5/26/10

You know, I drive all day, get settled in for the evening, turn on my computer, and see an article like this.  Men in high heels?  That's a new fashion trend?  Get the hell out of here.  I'll kick a dude in the balls if he ever stands in front of me wearing high heels.  After seeing that garbage, it would be easy enough just to throw my hands up and conclude that the world is irrevocably screwed.  Then I saw a video clip though, and I gotta tell ya - there may be hope yet. Politicians with gonads and the people willing to elect them are desperately needed if we're ever to fix the mess that we've made of this world.




So I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that I have something of a man-crush on two different dudes.  That agriculture guy from Alabama was pretty cool and the portly governor of New Jersey makes me grin every time he's in the news.  Setting all that aside though, the next little tidbit made it even more amusing. Something doesn't add up with respect to the chick whining about how she doesn't get paid enough (just before she contradicts herself and says it's not about the money). Either she's lying about her identity or she's lying about her pay. Heh.  Now that I think about it, maybe the NEA should quit bitching about layoffs and larger classes.  Just follow Ms. Wilson's advice and advocate for a per-pupil pay scale.  Then each teacher could blather on about some boring subject to a room with 80 kids in it and be a millionaire in no time, while the school districts could whack a bunch of teachers and balance their budgets.  Everybody wins.

Also tangentially on the subject of budgets... construction.  Oy.  I guess it's the same deal every year but I swear I've never seen so many orange barrels in my life.  The stretch of I-90/I-39 from Rockford to Beloit is all done now.  That's pretty nice.  Damned near everywhere else in this country though... oy.  Ohio turnpike - under construction.  Indiana turnpike - under construction.  Chicago Skyway - under construction.  I-90 in Illinois - under construction.  I-90 in Wisconsin - under construction.  I-94 in Wisconsin - under construction.  All of this on the heels of yesterday, and yesterday on the heels of last week.  Looking ahead to tomorrow, I haven't been to Minnesota in a while but I recall that there was a shitload of construction around Minneapolis the last time I was there.  So I imagine there's more of the same in store for me in the morning.

I made it up to Baldwin, Wisconsin today before deciding to get off the road and park for the night.  There's a T/A right before the Minnesota state line, but I'm pretty sure it's a small one.  If I got there and it was full, I can't really think of any other options that I would have along my route.  Not in the mood to gamble tonight.  I'm pretty sure I'll have less than 60 miles to go from here, so good enough.  After a little over ten hours on the road, nothing sounded quite as good as an Italian BMT with double meat.  I saw a little truck stop on the north side of the freeway and it had a SubWay.  Excellent!  And it had nowhere for me to park.  Bogus!  In hindsight, I realize that I should have pulled into the fuel island and grabbed myself a sandwich before heading over to the truck stop on the other side of the freeway.  It didn't occur to me at the time though, so I settled for provisions from the friendly Hindu folks that run the Mobil station instead.

7am appointment tomorrow.  Boo.

5/25/10

We start with Virginia.  Virginia had a pretty good performance today.  My route up I-95 to US-17 to I-66 to I-81 to VA-37 to US-522 was surprisingly easy and the SubWay was even open at 9:30am when I stopped at a little truck stop in Opal for a bite to eat.  We'll give Virginia a passing grade.

On into West Virginia.  Good old Goddamned West Virginia.  You know what I think about West Virginia, don't you?

Yeah, fail.  Epic fail, in fact.  In the last little hick town before Maryland, they had the road down to one lane.  There was some hayseed out there with his little stop/slow sign, directing each lane to proceed through the construction zone when it's turn came around.  Unfortunately for me, I was on the side of the road that was leading into town.  The southbound traffic was already in town, and was getting backed up through the intersection with the town's one stoplight.  So naturally Jethro and the gang had to give the southbound side more time to roll through and leave us on the northbound side sitting and waiting.  45 minutes.  Fail.

Maryland.  Yeah, we have to mention Maryland because it was technically part of the route.  Ten miles or so and that state was done.  Good enough.

Pennsylvania then.  Construction every twenty miles it seems like.  For all of the millions of dollars that people pay in tolls, that turnpike sure does have a hard time staying in proper condition.  We'll go ahead and give the trip across I-76 a passing grade though, if for no other reason than that the car traffic was light and the truck drivers did a decent job of proceeding in an orderly manner.

