8/14/10

It certainly seemed like she may have left us forever, but it appears that our girl has returned to drop another bunch of right-wing hate on the world.



I ain't gonna lie to you. I still kinda have a crush on her. Just a little. I think some of that stimulus money went to help my... ahem... brother Teamsters at YRC though, so I guess I have to hate her and her "fiscally responsible" nonsense. I'm torn, by golly.  Torn like an old sweater!

Not a whole lot to report from here in Michigan today.  I knocked out my stops in Howell, Grand Blanc, and Imlay City, then got back to the terminal by 8:30pm.  This means that I completed the trip in just over six hours, which was nice.  It also meant that I started sitting on my couch at 9pm on a Saturday, which wasn't so nice.  My friends are largely either boring, broke, or some combination of the two. 

To a certain extent though, I have to agree with George Will.  A little peace and quiet (or boredom) does us all some good every now and then.  This age of instant gratification is dragging us all toward the abyss, one tweet or one Facebook status update at a time.  I'm just gonna kick back and read for a while.  (Nothing meaningful, of course.  Don't kid yourselves.  It's just that the latest issue of Maxim arrived today.  Maybe they'll have some decent jokes or sexy pictures or something.)

I start work at noon tomorrow and it looks like I'll have a long day in store.  A three-stopper to Flint and Saginaw will be followed by a two-stopper to Toledo.  With the way my pay weeks fall, a busy Sunday is a good kickoff.  Tomorrow's $280 will be no exception.  I wouldn't mind if every week went something like the one that just wrapped up.  The $1,100 in earnings won't shatter any records, but it's more than enough for me, especially once I start to get retirement contributions and monthly performance bonuses to augment the base pay.  I was left alone on my two scheduled days off and had a good mix of busy days and easy days throughout the week.

Guess I should try to get a little of that reading done now.  Bedtime will come around soon enough.

8/13/10

After doing a little reading this evening, I feel that I should tell you I was born in 1976.  My sister was born in 1979.  The older of my little brothers was born in 1985.  My youngest brother was born in 1987.  What is the relevance of this?  Oh... nothing.  (I'm left-handed too, you know.  I ain't sayin', I'm just sayin'...) 

Now that we've gotten the obligatory self-high-five out of the way, let's talk about Friday the 13th.  I trust that no grave misfortune has befallen any of you.  My luck was just fine today, for whatever that's worth.  I guess we'll just have to get past next May now.

I do believe that today's run to Flint, Saginaw, and Bridgeport was my most efficient three-stopper to date.  I was in and out of the Flint stop within 15 minutes.  Five pallets delivered, three pallets of empties retrieved.  The drive from there to my Saginaw stop took an hour, largely because I couldn't get straight into town on I-675.  That road is closed, so I had to head across on M-46 and then shoot up one of the main roads in town to the store's location.  I had to wait about twenty minutes for a Frito Lay driver to vacate the loading dock, after which I delivered ten pallets of milk, retrieved twelve pallets of empties, and rotated all of the milk for my last stop to the rear of my trailer.  My total time there, even with the initial wait, came to just over an hour.  Then the last stop in Bridgeport took only 20 minutes.  With the milk all at the back of the trailer, I had it off in no time.  Then I snagged a few empties from outside the door, shoved them into my trailer, and hit the road.

The initial plan was for me to have only one run today.  The good old $65 bonus platter came up again though.  Another trip to that store at 8 Mile and Wyoming fell into my lap.  The pay for the run was $49.99 in addition to my $15 for taking a second run in one shift, so today's income got up over $200.  I would have to work a little harder this time than I did the last time this run came up.  On that previous occasion I was delivering three pallets of milk.  Tonight's version of the trip had me showing up with an empty trailer and taking all of the store's empty milk crates back to the dairy.  (There were 19 pallets in all.  I had been told that there would be 20.)

There was a US Xpress truck in the dock when I arrived, with a First Fleet truck waiting in line.  I assumed the #3 spot in the queue and was quickly followed by yet another First Fleet truck.  Busy place this evening.  I got settled into the dock about a half hour after I arrived, then spent another half hour loading up my trailer.  The drive back to Livonia was quick and easy and then my night was finished.  So the whole round trip took a little under two hours.  Fair enough.

Tomorrow brings one three-stop run out to the boondocks again, at least so far.  That's what I had scheduled for today and I wound up with two trips, so we'll see how it goes.  Any superstitions that I should know about the day after Friday the 13th?  Hmm, I wonder.

