9/22/10

Bad news, everyone.  Those pesky Vietnamese are stealing House seats or something.





Jackass.

Anyone who caught the comment thread on yesterday's post already knows that I got some bad news of my own.  My poor little motor has indeed gone kaput.  I made my call to AAA this morning, at which point I learned that I get 15 miles of free towing, not 5.  The guy from the local Amoco (I thought it was all BP now?) shop showed up within five minutes and I was at my destination ten minutes after that.

Once my buddy picked me up at the shop and drove me home, it was time to get ready for work.  Just before I headed out the door I got the call.  This is broken... that's something else... the other thing is whatever.  It's all Greek, dude.  What I understood was that I need a new motor.  That part was perfectly clear.  The mechanic guy said that he had made several calls without being able to find a motor for me.  He was going to check the internet and see what he could do.  Pretty good idea, I say.  Mr. Gore's fine invention will reveal numerous sites where I can get a remanufactured engine with a decent warranty at a decent price. I didn't hear back from the fella today though, so maybe he just doesn't have the same mad internet skills (aka Google) that I have... or something.

Work was another place where the inevitable laws of nature would have to bounce back in response to how smoothly yesterday went.  I checked in at the terminal, grabbed a truck, and headed down the street to the dairy.  Upon arrival, I parked and headed into the shipping office.  It turns out that they had booked five of our trucks today and I was the fifth to arrive.  Alas, there were only four loads.  I was shit outta luck.

Back over at the terminal, the dispatcher set to work trying to figure out what to do with me.  My union contract stipulates that I get four hours of pay if I show up on time and then get sent home through no fault of my own.  That's not a very good way to spend the company's money and it wouldn't exactly make a very profitable day for me, so the best thing to do was put me to work.  All of today's milk loads were already covered though.  So I got to cruise around and pick up pallets of empty cases for a while.  By the time I had spent six hours going to four stores and filling my trailer with empties, my day was done.  My mileage and stop pay wound up coming in just over $130, so I'll get the guaranteed minimum of ~$140 for the day.  Good enough.

After tonight's workout I'm feeling pretty run down physically, but for whatever reason I'm still awake.  Tomorrow is my day off so I can sleep whenever I feel like it, but I would kinda like to catch up with a couple of friends before the day is too far gone.  We'll see how it goes.

9/21/10

What does it mean to you when things seem to go a little better than expected?  To me, it means that I should get ready for the bad news.  Today was a pretty good one for the most part, so the laws of nature dictate that tomorrow should pull everything back into balance.  Therefore I'm bracing for the news that I'll have to shell out quite a bit of coin to get this car situation resolved.  We'll know soon enough.

I went ahead and booked a rental car from Enterprise before I went to bed last night.  It cost something like $150 for a week, so not too bad.  The fella from the rental place came and picked me up this morning, so at least my transportation for the next several days has been secured.

Given my general mistrust of people that I don't know... Hang on.  Let's correct that right now.  Given my general mistrust of people, whether I know them or not...  Yeah, that's better...  I wasn't too keen on the idea of calling a local repair shop and handing over my car.  There's a possibility that I can get by with a few basic repairs.  There's also a possibility that I need a new engine.  In either case, I'll be content to pay the appropriate price and move along with my life.  I have money in the bank and I don't tend to get too stressed out about pecuniary matters, so I'm inclined to file this sort of thing in the 'You win some, you lose some' column.  My only concern was that I would have no way of knowing if the diagnosis presented to me was an accurate one.

So I called my father and gave him the rundown.  As I suspected, he knew a guy.  Apparently my brother's father-in-law has a buddy who has an auto shop or something.  This guy has done work for various people in my family and my father likes him.  Okay then.  Better than nothing.  I spoke with the mechanic in question this afternoon and told him that I would find a way to get my car down to the shop (~5 miles from here) tomorrow morning.  I think I get up to 5 miles for free with my AAA membership, so I might have to drive down the block a little bit before I call them.  No point in paying for a service call when I don't have to.  That's my policy... or something.

