'm inclined to think that it must be psychological. Maybe it's just the cumulative effect of spending several hours paying more attention to every detail than is normally required. The timing of gear changes, the speed approaching curves, the spacial relationship to other vehicles - all of it requires more precision when the trailer is heavy and the terrain is rough. That's my best guess anyway. I'm pretty sure that, in the purely physical sense, I could move my gear shifter and press my pedals all day long without getting tired.

Anyhow, yeah, it was a long day of dragging ass through the mountains. Going through West Virginia in particular is less than fun when the payload is so heavy. The traffic was fairly light though, so good enough. I woke late enough to hit Charlotte after the morning rush but early enough to get clear of Charleston before it got too congested in the afternoon. There aren't a whole lot of parking options along US-33 in Ohio. I remembered taking a break at a little rest area outside Logan once in the past, so that's where I was hoping to find an open space tonight. I got in before 6pm and there were still a couple of spaces available, so that's that.

I have an 8am delivery appointment in Lancaster, roughly fifteen miles from here, so it looks like my recent stretch of sleeping late every morning will have to come to an end. Boo! 8am appointment! Boo!

1/12/10

I've had a handful of meals at Waffle House restaurants over the years. To the best of my knowledge, every one of them came shortly after I had consumed copious alcohol. I seem to remember enjoying the food quite a bit on each occasion. Tonight I grabbed some grub from a Waffle House next to the truck stop where I'm parked (completely sober, obviously). You know what? The food really ain't all that good.

{The preceding public service announcement was brought to you by the Fenian Godfather Institute for Culinary Excellence.}

Given the number of things that failed to go as planned today, I must say that the day overall didn't seem too bad. I was able to sleep until 10am without interruption. That's probably the biggest factor, since I'm convinced that nothing good can come from waking before 10am. In any event, there was a lot of tedious stuff but it all worked out fine in the end.

I received a message at some point late in the morning directing me to head toward Homerville, Georgia. More information was going to follow but I needed to be in Homerville ASAP. So I grabbed my atlas and found Homerville, then hit the road. I received the rest of the load information just as I was turning onto the freeway. I reached over and pressed the button on my dashboard to have the computer voice lady read everything to me. The directions to the shipper were fairly vague and useless, so I guess it didn't make any difference that I was already driving and couldn't write them down.

I angled over on some county roads into Georgia and then caught US-441 up to Homerville. The stop location information for the shipper was as follows: "2 miles east of town on Route 84, on the right." Okie dokie then. I hung a right on US-84 and, after a mile and a half or so, started looking for some sort of factory or warehouse. Nothing of the sort. Just a bunch of trees. I was looking for a mulch production place though, so I guess the trees would make sense. I'm sure the people behind me were pretty pissed at one point when I slowed to 25mph, only to find that the driveway that I was approaching belonged to a different business. I was looking for a place called Ohio Mulch and the driveway belonged to some other mulch outfit.

A little further along I saw a sign with "MULCH" in big block letters, in addition to some sort of smaller writing at the top. I couldn't make out what the smaller writing said but I played a hunch and turned into the driveway. As I entered I saw that the smaller writing said "Ohio" so that was good. Aside from the sign though, I didn't see much else. Just some hick dirt driveway in the middle of nowhere. The driveway wound back around toward the west though and there I saw a scale house and a couple of trucks. Beauty.

We were just getting started. My load assignment had included an order number and a pickup number. I went to check in with the secretary inside the scale house. Order number - no good. Pickup number - refers to an order that shipped two weeks ago. Okay then. I made a call to Joplin and hung out in my truck while the customer service people got things squared away. After a half hour or so, I received a satellite message with a new pickup number and headed back inside. The new number was a good one so the lady sent me back to the loading dock. The forklift guy worked fairly quickly and sent me back to the scale house.

Not in the clear just yet. Front axle - 12,000 pounds. Good. Drive axles - 32,670 pounds. Good. Trailer axles - 40,440 pounds. Umm. My truck is not a heavy one and these newer Con-way Truckload trailers are designed to be lighter than the older ones. Super single tires all around, thin walls, and so forth. As far as I have been able to learn at various shippers through various conversations, I have one of the lighter rigs on the road. I've scaled 47,000 pounds of freight with no trouble more than a few times. My fuel tanks were only half full this afternoon. And yet these guys had me weighing over 85,000 pounds? Seriously, what in the hell could they have been thinking? The forklift guy drove around and pulled two pallets out of the trailer. Still overweight. Another guy brought some fancy tractor thing with a telescoping arm and forks at the end to pull off one more. That did the trick. 78,000 pounds, good on all axles.

Not in the clear just yet. My load assignment (with the wrong numbers) said that I was going from Homerville to Pickerington, Ohio. My bill of lading said that I was going to Lancaster, Ohio. So I got to make one more call to Joplin and get that part sorted out. My new pickup number matched the number at the top of the bill of lading, so I was inclined to think that I would be going to Lancaster. Better to find out before I started driving though, just in case something was wrong. After a brief conversation with my fleet manager, I got the go-ahead to proceed to Lancaster and I was finally on my way.

After a few hours of angling across Georgia, I stopped at the Pilot in Port Wentworth to get some fuel. Debacle. There's just no accounting for the stupidity of some drivers. I got my fuel eventually. Moving along...

At long last, I was on the open road and ready to do some driving. I was feeling a little tired and a lot unmotivated by the time I got through Columbia and onto I-77, so I decided to find somewhere to park for the night. The first truck stop in my directory was a Shell station at Exit 24. No empty spaces there. Par for the course today. Nothing seemed to go right on the first try. So I continued on to the Exxon at Exit 34. Plenty of spaces here, so I was finally ready to grab a bit to eat and relax for a while. The truck stop must close at 10pm, as the doors were locked when I tried to go in, so we find ourselves walking over to the aforementioned Waffle House. One more thing that didn't go quite as planned today. Oh well, it could always be worse.

