3/19/08

If you ever have a hard time getting your ass in gear in the morning, I think I have the answer for you.

1) Set your alarm for 6:45am
2) Go to bed.
3) Wake up to piss and wonder why it's so light outside.
4) Look at the clock and see 8:15am.
5) Do some quick mental math (8:15am + nine hours = 5:15pm)
6) Check your appointment time (5pm)
7) Haul ass out of town.

Yep, that seems to do the trick. Of course, it's also a good way to get yourself behind the eight ball, but that's just details. I was making pretty good time and looking like I'd arrive around a half hour early... then it started raining. Rain isn't such a big deal, right? I agree, but apparently the rain means that people are free to block both lanes of the interstate at 35mph for thirty miles. So I had to be the aggressive pain in the ass driver as I made my way through, but I got out of the logjam and showed up about ten minutes before 5pm. Then the guy at the receiving location told me to go to shipping, which was a couple miles away. I got over there and checked in. Strike that. I got over there and tried to check in with the lady in the office. I could describe her for you, but what fun is that? Let's just say that she must have a son named Kyle.

And on my ex-wife's birthday too... that's pretty funny. Since I had the audacity to try to tell the lady that I was dropping off and not picking up, I got to sit and wait for a while as she pretended to be too busy to hear me. That seems to be some kind of ego trip that certain customers like to exercise. Then they loaded a local guy who showed up after I did, so I waited a little longer. When she came out to check the seal and tell me that I had a door assigned, I acted like I was on the phone and couldn't hear her. Fuck it... good for the gander and so forth. Once she looked good and annoyed, I rolled down my window. So they unloaded me and that was that. In the end, I wasn't actually there all that long.

I've ducked into a little truck stop just north of Dothan for the night. I have to pick up tomorrow a couple hundred miles to the north, in Anniston. As I looked at my intended route, I didn't see any places that I would be likely to find parking at night. I've been to the T/A in Montgomery and it pretty much sucks. All the other places listed in my directory have small lots or no lots at all. My instructions say that I am not to arrive at the shipper more than a half hour before my appointment, so I guess that means I can't park there overnight. So yeah, I'm just staying down here. I can only work a total of ten hours or so between the rest of today and all of tomorrow, so it really makes no difference when I drive up there.

3/18/08

Beauty day today. Well, it was kinda dreary, but the driving part went well. Usually going down I-81 through Virginia is a royal pain in the ass. Two lanes, tons of hills, and way too much traffic. Today it wasn't so bad though. It looks like Pennsylvania is getting soaked right now, so I got out ahead of that stuff. I think the best part of the drive was the little dance a Stevens driver was doing with me for about fifteen miles. Our trucks both go 65mph, and he was heavier than me, so he would take a run every time we went downhill. But he couldn't get next to me, so he would fall back in line going uphill. I would pull ahead a little ways and he would try it again a mile or two down the road. Then, when the dude finally made it around, he had to go into the scales and I got a bypass signal on my Prepass. Haha, so long sucker.

So I got down to Statesville, North Carolina tonight. That was a full eleven hour day, and I'll have somewhere around nine hours to go tomorrow. It's always nice to find an easy pull-through parking space at the end of a long shift, so I guess things are right with the world for now. This (Homer's) is one truck stop where I actually like to spend a few bucks. They dumped Citgo when old Chavez started his shit last year, so I have to respect that at least a little bit.

Tomorrow's run shouldn't be bad as long as Atlanta doesn't slow me down too much. My appointment is for 4pm CDT. The next pickup is something like 11am the next day, so it looks like my schedule should be pretty normal for a few days here.

3/17/08

I would like to start by welcoming Irishmen of every nationality on this St. Patrick's Day.

So, I got up to Manchester ten minutes ahead of my 5am appointment and was relieved to find the gate open. I pulled into the ConWay yard, but nobody was there to assign me a dock. That finally happened at 5:30am. Who would have guessed? See that picture up in the corner of the page? That's me being surprised.