Next it was time to tackle the trio of ghetto Kroger stores on today's agenda.  Man bites dog.  Each stop went quickly and easily.  In point of fact, the whole shift would have taken only five and a half hours if not for the fact that my second store sits right next to a school.  All of these degenerate bastards park in the Kroger lot and then walk over to the school to retrieve their little bundles of joy, so I had to spend twenty minutes trying to fight my way to the loading dock.  No justice...

It was way too early to head to the gym by the time I finished work, so I cruised back home in my nifty Dodge Avenger and hung out for a while.  ("Free upgrade," they call it.  "No cheaper cars available this morning," I call it.)  The latest issue of Maxim was in my mailbox.  Per usual, it had a bunch of tired old jokes that I heard from Jackie the Joke Man back in the 90's.  In a nice twist though, the Anna Kournikova pictorial was in 3-D.  Not bad at all.

Tomorrow's work assignment looks nice and easy so far.  I'll be pulling a trailer from the Country Fresh dairy in Livonia at 11am and then making a turn in Grand Rapids.  As long as there are no complications I should be done by 5pm or so.  There's always the chance that more work will pop up, but that hasn't happened much lately.  Odds are that I'll get an early start on my Thursday off from work.  That'll do.

9/20/10

Oh boy. While I was out running some errands this afternoon, I wound up with some time to kill so I stopped at a theater and checked out a movie.  When I came out to my car, I saw that someone had hit it while it was parked.  Again.  This time around, the damage wasn't much more than a rub against one of the rear doors.  Probably not even worth my trouble to worry about that one.  I thought that this would be the worst news of the day with respect to my car.  I was wrong.

After having dinner and visiting with some friends out in the northern suburbs, I headed down to my gym in Novi for my leg workout.  All worn out and showered up, it was time to head back home.  Somewhere along the way on I-275, I started to hear a noise.  It started off sounding like a plastic bag was stuck to the front of the car and flapping in the wind or something.  By the time I got off the freeway, it had evolved into a much louder knocking sound from the engine.  Oy.

I had an oil change done a few weeks ago.  At some point along the way since then, all of my oil has either burned away or leaked somehow.  I threw a couple of quarts in tonight, then took it easy in order to cover the last few miles and make my way home.  The knocking sound seems to have eased a bit, but it's still pretty bad.  From what I've found with that newfangled Google thing, it sounds like I'm fucked.  It's always something, eh?

Tomorrow was already looking like a real pain in the ass for me.  My dispatch has me going to three lousy stores in the Flint area.  It pays a little over the daily minimum and, based on my prior experiences with the stores in question, will likely take eight hours or so to complete.

The general hassle of delivering milk will likely pale in comparison to tomorrow's real challenge though.  I'll need to get my car to a shop, get myself to work (and possibly to the gym), pray that my engine hasn't been destroyed, find a way to get back home from work (or possibly the gym), and then do it all again the next day.  I don't trust mechanics at all to begin with, so I'm off to a bad start.  There's a Mazda dealer pretty close to where I work, but I'm not inclined to think that I want to drive the damned car that far, just in case I haven't wrecked it yet.  If you know anything about the less than impressive slice of heaven that I call home, then you know that I'm not too thrilled about the thought of giving my car to one of the degenerates around here.  That's probably what I'll have to do though, if I want to preserve any hope of saving the engine.

I don't know man.  We'll sort it out in the morning.  At least I had a good dinner and a good workout tonight.  And that Ben Affleck movie was moderately decent this afternoon.  And there's an Enterprise Rent-A-Car place right down the street.  They'll pick you up, you know.  I might as well drink a few beers and try to get some sleep.

9/19/10

I have a feeling that this won't be the last time you see this image on my blog. Call it a hunch.

At least my Tigers managed to make their meaningless game last four hours, screwing up the viewing plans of SportsCenter fans all over the country. I got a chuckle out of that one. After an easy shift at work, dinner at Applebee's, and a nap in my car, I headed to Novi for my nightly workout. When it was time to get on the treadmill and burn a few calories to wrap it up, I was surprised to see that the game was still going. At least the boys came out on top this time around. Any time you can sweep those thugs from Chicago, that has to count for something.

Maybe tomorrow will be a useful day off. Maybe not. I don't know. Whatever.