10/22/09

I made sure to hit the weights and burn off a little aggression before turning on my computer tonight. I also spent a few minutes reminding myself that I seem to have a pretty enjoyable weekend in store. I really have made an effort... but I'm still running pretty hot. Just can't help it sometimes.

The day started innocently enough. My 11am relay wound up being a noon relay, but that ain't so bad I guess. Still plenty of time to make it to Tampa by 10pm. I'm not sure who or what caused the delay but the time stamps on the paperwork were interesting. Load ready - 2:20am. Scheduled pickup - 5:00am. Actual pickup - 5:50am. In any case I was off and running, down I-675 to I-75 and away we go.

Just before Exit 201 on I-75, everything came to a stop. I don't mean that traffic was moving slowly either. I mean set the brakes, make a sandwich, walk the dog, whatever. We ain't going anywhere. I turned on my CB and heard that a pickup truck had flipped over the guardrail and the cops had the freeway shut down. Sounds like a good time for lunch, I suppose. I edged my way off to the exit ramp and pulled into the Love's for some McNuggets. After a half hour the situation didn't appear to have improved. Time for a new approach then. A quick glance at my atlas showed that I could run GA-36 over to US-41 and then catch US-341 all the way down to I-75. That route turned out to be nice and mellow and it came with the added bonus of cutting the corner right past Macon. I seem to recall some construction delays on I-75 or I-475 the last time I went through the Macon area. No such delays with today's route. Beauty.

Just across the Florida line I got some further good news as a pre-plan for the weekend came across the magic satellite. I decided to stop at the Pilot in Wildwood and top off the tanks before finishing the trip into Tampa. That's where the ole Godfather's blood got its first hint of a boil. Some slovenly asswipe in a Celadon truck left me sitting at the fuel island for a solid twenty minutes after I was finished pumping. I wasn't too worked up yet though. I still only had a little bit of driving to do, plus I knew which way to go before parking for the night. It would be good not to have any worries about wandering around Tampa and hoping for a space at the Citgo.

The drop at the Tampa yard, however, turned out to be an absolute bullshit fiasco. It's a little rinky-dink yard like quite a few of the other Con-way yards around the country. Most of the small yards don't have 53' trailers coming out their asses backwards though. An absolute debacle. After the (not insignificant) feat of negotiating the turn into the damn place, I wound up having to make a blindside back into an empty space with very little room to maneuver. It took 45 minutes. No, I'm not exaggerating. The highlight probably came halfway through the process when one of the linehaul guys started getting all pissy because I was blocking the road and he couldn't get to his second trailer. It's probably best not to get too detailed regarding certain verbal exchanges that arise from time to time. This is one of those times. Let's just say that he may have been introduced to a phrase that rhymes with, "Go pluck your shelf." Tonight was not the night to mess with me.

After getting my trailer into the slot and dropping it, I took a walk around the yard. I had received a message from someone in Equipment Control asking me to retrieve a particular empty trailer. That particular trailer was in the back corner of a two-deep and two-wide cluster of trailers along the fence line. No chance for me to take that one, so I sent a satellite message explaining that the trailer was inaccessible. Back over on the other side of the facility, I found two empty CFI trailers. Both were buried behind three sets of doubles that had been dropped on the lot. No chance of getting either of those. Okay then, what else? At the eastern end of the yard there were two trailers from the old Con-way Truckload. The first of these two had a big orange placard on it, stating that it was leased to Con-way and not for use by other carriers. It also had no trailer number as far as I could see. The second had no such orange placard. It did, however, have the red vinyl numerals indicating that it was a CFI (and then CTL) trailer. I hooked it up, checked it over, and sent in my 'dropped trailer' form.

