5/19/09

That stretch from Palm Beach to Miami definitely puts the "blue hair" in the good old Blue Hair Expressway. Mix in some rain and you've got yourself a good old-fashioned (pardon the pun) mess on your hands. How you can lose control of a car when you're going 30mph on the freeway is beyond me to comprehend. While we're on the topic, I think I have another of those laws that should be implemented but never will; If trucks are banned from the left lane, octogenarians should likewise be banned from the center lane. I ain't sayin', I'm just sayin'...

I got a pre-planned load to pick up in Miami after today's delivery, taking one bit of uncertainty out of the equation for me. It turned out that I could have parked on the street near the consignee but you never really know in that town. I was glad to see that I would have somewhere to go and not have to worry about parking. The trip down I-95, as the first paragraph may have suggested, was slow and tedious. I got checked in a couple of hours early though and then had to wait for my door assignment. The extortionists lumpers got a healthy $140 fee for the unloading and I once again concluded that I'm in the wrong business.

Once I was empty, I wasn't really empty. Here we go again... It turns out that the trailer that I picked up in Pennsylvania had some sort of imperfection in the floor. I couldn't see any light coming through but there must have been a crack or a hole or something. It had allowed water to get in under some of the boxes that were stacked inside as I drove through the monsoons on the way down. Long story short - two cases of napkins and four cases of paper towels were rejected. I checked on the products inside the boxes and they were fine. The simple fact that the boxes were wet made them unacceptable. Super. My call to the cargo claims guy in Joplin was surprisingly quick and painless this time around though.

I managed to unload one case of paper towels on a guy who was working on his truck outside the customer's lot. Five cases left to go and nobody else around. What to do, what to do? I sure as hell wasn't going to throw them all away. I would be lying if I said that I've ever paid attention to the cost of paper towels and napkins, but I'm sure they cost something. I decided that I would load the rest into my truck and give them to Mom or whoever else wants them when I get home. What a ridiculous decision that turned out to be. Both of my side boxes are full. All of the little storage areas in my sleeper are full. The floor in the sleeper is piled up to the height of my bed. There are a few rolls of paper towels on the floor by my passenger's seat, under my weight bench. And there are still a few packs of napkins piled on the bed. Completely ridiculous. I'm sticking to my guns though. If I took the time to load them in here, these damned disposable linens are going back to Michigan with me.

With all that resolved, it was time to send in my empty call and receive my next assignment. What followed could politely be described as 'the grabbing of the ankles.' My 1,400 mile run to Illinois somehow turned into a 273 mile run to be relayed to a team in Wildwood, Florida. I had more than enough hours to deliver it in Illinois by Thursday afternoon so I wasn't sure exactly what was the story there. I sent a message explaining that I could make the delivery on time and then headed over to the next shipper. The guy had me loaded within a few minutes, I closed up the trailer, and I was promptly dispatched to Wildwood. An hour later I got a reply to my message. They were kind enough to inform me that the outbound driver would be waiting in Wildwood when I got there. Yeah, thanks for nothing, peckerheads.

There were a few options concerning routing; Go up I-95 and cut over, go up the turnpike, or take US-27 through the middle of the state. I headed straight up US-27 out of Miami, since I-95 sucks balls and I'm still on strike against paying cash tolls. I probably should find more meaningful goals in life. Right now I'm stuck with two - never paying cash tolls and transporting a bunch of paper towels for a couple more weeks. Goals are goals though. So far I'm batting 1.000 on these two. The ride was probably a lot better than I-95 would have been and not a whole lot slower than the turnpike, as nearly as I can tell.

I was lucky enough to find a parking space at the Pilot in Wildwood when I got here. Then I got the distinct pleasure of walking around in the rain to find my outbound relay partner. I found him, we made the swap, and I may have gained some insight into why I lost the rest of my run. I had assumed that the planners simply panicked when I was at the previous consignee for a few hours. They had assigned me to a 1pm pickup when I had a 3pm delivery appointment in the first place. I tried to mitigate things somewhat by arriving early to the consignee but they didn't unload me until 3pm. Maybe all that waiting had convinced someone that I wouldn't be able to make the rest of the schedule on time. I asked the outbound driver if he was trying to get home or something (another plausible explanation). He said no, he had just left home. He lives in Florida and this is his first run since leaving the house. Remember though, this guy was part of the team to which I was passing the loaded trailer. At this point I'm thinking that they wanted to get the team back into the flow of freight and my nice long run was the best way to make that happen. This is all conjecture though, so whatever. I have no way of knowing and the people working at night usually know less than I do.

I was prepared to be optimistic and think that maybe I could get 1,100 miles over the next couple of days and things would work out roughly the same for me. My next assignment put an end to that thinking in a hurry. I'll be picking up 55 miles from here tomorrow afternoon and delivering 273 miles from there on Thursday morning. Unless I somehow knock out another 700+ miles before 2pm Thursday (impossible, obviously), I got hosed.

Well, that's enough whining for today. Now I need to figure out how to get a book out of my cubby hole and how to get the napkins from my bed to my front seat without being able to stand on the floor in the sleeper. This should be pretty fun. Oh... yeah, it's still raining.