4/15/10

Yeah I'm plenty angry at the federal government today, but it has nothing to do with taxes.  To be perfectly honest, I don't have a huge beef with my current tax burden.  I get thousands of dollars in deductions for money that I don't actually spend, so my effective tax rate is fairly reasonable.  On matters of taxation, it's the economic cost of an over-reaching government and the inevitable day of reckoning that concern me.  But no, that's not the issue this evening.  This evening we're back to bitching about the good old FMCSA.

First though, let's bitch about my employers for a minute.  This seems to be a theme for the last week or two.  So, I got rolling from Alorton, Illinois at 4:45am this morning.  I arrived at my consignee just before 7am and found that there were only three trucks ahead of me and none of them were CTL trucks.  Okay then, not too bad.  I walked into the receiving office and learned that the consignee opens at 8am.  Dispatched to arrive an hour before the customer opened, on both the pickup end and the delivery end.  Hey, there's something to be said for consistency.  (You'll see shortly how getting started that extra hour early, once again, made a huge difference in how badly I got screwed by the 14 hour rule.)

As I sat waiting for the place to open, I received my next assignment.  I would be heading down into Missouri this evening and getting a load headed to La Grange, Georgia.  This would work well with respect to my pending home time request, but not so well with respect to my federal government's idea of common sense.  I was unloaded quickly after the consignee opened, then sent on my way at 8:30am.

My pickup was set for 6pm in Bloomington, Missouri.  (You'll of course recall the 4:45am part of this conversation, meaning that 6:45pm is shutdown time.)  I had to drive 120 miles along a mixture of highways and through various towns to reach the shipper, meaning that there wasn't time for an eight hour break before arriving.  I also had instructions saying that the shipper doesn't allow us to park on location, meaning that I shouldn't arrive too early.  I stopped for a nap in Charleston, Missouri and then finished the drive over to the shipper.  I arrived at 2pm in hopes that they wouldn't kick me out and I might get loaded a little early, leaving me at least enough time to drive to a truck stop or rest area tonight.  They had enough room for me to stick around, so that part was good.  No such luck on the getting loaded early part.

I got my paperwork right at 6:45pm.  Out of hours and out of luck.  The nearest truck stops would be around a half hour away, back over along I-55.  Gee, if only I had started my day an hour later.  I sweet-talked the security guard into letting me hide out among the empty trailers until I could get myself legal again.  She said that they're not supposed to let us do so, but that she would make an exception as long as I took off within a few hours.  I told her that I could roll out of here at 10pm and thanked her very sincerely.

At this point I raise a practical question.  Given that I took a nap this afternoon and I'm a half hour from a tuck stop, which makes more sense - Driving that half hour to the truck stop, calling it a night, and taking a full break; or staying at the shipper to complete an eight hour break and then getting stuck in the split shift from Hell?  (That's a rhetorical question.)  Since the 14 hour clock continued ticking until I started my bunk time at the shipper, I can work for 4.75 hours once I get rolling again.  Then I have to take a two-hour break, assuming that I can find somewhere to park in the middle of the night.  Then I'll be able to work whatever portion of the 11/14 deal I don't use between now and the two-hour break, but the two-hour break will count against the 14.  Then, once I've made my delivery, I'll be running up against the other side of the split again.  Fucking stupid.  I'm telling you - just limit us to 600 miles a day, 3,500 miles a week, and just get rid of all this clock management bullshit.  We can earn a comfortable living at that pace and it would prevent people from going completely overboard with the tired driving.  This clock shit makes no sense.

At this point in time, I honestly have no idea how this trip will play out.  My lamentations about the 45,000 pound payload out of Arizona were rewarded with a 46,000 pound payload out of Missouri, so that part should be fun.  I can't decide whether I would prefer to deal with Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta or if I would rather deal with state and U.S. highways and the varying conditions that they present.  I have a half hour to figure it out, I guess.

The money end of the equation should be starting to take shape at least.  Today's 673 miles will kick the week over $800 with Saturday still to come.  I don't have any high hopes for tomorrow evening, in light of the logbook/split situation, but we'll just have to see what kind of freight comes out of the Southeast.  As long as I can make enough on the way back home to buy beer and food for next Saturday's tailgater, we'll be well on our way to forgetting the obnoxious nature of my job over the past couple of weeks.