The net result of the day is that I covered some decent miles and I'll only have around 475 miles left from here, ahead of a Thursday morning delivery. Looking forward to a long day of slugging my way through the mountains with a heavy trailer, I'm sure. At least I can sleep until 10am tomorrow if I want to. And I got to say "mulch" a bunch of times in this post. That doesn't happen very often. Small victories, my friends. Small victories.

1/11/10

When I left home a few weeks ago, I forgot to grab my hair clippers out of the bathroom. Consequently, I haven't shaved my head in a few weeks. Consequently, my hair is longer than it generally tends to be. Consequently, I'm becoming more and more aware of just how freaking bald I am. 33 years old, man. Ain't that a bitch. As uninteresting as this may seem to the average reader, I'm not just cruising toward the next warehouse each day on this here web log. I'm also cruising toward my inevitable demise and you'll just have to come along for the ride.

That whole going to bed early thing didn't pan out last night, so I got started a little later in the morning. After a shower and a shave, I came back out to my truck just before noon and fired up the engine. My satellite unit kicked on and the lovely voice announced, "Attention! You have twenty unread messages." Twenty? Holy smokes. I've never heard that before. What did I do this time?

It took a minute for me to figure out what was going on. There were messages for relay assignments and new dispatches and all kinds of weird stuff on the screen. Then I realized what had happened. My extra miles relating to the North Carolina rock slide had been added by setting up relays to alter the route and bypass the road closure. I'm not sure what sorts of things are encouraged or discouraged over there in Missouri, so I won't get into a whole lot more detail, but we'll just say that common sense has prevailed in the end. If I am going to cyber-whine when things don't make sense (as you know I do), then I feel compelled to take note when issues are resolved appropriately. Good lookin' out, my brother.

Southern Georgia is something of an anomaly when it comes to driving. Quite a bit of I-75 is under construction but there are rarely any delays or traffic. Although the speed limit drops to 60mph in some spots and 50mph for a few miles, and although there are a few lane closures here and there, people seem to keep rolling right along. Come to think of it, I'm not really sure why most of the road has three lanes in the first place. Today, everything was nice and easy. The weather was sunny and the drive down to Florida was quick and smooth. Ditto for the rest of the ride along I-10 into Jacksonville.

Shortly before I reached my destination, I received a message from one of the office guys asking me to take an inventory of the trailers at the Con-way terminal. We get our basic $17.50 one-hour pay for doing so and it doesn't take anywhere near an hour, so that message was a pleasant little surprise. In point of fact, the terminal in Jacksonville is quite small compared to the one in Atlanta, where I last performed a yard check. Today's version took about six or seven minutes, the bulk of which was spent walking to the far side of the terminal only to find that none of our trailers were over there.

Once I had called and given the trailer numbers to the equipment guy, I hooked to an empty and checked on my board position. #5. Hmm. The nearest truck stop where I could be confident in finding a parking space would be fifteen miles back to the west. There was a pretty strong chance that my next load would be beer out of Jacksonville or paper out of Palatka (to the northeast or southeast, respectively). What to do, what to do? I hadn't asked if I could stay parked at the Con-way yard. So... I hadn't been told not to stay parked at the Con-way yard, right? This sort of logic may not fly on every occasion, but it was going to have to work today. Plus there was already one of our trucks hooked to an empty trailer when I arrived. If I was going to get the boot, at least I wouldn't be the only one. Strength in numbers, power to the people!

After five and a half hours on the board, I find myself at... #6. This happens all the time when I get on the board at home and I'm still not quite sure what it means. What it means to me today is that I'm probably spending the night at the Con-way yard. So let me get this straight. I got paid to take a walk this afternoon and now I'm being compelled to stay somewhere with no restaurants? What are they trying to tell me here? I know I'm not in great shape these days and all, but come on. I get the last laugh though. I scrounged together $3.85 for the vending machine. Tonight's odd little assortment of sodium and sugar will definitely take us one step closer to my inevitable demise.

1/10/10

I couldn't do it, could I? Is it possible to pick all four playoff games incorrectly in a single weekend? Well, I picked Arizona so my perfect record is in jeopardy at the moment, but we'll see. I did already manage to lose what you might call a "pint sized" wager to a friend back home though. Damned Ravens.

There were three items on the agenda for today.

First was to see the sun at some point in time. That dreary crap gets depressing after a while. It wasn't looking too good as I got rolling this morning, as there was some light snowfall and the skies were dark in every direction as far as the eye could see. As I descended down the mountains toward Knoxville though, the clouds receded and it was sunny for the rest of the day. Beauty.

Second was to cover enough miles to leave Atlanta in my rearview mirror. Better to get through there on a weekend than on a Monday, the theory goes. Traffic was flowing freely down I-75, so I drove all the way to the Pilot in Byron, Georgia before calling it a day. Beauty.

Third was to find a lovely young southern belle to keep me company this evening, since I have all kinds of free time to kill. Well, you know, two out of three ain't bad... or something.

It looks like around four or five hours of driving from here should get me to Jacksonville. This load is due to arrive by 3am Tuesday, so any time tomorrow will do the trick. Given the absence of any southern hospitality to enjoy, I may try to get some sleep early tonight and get down there in the early afternoon tomorrow. This would put me in a good position to get another assignment after I make my drop. Or maybe I'll just sleep late and get down there in the evening. This wouldn't put me in a good position for much of anything, but I do like to sleep late. I don't know. Whatever.

Hmm, Green Bay is keeping it close after all. I may yet go 0-4 this weekend.