8/12/10

I offer the following assessment of my first game at Fifth Third Field in Toledo - It probably won't be my last game at Fifth Third Field in Toledo.  I had a great time down there and, since it wasn't the real Tigers, I didn't even mind so much that the team lost.  The weather was beautiful, the gals were dressed accordingly, and the game was fun.

When I walked up to the ticket window to retrieve my internet purchase, I was treated to a rather humorous exchange.  I had ordered two seats online last night, but my brother had decided to join us today.  So I explained the situation to the guy at the ticket window.  We were picking up two tickets and needed to buy a third.  The guy told me that his computers had been down for over an hour.  All he could do was give us wristbands that would get us into the stadium.  From that point everything would be general admission unless we wanted to complain to the box office manager and see if he could get us into our purchased seats.  My brother handed over his nine bucks and then we were given three wristbands.  It occurred to me as I walked into the stadium that this guy had just given me two wristbands based on nothing more than my word.  I said that I had bought two tickets and he had no way of knowing otherwise, so in we went.

My originally purchased seats in the fourth row were occupied, quite predictably.  We sat in the next section over and a little further back from the field, but our view still was excellent.  When a stadium holds something like 9,000 people, there really aren't any bad seats.  We scooted out just before the game ended and grabbed a round at Tony Packo's.  The fellas said that their chili dogs were good.  I'll take their word for it, since you couldn't pay me enough money to eat that kind of stuff.  Instead of eating, I took advantage of the fact that they had Guinness and Bass on tap.  For some reason, quite a few of the bars around home don't seem to be equipped to serve a good old black and tan.  A treat, I say.

We tried to scoot back into the stadium to watch the postgame fireworks show, but the guy at the gate was having none of it.  No re-entry, he insisted.  Fine then.  Back over to my $5 parking space and up I-75 we went.

My work for tomorrow should be fairly easy again.  I say "should" because we all know that things beyond my control can change at any time, in addition to the fact that I can screw up a delivery at any time.  I'm scheduled to pull one load tomorrow - starting at 1pm and hitting Flint, Saginaw, and Bridgeport.  Assuming that all goes as planned, I should knock it out in six or seven hours.  Assuming that all goes as planned...

8/11/10

We spoke about inspiration recently, didn't we?  If you're not up to speed on this part of the deal, then I'm sorry about your luck.  You're gonna have to read this blog a little more frequently.  Tonight I was fortunate enough to encounter a brilliant bit of inspiration... twice. 

After this afternoon's work - 200 miles of driving with stops in Bridgeport, Saginaw, and Frankenmuth - I headed back to the terminal in Livonia.  My two closest friends were waiting for me there with my newly repaired car.  As we bantered back and forth about various things, The Big Lebowski was mentioned at some point in time.  This provided the first dose of inspiration.  How long has it been since you last went bowling?  For me it had been a while.  For my friends even longer, I suspect.  So we swung by my place and grabbed my bowling balls, then hit the lanes.  I might as well have used a house ball, given how poorly I bowled, but we had a good time just the same.

After grabbing some groceries and heading home for the night, my one buddy and I were sitting around and shooting the breeze.  I decided to pop Bull Durham into the DVD player.  This is another of those movies that you can see a hundred times and still enjoy it the next time around.  As the story of ole Crash's time in Durham played out on the screen, I mentioned that it would be pretty cool to live in a town with a minor league team.  Hey, wait a second...

A quick visit to toledomudhens.com produced... well... nothing.  Apparently it hasn't occurred to anyone that this would be a good website for a team called the Toledo Mud Hens.  Google got me there eventually though.  It turns out that the Hens are in town this week and I have the day off tomorrow.  Seats down the left field foul line, in the fourth row, for nine bucks a pop?  Pretty cool indeed.

8/10/10

The following conversation took place this afternoon in Saginaw, Michigan.  I was making the first of my two deliveries in that town.  As I wrapped up the stop, I wheeled the pallet jack toward a storage trailer with pallets of empty milk crates in it.

Kroger Dairy Girl:  Oh, you're taking more empties?

Me: Yeah, I have room for two more (pallets).

KDG:  Cool, I thought you were done.

Me: Nah, I only have one more stop to make so I can get a couple more in there.

KDG: Some of the guys don't like to take the empties.

Me: Probably just trying to get out as quickly as they can.

KDG: But some of the guys do everything for me.  They put the milk in the cooler and everything.

Me: Yeah.

KDG:  One guy even asks for me when I'm not here.  I don't know what that's all about.  Kinda weird.

Me: I'm pretty sure I know what that's about.

KDG: What?

Me: Nothing.  All set.  That's seven pallets in, nine out, and two left.

KDG: Oh, okay.