4/14/10

Back when I had season tickets for the Tigers, I was working in a profession that allowed for a great deal of scheduling flexibility.  As such, I was able to attend around 50-60 games each year.  I had three seats so various combinations of people would attend the games with me, but most often I was accompanied by my girlfriend at the time and her daughter.  The daughter actually became quite a baseball fan, much to my surprise (given how young she was), but her mother said that she just liked to "people watch."  I would submit to anyone who shares this philosophy that the drivers' lounge at your local truck stop will get you far more bang for the buck.

After an uneventful drive across the rest of Oklahoma and all of Missouri today, I took the loop into Illinois and parked for the night at the Flying J off Exit 17A.  The temperature was around 90° and the sun was shining, so I decided to sit in the lounge for a while after I had some dinner and took a shower.  These heavy loads and mountains aren't doing anything to help my 'bad employee' status in terms of fuel mileage, so I figured I might as well kill some time inside the truck stop (rather than idling my truck) until the temperature dropped for the night.  The variety of people in these places is interesting.  From the outward appearances to the speech patterns to the topics of the cell phone conversations that you can't help but overhear... it's something.  I'd take a $9 beer and a seat behind the dugout any day of the week, but then again, I'm not the "people watching" type.

My cheap little power inverter stopped working last night, so I bought a new one at the service plaza in Oklahoma before I headed out this morning.  The only kind that they sold was rated at 100 watts, so I wasn't sure if it would be adequate to power my computer.  (The old one was a 200 watt model.)  What the hell though.  It was only $20.  Might as well give it a shot.  As I type this post, my computer's power display says that it's working just fine.  As an unexpected bonus, I can actually use the touchpad while the computer is plugged in now.  For the last month, since I headed out from home with this new computer, this has not been the case.  I'm not an electrical engineer but we'll have to proceed on the assumption that the old inverter, and not the new computer, was the problem.  Beauty.

Looks like around 75-80 miles from here to my consignee in the morning.  I'm gonna angle down on some state highways and hope to dodge the morning traffic for the most part.  Then, if my hunch is correct, I'll get to sit in line behind a bunch of other trucks (all with 7am dispatches) before I get unloaded.  The 34-hour restart that I got in Arizona should work in my favor with respect to this weekend so, assuming that there's actually some freight to haul, I may end up making a few bucks this week.  As long as I can get something to keep me occupied for a couple more days, the timing should work out for my upcoming home time request.  It has been time to head home for a couple of weeks now, I think.

Make sure you get those taxes paid, suckers.

4/13/10

It has been a common refrain on this blog that I am not a huge fan of driving anywhere near eleven hours on a given day.  I'm paid by the mile though, and it takes a lot of time to drive a lot of miles, so the conundrum persists.  Take heart though.  We finally may have found a way that I can get the money without doing the work.  In short, I need to move to England, get married, and have my wife start churning out some young'uns.  Better car than I drive now?  Yep.  Bigger TV than I've ever had, with cable (that I also don't have)?  Of course. Video game systems, a computer, and mobile phones.  Yes, yes, and yes.  And no taxes paid?  That's the ticket, baby.

Until I manage to embark on that new career though, I guess I'll just keep slugging out the miles.  I always seem to have enough money in the bank for a case of beer and that ain't half bad.  A steady 10.5 hours on the road today got me to Stroud, Oklahoma.  Battling the wind and the hills all day wasn't terribly frustrating this time around, since the traffic was fairly light and I had another afternoon ballgame on the radio.  From here I'll have another 500+ miles' worth of hilly terrain to cover tomorrow.  Then an evening of searching online for my British princess will be followed by an early morning delivery. 

(If any lovely ladies from across the pond are reading this post, ahem, you know what they say about bald dudes and testosterone.  And I'm a good cook too.  Help a brother out here.  It seems that my dream job in Denmark isn't quite what it used to be.)