So... what comes after Pennsylvania?  Ahh yes, Ohio.  Remember this shit from a few days ago?  On that occasion, the asshats in charge of road construction had only screwed the eastbound side of the road by taking it from three lanes down to one.  Today they did the same thing to the westbound side.  Good times.  After I got through that three-mile jam in a half hour or so, I was back out on the open road and trying to calculate how far into Indiana I could make it tonight.  Cue more brake lights - now.  Some weisenheimer in a pickup truck had gone and flipped his camper trailer on its side.  One more time... three lanes down to one.  And the one open lane was stop and go while a wrecker tried to get the pickup back in the full upright and locked position.  I hate to break it to you Ohio, but we're not gonna be able to give you a passing grade on this trip.

The delays in West Virginia and Ohio sucked quite a few of the potential miles out of today's driving.  By the time I got past the accident, I only had enough time left to reach the Ohio/Indiana line.  That would have left me in a pretty crappy spot for tonight and still would have left a long day of driving for tomorrow, so I just stopped at the Petro outside Toledo instead.  A couple of friends drove down and took me out to dinner, so that was pretty good.  And the parking lot here is enormous so I was able to find a spot where nobody can park on my right.  Since my weight bench is on my passenger's seat and my weights are in the side box on the right of my truck, the Fenian Godfather Fitness Center was able to operate without any impediments.

I only covered 529 miles today by the time all was said and done.  This means that I'll have to knock out a little over 600 tomorrow.  I don't think I'll have any parking options in Minnesota, so I'll most likely end up camping out somewhere on the western edge of Wisconsin.  Then a ten hour break and some more early morning driving will get me into the Twin Cities area for Thursday's delivery.

Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin - pop quiz tomorrow.  You will be graded.

5/24/10

Several years ago, I worked for a company called American Express Financial Advisors.  The main reason that I left AEFA (which had spun off to become Ameriprise Financial along the way) was that I got a much better revenue sharing arrangement from MetLife.  One of the other factors, however, was the moronic marketing shit that I had to do as an American Express employee.  Case in point - Costco.  The AMEX credit card operation had a table at various Costco locations at which it signed up new cardmembers.  They offered a gift card or something for each person who signed up and they had a reasonable amount of success in attracting new business.  So someone decided that the financial advisors would do the same thing.  On Saturday mornings, various advisors took turns standing at a stupid table and offering Costco gift cards to people who would show up at our office for an initial consultation. 

As a good 'team player,' I was expected to work at least one Costco shift per month.  I'm not the sort to beg for some broad's business while she pushes a shopping cart packed with 86 jumbo rolls of toilet paper.  Call me a snob if you must, but that's just the way it is.  So I would stand with my thumb up my ass for two hours on a Saturday morning, absolutely hating Costco and everybody who shopped there.  My alarm went off at 6am today and, after getting my shit together, I drove the last two miles to my consignee - Costco.  6am is not an agreeable hour for me.  One more reason to hate those bastards.

I was unloaded in short order and found myself on the board at #1.  As noted last night, my parking options were less than ideal.  Rather than drive ten or tweny miles in what may turn out to be the wrong direction, I decided to park out in front of the store.  It was still early in the morning and the store wasn't open yet, so I figured I would have at least a couple of hours before anyone kicked me out.  Letting me park for a while would be the least those guys could do, after all of the ruined mornings that they've caused me and whatnot.  I never did get kicked out, which was convenient since my next assignment took a few hours to come across the satellite.  Nice long run to El Paso though.  That ain't so shabby.

My next pickup was scheduled for 3pm in Richmond, meaning that I would have been headed in the right direction if I had chosen to drive down to Ruther Glen once I was empty.  So I jotted down the directions to my next shipper, then went ahead and made that drive to Ruther Glen.  After chilling out for a while and taking care of my personal affairs at the Flying J, I decided to head down to Richmond and see about getting loaded early.  Might as well get loaded and head out of town before rush hour if possible.  The worst they could say was "no," right?

