5/6/09

Holy jeez, good golly Miss Molly, and all that nonsense. If uncertainty carried the day yesterday, then it kicked into another gear today.

I don't recall exactly what time the sun started to EZ Bake my truck this morning, but whenever it did I fired up the engine and kicked on the AC, then hopped back into bed. I awoke to a knock on my door an hour or two later. I was bugged by a few panhandlers last night, so my first inclination was to ignore the knocking. It struck me that most panhandlers don't knock on a door early in the morning when there's nobody in the driver's seat though. I got up and took a look out the window. It was the other CTL driver who is sharing in this little hard luck story with me. I shut down the engine and opened the door to see what was up. He asked if I had tried to deliver my load again. I hadn't, as I was waiting for the go-ahead from my fleet manager.

He said that he had gone over to the consignee early in the morning and they had rejected his load a second time. In the 27 miles from Fayetteville to Dunn, the pallets had tipped over again. So we headed to the back of my trailer and opened the doors. Yikes. It looked worse than it had when I arrived at the consignee the first time around. So the people in Joplin told him (and by extension told me) to stay put while they worked on the situation. I don't know that I'm at liberty to divulge how much they had paid the shop in Fayetteville for the restacking, but holy shit! Considering that we couldn't even make a straight 27 mile trip up I-95 without the load shifting, I think my employer got hosed on that deal. Maybe they'll negotiate a better price in the end. I don't know.

In any case, I was still in limbo and there was no point in trying to deliver the load at that point. After a couple of hours, I was apprised of the next step in the grand plan. Haul the water back to Pennsylvania and return it to the shipper. As far as my (insignificant peon) end of things, this didn't work out too terribly. I got another 477 miles to head back north plus another chunk of northeast pay. Plus it worked out such that Breinigsville was Stop #1, Dunn was Stop #2, Fayetteville was Stop #3, Dunn was Stop #4, and Breinigsville was Stop #5. Three extra stops meant $105 in accesorial pay for me. It doesn't quite completely mitigate a day of lost work but it does help. I also got a pre-planned load leaving the same shipper tonight, so that was good. As far as the company's end of the deal, what a mess. Paying two drivers and burning the fuel to go from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and back is not very good. Nor is paying some fly-by-night shop for a useless restack of two trailers very good. Oh well. The way the cookie crumbles and whatnot.

I got up to the shipper in Pennsylvania this evening and pulled up to the little phone that they use for the check-in process. The bitch lady on the other end said that I wasn't dropping anything without a return authorization number. I knew nothing of this authorization number so I had to park and call Joplin again. (I think we've used up my quota of phone calls to Joplin for 2009 at this point.) None of the night dispatchers seemed to have any idea what was the story. My colleague was parked a few spaces down from me at the time, going through the same runaround. After a little while, he got a return authorization number. I did not.

The person to whom I was talking seemed to be fixated on insignificant details regarding things that had already been resolved. I was trying to get her to understand that it didn't matter why the load had been rejected, it didn't matter who had told me to come back to Pennsylvania, and it didn't matter whether or not I knew the name of the lady who wouldn't let me drop my trailer. I needed a damn return authorization number. That was all. The rest had already been handled. After several pointless minutes, I agreed to get the name of the lady and then call back. Yeah, I still don't know that lady's name and I didn't call back. The other driver told me that whoever was helping him had said that she was working on my situation too. Good enough for me. No need to have another asinine phone conversation.

By this time my comrade had dropped his trailer and checked in to pick up his next load. He had gotten the same pre-planned assignment as I had. The new loads were scheduled as drop/hooks but the shipper didn't have any of our trailers available. Ipso facto we weren't picking up any pre-loaded trailers. Nor were we getting live loaded (since you also need an empty trailer to do that). We were right back in limbo... again.

After 45 minutes of wrangling, I got my return authorization number and made it in to drop my full trailer. Then the focus shifted squarely to finding an empty. After being told 'yes we have empties'/'no we don't' a few times, I tracked down a yard dog. He was able to find an empty for me and one for my new friend there, so we were finally able to check in and get loaded.

I write to you this evening from the lovely loading docks in Breingisville. It looks like I'll be ready to roll pretty soon. I think I'll pull around the corner and take a nap since my log book is pretty well shot for today. Then it will be out to the big road and down to Alabama. The upshot of the festivities of the last couple of days is that I'll be empty on Saturday morning with 2,040 miles, $105 in stop pay, and quite a few extra nickels for the northeast miles. We'll have to see how the week wraps up from there. Getting a dispatch for a Saturday hasn't been anything close to a sure thing lately.