After a minute or so I received the information for the pre-planned weekend load. I also received a text reply to my earlier message about the inaccessible trailer, stating that the sender of the message would pass on the information to the Equipment Control people. I started up the road, expecting my dispatch to come through at any minute. With the need to find a parking space and catch a ten hour break before my scheduled pickup, I had very little time to waste. After I got about five miles up the highway the satellite unit chirped at me. My dispatch then, right? No. It was a message stating that the trailer that I was pulling had been sold to Con-way and that I couldn't take it. In other words, someone should have removed the CFI numbers and placed one of those big orange placards on the front. But nobody did. Shit. And the computer system should have sent an error message following my 'dropped trailer' form, saying that I picked up a nonexistent CTL trailer. But it didn't. Shit.

So I hopped off at the next exit and turned back toward the Con-way yard for a second go-around. My first drop/hook had taken from 8:45pm to 9:45pm. The round trip from the yard to the highway and back to the yard carried us to 10pm. The second drop/hook took another half hour. Given that the only empties that I might possibly take were buried behind Con-way doubles (down to one set by this point), I had to flag down the yard driver and ask him to move the set out of the way. I also had to see what he wanted me to do with the empty that I was returning, since he had already filled the space from which I had pulled it. He showed me a pair of open spaces behind the set of doubles that he was going to move. I made a lap around the building to get out of his way and set myself up to back into one of the open spaces. One of my CTL colleagues had arrived in the interim and entered the wrong way, so my intent was to hang back while she dropped her trailer and then take whichever space she didn't use. As the yard driver pulled the set of doubles forward to clear the path, another CTL driver came barrel-assing into the yard (the wrong way) and took one of the empty spaces. The first one who had come in the wrong way took the other empty space. I was back to square one and about ready to blow my top at this point.

The yard driver moved a trailer to a dock, leaving me an opening along the two-deep and two-wide cluster that I mentioned earlier. I swung my Godforsaken empty in there, dropped it, and then drove around to the other side of the building. I was fully expecting to find that the two nonconformists had taken the last of the empties. They had not. The lady driver was hooked to a trailer but Speed Racer there had gone down and parked his bobtail at the far end of the yard, among some Con-way pups. Thus, I got an empty. I sent a message advising the Joplin gang of my new new trailer number, along with a (perhaps unnecessary) bit about the fact that I was not at all pleased with how my previous two hours had been spent.

Off to Sanford we go. Can you guess what happens when you spend two hours in Tampa getting screwed around? The truck stops and rest areas all fill up before you can get to them. Yeah, really. As far as I could tell, I had shots at the truck stops in Polk City and then two rest areas on I-4. Trying to play it as safe as possible, I tried Polk City first. Nope. Then the rest area right outside Polk City. Yeah, that's funny. I continued onward and got stuck in a traffic jam in Orlando. Two left lanes closed for construction, at the exact point where the far right lane is forced to exit. People from both directions trying to jam into the right-center lane. Fucking brilliant. Construction work being done, you ask? Oh, none. None whatsoever.

The rest area right before Sanford was overfilled just like the previous one had been. I had no choice at this point but to go straight to the customer and hope for the best. The directions were wrong. I would have expected nothing less tonight. After getting stuck in a bad spot and backing my way out to the main road, I managed to wander around the industrial part of town long enough to find the road for which I was looking. I'm not sure what the legal ins and outs may be, but there were a couple of trucks parked along the side of this road when I arrived. Now there is one more.

So I was thoroughly pissed when I got settled in, to say the least. My quick workout seemed to help though, as did the knowledge that I have a little over 1,100 miles to run for the weekend and I should have plenty of time to kick back and watch some football. Speaking of football, let's see what kind of news we have today... What? You've got to be shitting me. They scheduled Western Michigan for next year? Oh, that ain't gonna help the anger level. Then, in the middle of my post, the freaking Blogger site crapped out. I don't know when it's coming back on, but I'll just save this as a text file and you'll get it when you get it. Whatever man.

Anybody wanna fight? Come to Sanford, Florida and I'll give you a shot or two. Running a little hot tonight. A little hot.