7/14/09

The beautiful 70 hour rule... Here's the Cliff's Notes version of my latest beef - Having made my drop/hook and gotten on the board at #1, I received an assignment early in the day. Based on the 70 hour rule, I had 2.75 hours available to me. I drove 90 miles to the south to make my pickup, burning 1.5 hours in the process. 1.25 hours left. The (surprisingly attractive) forklift driver chick worked very quickly and sent me on my way. Once loaded, I was able to drive an hour back to the north. Then I had to make my post-trip inspection and that was that. No more hours. End of discussion. It would make far more sense for me to drive until this evening and then go to bed. I could wake at a decent hour and finish out my trip, making tomorrow afternoon's delivery and getting plenty of rest in the process. Instead, I had to park for the day long before I was tired. Now I get to start at 1:15am tomorrow in order to keep my schedule. Maybe I can get to sleep for a while this evening or maybe I can't. Stupid.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - 70 hours is way more work than I care to do in a week. I have no beef with limitations on the number of hours that people can be on the road. A lot of these guys would drive way too much if they could get away with it. Personally, I'm not so sure that I should go much more than 8 or 9 hours in a given day. Save the pseudo-scientific hippie bullshit for someone else though. That 70 hours in 8 days bit was pulled out of someone's ass to make the "safety" lobbyists feel better. There's nothing behind it. There's no rational basis for the idea that I'll be less tired after midnight than I am at 3pm, when I slept last night and drove this morning.

Of course, the whole conversation would shift if I worked for one of those companies that don't have any freight to haul. That would certainly be worse. I had a handful of hours left and my company found me a load to use those hours. I guess I might as well just buck up and be glad that I can earn a living... for now. I didn't really want to watch baseball tonight anyway. I hate baseball. Yeah, that's the ticket. Baseball sucks. I would rather toss and turn and try to sleep so I can work overnight and all morning tomorrow. Okay, that's enough bitching for a month or two.

My latest assignment had me picking up a wicked heavy load of wood in Epes, Alabama and heading toward High Point, North Carolina. Notwithstanding that the (perfectly legal) schedule and the 70 hour rule will most likely leave me exhausted tomorrow, my week will be off to a decent start. I'll only pick up a few hours on Thursday, so the week's pay will likely rest on whatever I get for the weekend.

Goodnight...