After I got empty, I headed back south to the rest area where I spent last night. It was about fifteen miles away, but I didn't know of anything closer. My intent was to leave Manchester by retracing the route I had taken on my way into town. Yeah, that didn't work out. The ConWay yard is on a one-way street. Once I turned north out of the yard, it was the old "that street looks okay" routine. It turned into a bit of an adventure, but I found my way back to the rest area without hitting anything.

A few hours later I got an assignment to head a little further south and pick up a load in Massachusetts. It worked out that my route to the shipper would have taken me right past the rest area, so that was nice. I checked in and then sat around waiting for almost five hours to get loaded and get my paperwork. So I could only manage to knock out a couple hundred miles this evening before my 14 hour clock ran out.

As a result of the delay at the shipper, I'll have two long ass days ahead of me starting early tomorrow morning. I'm scheduled to deliver in Dothan, Alabama on Wednesday afternoon. On a more positive note though, I'm set to grab another run out of Alabama on Thursday morning and head for Laredo. That will put me in Laredo on a weekend, which can be hit and miss, but my miles will be somewhere between 2,500 and 2,600 for the week by the time I get there.

I stopped in Sturbridge, Massachusetts this afternoon to top off the fuel tanks. Apparently in that state it's now illegal for the pump handles to lock in the 'on' position. I had to fill up one tank, then walk around to the other side and fill up the other one. So let me make sure I understand this. The liberals in Massachusetts have enacted a law that interferes with the ability to do a job and, as a result, caused a logjam with respect to interstate commerce? See that picture up in the corner of the page? That's me being surprised.

3/16/08

Waking up in western New York and seeing snow falling... where have I heard this story before? It didn't turn out anything like last weekend's drive though. Some snow, some rain, some snain (I get to make up words in my own blog sometimes), but nothing to really slow me down. I headed east across I-90 and ran the speed limit all day.

After a nice hearty lunch at Sbarro I got across Massachusetts and up into New Hampshire. I passed a few places along the way, where I knew there would be parking. I had my eyes on a rest area that my atlas shows on US-3 just outside Nashua. In the back of my mind, I was thinking I might be better off stopping short. If the rest area were full, I would have no other options between Nashua and Manchester. The smart thing was probably to hedge my bets and stop sooner, allowing for the possibility of finding a full lot. I don't generally do the smart thing though, so I rolled the dice and headed up to New Hampshire anyway. The rest area is down along some little side street. It has parking for five trucks... and there were four trucks here before me. Beauty.

When I started at CFI, they made a big deal of saying that many of the people in Joplin used to be drivers so they know what it's like out here. Runs like this one lead me to call bullshit on that topic. I was dispatched to deliver at 5am tomorrow. The ConWay paperwork says that the load is due at 5am Tuesday. Obviously I had plenty of time to cover 925 miles this weekend, so there is no reason to wait and deliver on Tuesday. I have no issue with them scheduling me for tomorrow, but here's the rub. No parking, right? We're ConWay employees now, but not really. So the ConWay terminal is closed for the weekend, set to open at 5am Monday. Say I show up at 4:30am and nobody is there. I'm on some bullshit little street with a big old truck and nowhere to go. (They showed up after 5am in Providence the last time I had a Monday drop at a ConWay.) Say I show up at 5:30am and somebody is there. I'm late, according to my dispatch. So I have the fun task of driving into a major city before the sun comes up and trying to arrive at exactly 5am. Hopefully traffic flows exactly the way I foresee it with my all-knowing mind.

Why not just schedule me into Manchester at 10am or something like that? Then I don't have to wake up at 4am, I know the yard will be open, and I'll still be a day ahead of ConWay's schedule. To someone who "knows what it's like," this shit is just common sense. Whatever man.

I got tired of the news talk after a while today, so I checked out XM's Irish music on channel 76. They're playing it all weekend and through St. Patrick's Day. As long as you can wade through the overabundance of cheesy singalong nonsense, they mix in some pretty good music. I even heard a handful of the old fenian ballads, which surprised me a little given today's PC climate. If you have XM, it's a decent change of pace worth checking out. Anyhow, it's time to wind down for a little while, since I don't make the rules and I do have to get up at 4am. Cheers.