So I got down to Richmond and saw that the shipper was another Godforsaken paper mill.  The number of 40,000+ pound loads that I've had this year is simply staggering.  Anyhow, I checked in with the security guard.  He sent me to the shipping office.  I gave my order number to the shipping guy and he shuffled some papers for a second.  Then he tinkered with his computer.  "Come over here. I want you to look at this," he said with a weird look on his face.  So I did as I was told and walked over to his computer.  In the 'sent' folder of his Lotus Notes, there was an e-mail from 8:05pm last night.  It had been sent to some gal in Joplin to inform my company that the load to El Paso, along with two others, had been canceled due to a mechanical breakdown at the paper mill.  And yet I received the assignment this morning.  Go figure.

Hey, at least I wouldn't have to haul 44,000 pounds of paper today.  Always look at the bright side, right?  I sent the FYI message to my fleet manager and then tried to find somewhere nearby to park and wait for whatever came next.  Having no luck on the industrial street where my non-shipper was located, I decided to head southward and put in at the Pilot in Colonial Heights.  Just as I reached the exit for the truck stop, I received a new asignment... picking up back to the north... at another fucking paper mill.  Awesome.

The people at the paper mill in West Point are some picky mofos, so I took a few minutes at the truck stop and gave my trailer a thorough sweeping before heading back out.  I got to the mill and checked in at 2:45pm, then got the unfortunate news that my order was being live loaded.  Sometimes I catch a drop/hook there and sometimes I don't.  Today I didn't.  Normally the live loading isn't a big deal, since a full trailer of paper is only six or seven rolls, but today there were seven trucks in line ahead of me and five more at the dock.  Good times, good times.  6am + 14 hours = 8pm... as the clock slowly ticks my day away.

I made it out of there by 6:45pm, so I guess we'll file this one under the category of things that could have been worse.  At least I had enough time to make it up to the truck stop in Doswell before my 14 ran out.  And the truck stop in Doswell has a SubWay... which is nice.

This dispatch is one of those ball-busting kinda deals, requiring me to get to the suburbs of Minneapolis by Thursday morning.  I'm sure as shit not going back up I-95 tomorrow, so we'll have to see how much time I burn by angling across Virginia and then catching up with I-70 in Maryland.  With a load this heavy and the terrain that I'll be covering, I don't think the US highways will be all that much slower than the interstates.  It's not like I'll be flying up and down the road in either case.  As long as I can get somewhere in Indiana by the time my hours run out tomorrow, everything should work out okay.  Tomorrow is still a day away though.  Plenty of time for something to go wrong.

5/23/10

I don't know man.  Either I got stuck at a loading dock all morning, dragged a 45,000 pound load out of Pennsylvania in the rain, ran into horseshit traffic around Philly, more horseshit traffic in Delaware, more horseshit traffic in Baltimore, more horseshit traffic around D.C., and everything at a dead standstill in northern Virginia... or I was lucky enough to get a spot to park and take a quick shower in Perryville, there was plenty of room to park at the Virginia welcome center just a couple of miles from tomorrow's consignee, and the Tigers hung on to beat the Dodgers this afternoon.  Take your pick.  I'm willing to settle for the second version of events as long as I can get a new assignment before my trailer is empty tomorrow.  That seems fair enough.

Assuming that I have to go on the board tomorrow morning, I'm pretty much screwed in terms of parking.  Ruther Glen is about 25 miles to the south.  If I head down there, I'll get an assignment picking up in Baltimore or something.  Or I could do about ten miles of circling around and get back to where I am right now, at the welcome center on the southbound side of the freeway.  Then I'll probably get an assignment picking up to the south, such that Ruther Glen would have been right on the way.

I swear this job would be pretty cool if, as soon as I picked up a load, someone was at work setting up my next assignment.  Not around here though.  We play the 'wait and react' game more often than not.  I've had times when I had work pre-planned for a week solid, so I know someone in the state of Missouri has the ability to make it happen.  For whatever reason though, it's not standard operating procedure.  And that, as the kids like to say, is a damned shame.

Also a damned shame - 7am appointment tomorrow.

Also a damned shame - I figured out the answer to an e-mail riddle so now I'm apparently a psychopath or something.

Also a damned shame - I have to lift weights tonight.

Not a damned shame - I've somehow made it through 33 years on earth without ever doing anything this stupid...  and that makes me smile.