Go ahead detectives.  Which detail did I leave out? 

I failed to mention, of course, that the dairy girl was about 21 years old and smoking hot.  I may not have told you this part of the tale in advance, but you can bet your ass that she knows it.  And yet it's as if she just can't figure out why some old pervert delivering milk will do whatever she asks of him. So I must inquire - why do you broads out there feel the need to act out the coy routine?  I'm pretty sure that these pretty girls take classes on how to get whatever they can out of whatever sucker guys come along.  Yet they still need to hear someone else say it to them, just for kicks.  Stupid.  (In completely unrelated news: I've had a sketchy past when it comes to dating smoking hot girls.  For some reason it never seems to last very long.  Go figure.)

When I walked into work this morning, I was scheduled for those two stops in Saginaw and nothing more, at least as far as I knew.  Of course we shouldn't be surprised that things had changed though.  Just a way of life at this gig of mine.  I still had the two stops in Saginaw, as noted during the little anecdote above.  In addition, I would have a second run with one stop in Flint and another in Owosso.  So my pay for the day went from its scheduled $138.27 to a more robust $288.50.  Two-stop loads are far more easy than three-stop loads though, and the bulk of today's pay came from the lengthy mileage involved, so it turned out to be a pretty easy afternoon and evening for me.  The electric pallet jack in Owosso had been repaired and everything.  Even with a stop in Grand Blanc for some dinner, I wrapped up the whole day within twelve hours of starting.  Good deal.

I got the news about my brakes from the auto shop in Lincoln Park this afternoon.  Pretty much what I had expected.  The pads are worn and the rotors are rusted pretty badly, so it's an all-around remove and replace job.  The seasonal weather patterns here in Michigan can be pretty dramatic and my car had been left to sit for weeks at a time over the last four years.  Without regular use, it comes as no surprise to me that various metal parts would begin to rust.  I wasn't terribly concerned about the cost, as I told you yesterday.  It was just about what I anticipated.  I had, however, been hoping to get the car back today.  No such luck.  The car will ll be ready tomorrow afternoon and my pull time for tomorrow is 11:30am, so it'll be another day of getting chauffered around.  Bummer.

Tomorrow's trip will take me to Saginaw, Bridgeport, and Frankenmuth.  I'm not familiar with any of the locations in question, so here's hoping for a day that goes as smoothly as today went.  In point of fact, let's go ahead and hope that they replace the milk run with a trip to Grand Rapids or Indianapolis.  That would be even better.

8/9/10

If it's true that some of us fondly remember things that never actually happened, then it seems that someone like me should be a little better at remembering about the things that do happen.  For instance, I had completely forgotten that sometimes a day off from work is really pretty lame.  I spent my first handful of days off doing fun things or productive things and so forth.  One day it was a ballgame.  Another day it was a cookout with friends.  Another day it was a cookout with my parents.  Another day it was some grocery shopping and a few beers.  You get the picture. Not so much today though.  Today seemed like one that got away.

I was in bed until the afternoon, which is already enough to leave one with a sense that the day is half gone.  When you go to bed at 7:30am though, what are you gonna do?  I had shut off the ringer on my phone so that the inevitable call from my dispatcher wouldn't wake me.  As it turns out though, he never called.  Good deal.

Once I got up and moving, I drove over to a friend's house in Lincoln Park.  He knows some guys who run an auto shop and I trust mechanics about as much as I trust politicians, so he offered to ride up to the shop with me.  I'm not really concerned with the cost of getting my brakes fixed.  I'll pay whatever I need to pay.  I would just prefer to know that they're not charging me for a bunch of other shit that isn't necessary.  Since I hadn't made it to the shop until late in the day, there wasn't much of a chance that my car would be done before they closed.  Probably tomorrow, the guy behind the desk told me.  Fair enough.

So it looks like my buddy the reverand will be my transportation for a day or so.  He gave me a ride home this evening and offered to get me back to my car tomorrow.  If my car isn't ready before I have to go to work, then he'll drive me to the terminal at my appointed time and we'll deal with the car later.  I'm not sure exactly why it is, but I don't much enjoy having people do favors for me.  When it comes to that sort of thing, I'm much more content to be the one helping out a friend.  Anything that's being done on my behalf is something for which I would gladly pay.  I have no idea what the explanation is.  That's just the way I am.  More comfortable running a surplus in the goodwill department, I suppose.  Alas, the reverand is a dear old friend.  He and his father would do anything for me.  It would be an insult to turn down his generosity.  (And such generosity is always appreciated.  Don't get me wrong.)

