10/29/09

One more reason that I should never be forced to wake before 10am - I may get cracking as soon as legally possible, drive my ass off all day, arrive two hours ahead of my dispatched ETA, and then have my consignee tell me that they stop receiving trucks at 3pm. I've been wrestling with when exactly to put in my next request for home time. The football game in Pittsburgh is on November 14th, so I'll either take a week or so before then or a week or so after then. I've been leaning toward the 'after' approach, but my frustration level has been running pretty high lately. If it keeps up I may just have to head home a little sooner than anticipated.

The drive itself wasn't too terrible today. It wasn't good (think rain and Texans) but it wasn't terrible. The only major accident on US-59 in Houston was on the northbound side, so my side should have been cruising right on through. Gawkers had us backed up for five miles. One of these days, man... One of these days.

In late October there don't tend to be a whole lot of places in America with hot weather. There are a few though. Angling down from Houston to Laredo today, the temperature reached 92 degrees and the rainy weather made the humidity pretty obnoxious. Hey, anyone wanna guess whose air conditioning quit working this afternoon? Yeah, seriously. It was a windy mofo out there today, so rolling down the windows helped to mitigate the temperature for the most part. That humidity was disgusting though. It felt like I was sweating even though I wasn't sweating. I have been planning to get a couple of things fixed on my truck once I get back home. Better to put the truck in the shop when I'm already off work, the theory goes, than to sit in a hotel and waste my time on the road. Now I guess there's one more item on the list. Hopefully I won't get stuck in too many hot places between now and then.

I wasn't sure about the proper CTL protocol for making a live delivery in Laredo. Usually on Laredo loads we have to report to the terminal and get the trailer inspected, then head to our broker. My stop location information that came with this assignment gave me directions to the broker though. This has never been the case before, at least in my experience. Since the trailer wasn't being dropped, the inspection process didn't have to be done before the delivery. (I would have to bring the empty back through the inspection bay anyway.) So, in an effort to waste as little time as possible, I went straight to the broker. The little dude at the gate took my paperwork and we were looking good... for a minute. Then he gave back the paperwork and told me to come back tomorrow at 8am. Bummer. So, the question must be asked - from where did my 6:45pm dispatch come? Pulled directly from someone's ass, I suspect, but there's no way of knowing for sure. Had I known that I couldn't deliver until 8am tomorrow... well, something about waking before 10am today comes to mind.

I headed over to the terminal and got on the board at #35. I'm already up to #28 so I'll most likely be rolling shortly after making my delivery in the morning. This place does look like a ghost town though. Somewhere around half the trailer parking spaces are unoccupied. Just enough freight to move 28 more trucks - that's all I ask. My week hasn't been too stellar so far but one decent run for the weekend can make it all better. A shitty weekend will probably be enough to convince me that it's time to go home for a while.

The temperature is dropping rapidly as the sun goes down. That's always a plus when you have no air conditioning.