4/12/10

Nonsensical dispatches, when combined with the 14 hour rule, can do a number on a driver's schedule.  In related news, I'm a driver trying to keep a schedule.  We've already covered the fact that my whole day yesterday was wasted in Buckeye, after which I received a dispatch to pick up in Miami at 7am today.  Since I wouldn't have time for a ten hour break if I drove to the shipper last night, I had to wait and drive across to Miami this morning.  Getting that assignment a couple of hours sooner sure would have come in handy, but hey, I'm sure the shipper just called us on a Sunday night (when they weren't even open) and requested a truck... or something.

So cue the start of my 14 hour clock this morning at 3:45am MST.  The trek into the mountains went a little more quickly than anticipated and I reached the shipper at 5:45am MST.  After checking in with the security guard, I was informed that they opened at 8am and loaded trucks until 3pm - first come, first served.  More information that my benevolent employers apparently didn't care to share with me.  I got settled into the loading dock shortly after 8am and I was released with my load just before 11am.  It took all of ten minutes for the guy to load my truck, so those extra hours of sitting around and waiting for him to get started weren't very helpful to the cause.

As I suspected, there is nothing light about this load.  With a cool 45,000 pounds in the wagon, it was bound to be a long afternoon of dragging my ass up and down the mountains.  According to my web log here, I was hauling 29,000 pounds when I made my first trip through the Salt River Canyon  a couple of years ago.  Today's 16,000 additional pounds were certainly enough to take the fun out of the ride.  The drive into the canyon consisted of me trying to maintaining a safe speed and navigate the hairpin corners without burning up my brakes a I dodged the locals who just had to speed past me in a 35mph zone.  The drive out of the canyon consisted of me repeatedly getting fooled into thinking that I might be able to shift into sixth gear for a few minutes.  Every time I thought I was going to get some flat ground for a few seconds, the next ascent would begin.  Tedious.

Since I was working more than taking in the scenery this time around, I held up my phone and pressed the camera button a few times whenever I got onto a straightaway.  Maybe I could enjoy the view after I was parked for the night, I thought.  The photos were mostly garbage, since I couldn't really look to see where the camera was pointed, but a couple turned out okay.

The steepness of the remaining stretch taking me out of Arizona and into New Mexico didn't exactly help he cause.  It seemed like, every time I got into high gear for thirty seconds, I would have to start downshifting again.  It's not like stepping on the clutch and moving the shifter are strenuous activities or anything.  Just a test of patience when you're trying to cover some ground with the hours available to you under the law.

Which brings us back to the topic of nonsensical dispatches.  I'm due in some podunk town in southern Illinois by 7am on Thursday.  I was able to reach the little truck stop in Lemitar, New Mexico just before my 14 hours ran out today, leaving me somewhere around 1200 miles from here to my destination.  Stating the obvious here, but I'll need to cover around 600 miles a day for the next two days.  If any of the aforementioned dispatching shenanigans had been avoided (allowing me either to drive to Miami last night or to start later this morning), then today's time under the 14 hour rule would have carried me further and allowed for a more reasonable pace.  Further to that, there is no reason for me to get to the consignee by 7am.  The receiving hours are 7am to 2:30pm and I have no appointment.  Our asinine dispatch system just puts me in at the earliest time on the scheduled day, at which point I'll sit in line behind ten other trucks that were told to arrive at the same time.

So yeah, it's all perfectly legal and it's all perfectly stupid.  I know they think drivers are all idiots and we would show up late if they told us when we were actually required to deliver, but it would be just as easy to lie and say I have to arrive by 11am as it is to lie and say I have to arrive by 7am.  This still would leave 3.5 hours of 'screw up' time and I would have the option of parking somewhere convenient on Wednesday and then finishing off the drive on Thursday, without having to get up at the crack of dawn and deal with all the motorists rushing to work.  Peckerheads.

At least I'll have some decent miles to start this week with a few days' worth of (potential) work still to come.  Since I'd like to grab another run or two before heading home, and it's most profitable to be pretty far away before I start working my way back toward Detroit, nobody should be surprised when my next assignment takes me from Illinois to Michigan or something along those lines.  It certainly wouldn't shock me.

Update (10:48pm):  For anyone who has been getting the blank rss feeds lately, I've put in a workaround and it seems that the issue has been corrected.  On my end, I am now getting the actual content from the feed.  If there's still an issue, I would apreciate it if someone could let me know so I can keep working to fix the problem.