The dispatcher at work, having kindly left me alone on my day off (once again), did call later in the day and give me tomorrow's assignment.  I have one straightforward two-stop run to Saginaw and my pull time is 11:45am, so that'll be a pretty easy day as long as nothing changes.  I'll earn just a little more than the daily minimum, meaning that we'll be far short of last week's pace, but I'm okay with that.  That $313 work load or whatever it was last Tuesday was a little excessive.

Once I got home tonight and listened to the ballgame for a little while, I decided that I would indulge a little OTR flashback and take a nap.  That really has been something that I've missed since leaving the sleeper cab behind.  After getting my usual few hours of sleep in the early morning, an afternoon power nap in the middle of my work day would always leave me feeling quite refreshed.  Whether that nap would come at a customer's loading dock or at a rest area along the highway, I very much enjoyed having a bedroom attached to my office at all times. Tonight, as it turns out, my bedroom was just down the hall, so close enough.

I just woke a little while ago to find that my day off was pretty much over.  A pretty lame conclusion to a pretty lame day off.  Now there's nothing left to do except bum around on my computer for a while and see what I can learn.  Such as... Shaq is a 12 year old girl named Tanya?  I'll be damned.  At the risk of sounding like someone who defends sexual predators, I'm not terribly comfortable with the notion of people being arrested for propositioning kids who don't actually exist.  Who's the victim?  I catch a bit of flack for that viewpoint, and for understandable reasons, but something about the whole notion of tricking people into thinking about maybe committing something kinda sorta like a crime, simply in order to arrest them, doesn't sit right with me.  I'd have no problem using modern technology to identify various perverts and watch for actual bad behavior, but I don't know... I'm a little leery of the Thought Police.

Of course, some of the day's news can make a fella stand up and applaud.  For example, Greg Gutfeld's latest missive is pure genius.  And Stephen Hawking's latest plan sounds like a real hoot as well.  I wanna land on one of those planets with the sexy queens or senators or whatever.  That's my only request.

8/8/10

Do you ever read newspapers?  I don't anymore.  There was a time when I had subscriptions to the Detroit News, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  At some point after Mr. Gore was kind enough to invent the internet though, I lost my taste for reading through forty pages of shit in order to see one worthwhile article.  Anyhow, back in the good old days, they had comics in the Detroit News.  I guess they probably still do, but you know, I don't read the paper anymore.  Somewhere in the comic section they would have a few crossword puzzles and such.  They also had horoscopes, complete with your lucky numbers for the day.  Well, today's lucky numbers for me were probably not 53 and 4.  If you're kicking those numbers around in your head right now, just stop.  You have no idea.  We'll get to it soon enough.

We might as well start with the 'man bites dog' aspect of the story.  For the second day in a row, I didn't get any phone calls from work and my assignments didn't change.  I was scheduled for six stops on two trailers when I left work last night and I had the same six stops on two trailers when I got to work this afternoon.  This, my friends, was simply stunning.

The first three-stop run took me to the Toledo area.  I shot down US-23, since my first delivery was on the western side of town.  Shortly after a quick fuel stop at the Pilot at Exit 5 in Michigan, I was in the dock for my first delivery.  Seven pallets of milk unloaded, five pallets of empties retrieved, no worries.  On to Stop #2...

Aside from the fact that it took damned near a half hour to cover the three and a half miles to the Kroger on Monroe Street in Toledo, I really have no complaints about the second stop.  I managed to get all of their milk off my trailer before their electric pallet jack's battery died, so good enough.  I prefer to use a manual jack to retrieve the pallets of empties anyway.  They're not very heavy and the manual jack seems much easier for me to control.  I got the milk for my last stop halfway rotated to the rear of the trailer and then headed on to Stop #3...

{Technical note - In a perfect world, I would rotate all of the milk to the rear of the trailer and all of the empties to the front of the trailer.  Some loading docks, however, are a little too tricky.  Any time a pallet of milk crosses the dock plate, there's the potential for a mishap.  I usually can get half the milk rotated to the rear of the trailer without ever taking it across the dock plate.  Then I leave the milk on the other side in the nose of the trailer and pile empties behind it.  Once I've made it to the last stop and removed the half of the milk that was rotated to the rear, I can shift the empties that are blocking the rest of the milk into the space that was vacated by the milk that I just removed.  Then the 'unrotated' milk comes off and everybody is happy.}

My third stop on the Toledo run was the store on Monroe Street in Sylvania.  I had been there once before and found it to be one of the best stops I've made in my short career as a milk man.  So, obviously, I was feeling pretty good about the first half of my day.  Just gotta drop these last seven pallets and then head back to the dairy for my second load.

