4/23/09

After two weeks, several hundred dollars spent, several thousand calories consumed, and several dozen beer bottles emptied, I am out of Michigan. Beauty.

I stayed home last night and set my alarm for early this morning, figuring that I wouldn't get any assignment much earlier than 6am. I got up at 5:30am and found myself still at #2. Got back up at 6am and checked again. #0. That means a load is assigned. Beauty. I called the dispatcher to see what was what and got some good news. I had to go about a hundred miles to make my pickup and I could get it any time between 8am and 2pm. Sweet.

After going back to bed until a more reasonable hour, I headed up to work and hooked to my empty trailer. My truck fired right up after sitting for a few days so I guess we can assume that my new batteries are functional. It was a nice easy trip down to Defiance, Ohio and it felt pretty good to be out driving again for a change. My drop/hook was a pretty basic affair, but my backing skills were a little rusty and the drop lot was pretty tight. It took a little while, but I got 'er done. From Ohio, it was west to Fort Wayne, south to Indy, and then west toward St. Louis. I stopped at our yard in Pocahontas for the night, having covered nearly 500 miles. Not bad for the first day out after a long layoff.

My dispatch indicates that this load is due in McPherson, Kansas by Sunday night at midnight. It's a drop/hook and I take the Sunday night ETA to mean that it can get there any time this weekend. We'll see. I intend to drive the mofo all the way through and try to dump it tomorrow evening. I may end up with a 950 mile pay week here, but I'm going to do my best to put myself in a position to get one more load before Saturday night. Kansas doesn't seem to be a hotbed of manufacturing activity though. All I can do is get there and then let the rest take care of itself.

The Q1 earnings continue to roll in and it continues to be impossible to make any sense of it all. There's American Express, where earnings tumbled but beat estimates. They say that defaults are on the rise but they're downsizing to help profitability. And they expect defaults to level off at some point this year. I'm not sure how you square these statements with their decision to cancel my accounts, when I spend as much in a month as their average customer spends in a quarter and I've never been late in ten years. Weird. Banks are stupid.

Then there's Con-way, where the first quarter loss appeared to be a robust $154 million but the bulk of the loss was a writedown of the value of my employer, Con-way Truckload. So we, as a truckload unit, lost $132.7 million. And $134.8 million was a writedown. So we actually made $2.1 million. Got all that? You've just read a nutshell explanation of the banking crisis, illustrated by a non-banking corporation. Freight volumes are down so CTL is "worth" less than it was a few months ago. Same assets, same liabilities, just a lesser "goodwill" value. Presto, change-o, a hundred million bucks disappear on paper, and Con-way's balance sheet gets rewritten. If Con-way were a bank, it would have less equity against which to raise capital and would thus be less able to lend money. Since it's a trucking company and not a bank, it just sticks the paper loss in its back pocket so its return on equity can look awesome once the economy rebounds. Accounting rules are stupid.

There were a few others that I heard on the radio today, but I don't remember what they were and I don't feel like looking them up. Good enough. I think I should try and get some sleep now so I can scoot past St. Louis before rush hour tomorrow.