Flashbacks...

Tuesday is laundry day here at the Fenian Godfather Estate.  Well, usually Tuesday is laundry day.  This time around, there was the matter of a late night of drinking on Monday with which to contend.  No worries though, I thought.  I could roll out of the sack around noon and get started on my chores, then kick back and enjoy a ballgame in the afternoon while my clothes went for a spin.

RING! RING!

I've gotten in the habit of not answering my phone when my employer calls on an off day.  The main reason is that it's easier for me to retrieve my next day's assignment from a voicemail message than it is to stop whatever I'm doing and write it down.  I keep a spreadsheet with all the monetary particulars and such so I need all of the details.  A secondary reason for not answering the phone is that I prefer not to be bothered on my days off.  If the dispatcher is in a pinch, he can leave me a message and say so.  This way I can weigh the pros and cons of working an extra day before I call back and give them my answer.

Business hasn't been too stellar lately, so the calls for extra work have been few and far between.  Some of the more senior drivers are convinced that we're overstaffed at the moment, as quite a few new fellas have come on board in recent months, but staffing decisions are above my pay grade.  All I know is that my work load has been lighter than normal.  So, with respect to avoiding the phone on my day off, I guess I've gotten rusty.  When the phone rang yesterday at 11am, I reached over and picked it up.  After saying, "Hello," I realized that 11am is too early for me to get the next day's assignment.  Oh well, let's see what's what...

It turns out that the Kroger dairy in Indianapolis was having some sort of technical difficulty.  This meant that various stores wouldn't be getting any milk unless the dairy in Michigan could come to the rescue.  Somehow the folks at the Michigan Dairy were able to make up the slack.  Half the time they have enough trouble keeping up with their own local workload, but that's another topic.

It's commonplace for these dairies to send a trailer or two of a given product to each other in order to cover a shortage.  Maybe one place is a little short on 2% milk or whatever, so the other place sends over a few thousand gallons to help out.  I sincerely enjoy the call when I hear that my next assignment is a $300 run to Indy and back.  This week's situation was different though.  The dairy in Indianapolis apparently wasn't producing anything for at least a little while.  Michigan Dairy wound up loading eight trailers' worth of complete orders for stores in Illinois and Indiana.  Our Indianapolis terminal was able to round up enough manpower to come and get six of the trailers.  Six is less than eight though, right?

This is where I come into the picture.  If possible, the fine folks at Quickway needed to know if I could make an evening run down to the Flying J in Lake Station, Indiana.  (Another Michigan fella was a little while behind me with the eighth trailer, but screw him.  This is my story.)  There I would relay a loaded trailer to a guy who would make four deliveries in and around Rockford, Illinois.  Perhaps the trucker folks among you rolled your eyes when you heard mention of that damned Flying J.  I sure as hell rolled mine.  Of all the places to set up a relay...  It was almost as if I was back in my old black Kenworth, cursing the Con-way Truckload people for setting up a Godforsaken relay in some Godforsaken truck stop at some Godforsaken hour.

In the present case though, at least the Quickway dispatchers had a decent excuse.  The long-haul world isn't really their milieu.  These guys spend their days handling local deliveries, so it's not surprising that they don't know about the shithole Steel City truck stop on Grant Street, where there's usually plenty of room late at night.  That place would have worked quite nicely.  Instead, someone somewhere looked at a truck stop directory and thought, "Hey, I've heard of Flying J."  As a general rule of thumb, any Flying J not located in Pecos, Texas will be a clusterfuck by 9pm on most weeknights.  Mix in one of the most heavily traveled truck corridors in the country and... well, there you go.  Good times, good times.

I managed to find my relay partner without too much difficulty.  Our system is a little more arcane than that used by the OTR outfits.  We don't have any satellite communications or anything like that.  Nah, I just got a call from my dispatcher.  "You're meeting a guy named Charlie.  Here's his phone number.  Give him a call."  To be honest, I think I like this way better.  Why waste time communicating via third parties who don't know shit about truck stops?  Better to go straight to the source, I suspect.  Charlie was able to tell me accurately how to find him and we were able to arrange the swap.

Sidebar moment:  'Charlie' was an African dude with one hell of an accent.  What are the odds that his name is really Charlie?  Or that the guy at your local China Wok is named 'Mike'?  Is it that these guys have real names that are too hard to pronounce or that life is just simpler for them with traditional American names?  I don't know.  Anyhow...

As was expected, that Flying J was a disaster.  I arrived at 11pm.  Every parking spot was taken.  EVERY parking spot was taken.  That's not a huge deal, per se, since Charlie already had a parking spot.  I just needed to find a little space where I could set down my loaded trailer.  Then ole Chuck could take it, I could go get his empty, and we could both proceed with our evenings.  There's this cool thing that truck drivers do though.  When the parking spots are gone, they say, "Fuck it.  This'll do."  Then everyone else gets to try to figure out how to get through the truck stop.  I guess I'm being a little unfair, since not all truck drivers have that attitude.  Plenty of them do though.  Believe me.  What a mess.

After essentially surrendering to the If you can't beat 'em, join 'em school of thought and dropping my loaded trailer right in the middle of the damned road, I rolled over and backed under Charlie's trailer full of empty cases.  At this point the flashback wasn't quite complete.  I hooked up my air lines and electrical cable.  I kicked the tires and checked the lights.  I cranked up the landing gear.  I walked toward the cab of my truck.  A poor unfortunate TMC driver had entered the truck stop in front of me, before I found Charlie and before I found that there was no decent place to drop my trailer.  After I had made the swap with Charlie, the TMC dude was still circling.  Poor fella.

The TMC guy, seeing that (a) I was making a relay and (b) I was driving a day cab, rolled down his window and asked if I was heading out.  Yep.  On my way in a minute.  I couldn't hear his sigh of relief over the din of idling diesel engines, but I'm pretty sure I could see it.  Flashback complete.  There's no way in hell I would ever have tried to spend the night at that particular Flying J (stopping for lunch there was bad enough), but there were plenty of times that I had to circle for a while in various other locations, waiting for someone to leave so I could park for the night.  I miss a few things about being out on the road.  I don't miss that shit.