As I pulled the first pallet out of my trailer and across the dock plate, the damned pallet jack seized up for some reason.  The one rule that is never to be disregarded is that you DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!  The other rule is that you never stop a pallet of milk as it crosses the dock plate.  Never.  So I guess you can see where this is going.  I sure as hell wasn't trying to stop, but the jack froze up nonetheless.  The milk was left to recoil from the impact of hitting the dock plate while all momentum was gone.  As unintentional as it may have been, I had stopped a pallet of milk on the dock plate.  Crash.  Bang.  Boom.

After taking the time to restack the pallet of milk and set aside the bottles that had spilled from the mishap, I had to figure out what to do next.  Surely the pallet jack seizing up had been an isolated incident, I thought.  No reason to think that would happen again.  On the other hand though, my trailer was sitting quite a bit below the dock.  Any effort to drag a pallet out of that trailer was going to force the pallet to tilt back into the trailer as it was removed.  I needed to employ some analytical skills and come up with a solution.

This is where the brightest idea of my week comes into play.  Since the milk would be tilting back into the trailer (the way the first pallet had tipped), I decided that I would turn each pallet around and then bring it out of the trailer as I was going forward.  This way the milk would tilt back into the pallet jack and would be supported well enough to keep it from tipping.  Yeah, fucking brilliant.

The milk never had the chance to lean back against the pallet jack.  As soon as the forks of the jack hit the dock plate, that second pallet of milk was launched like a cruise missile across the stock room floor.  This time, instead of having spilled milk in my trailer, I had spilled milk everywhere.  Awesome idea to come out going forward, eh?  Truly awesome.

After restacking my second pallet at that damned place, I needed to figure out how the other five pallets would be getting out of my trailer.  Backward was no good, since the dock plate was too steep.  Forward was no good, since the dock plate was too steep.  What to do?  What to do?  I wound up convincing the guy working in the stock room to back the pallets out of the trailer.  I stood on the other side and pushed them as he pulled with the pallet jack.  This approach managed to head off the tendency of the milk to recoil when the jack hit the dock plate.  It also cut down on the chance that the jack would freeze up again, since I was giving it an assist with my manly girly physique.

No more issues arose at that Sylvania stop, but my total time there wound up being an hour and a half.  You win some, you lose some.  When it came time for the stock receiver guy to sign for the delivery, I did a quick casualty assessment to see how muck milk had been spilled due to my incompetence.  53 gallons and 4 half-gallons.  Son of a...

As I drove back to the dairy to get my second load, I started doing some calculating to see if my little episode was going to cause me any problems vis a vis the 14 hour rule.  Any time a day is paying me close to $300, there's a chance that I'll get pretty close to the legal limit.  Any lengthy delay can derail the whole shift.  Probably not gonna be a problem tonight though, I concluded.  My second trip would involve a long drive out to Imlay City, but I should be okay as long as I didn't dump a couple more pallets along the way.  The last two stops were closer to home so I would be able to knock them out pretty quickly after the initial long drive was finished.  It turned out that the dairy didn't even have the paperwork ready for my second load before I got there.  So even if I had been quick and efficient with that last stop on my first trip, I wouldn't have begun the second trip any sooner.

The nightcap went as smoothly as I could hope.  I left the dairy at 10pm and got to Imlay City at 11:30pm.  I was out of there at midnight and then arrived at the store on 8 Mile in Livonia at 1:15am.  That stop took a while, as the store had only one electric pallet jack.  I would use the jack to pull a pallet off my trailer, then the receiving lady would take it from me and drive the pallet down the hall to the dairy cooler.  Then she would return a few minutes later and we would do it again.  Not exactly the most efficient approach, but I wasn't about to tell some old lady that she would have to use a manual jack to drag the milk down the hall.

I took a few more minutes at the end of that Livonia stop and performed my 'half rotation' in order to set up for my final stop in Walled Lake.  I left Livonia at 2:15am and got into the Walled Lake store at 2:30am.  I pulled off the first few pallets of milk, shifted some empties over, and then pulled off the last four pallets.  Once I had loaded the store's empty cases and closed up my trailer, I was back on the road at 3:15am.

At the dairy by 3:30am.  Trailer dropped and inspection completed by 3:45am.  One hour to spare.  (My 14 hour clock was good until 4:45am.)  Never a doubt, right?

A little birdie (aka the night dispatcher) told me that a couple of guys had already called in sick for Monday.  I'm not on the schedule at this point but she seems to think I shouldn't be surprised to get a phone call in the morning.  I'm not really sure what my response might be.  To answer the phone or not to answer the phone - that is the question.