7/28/10

Another day, another phone call while I was still in bed.  I'm seeing a disturbing pattern here.  I was pretty excited about the fact that I don't have to hear the chirping of the satellite unit anymore, now that I'm not a real trucker.  This early phone call shit is not exactly a suitable replacement.

Today's call was of the work variety.  Long story short - $250 instead of $150 today and no store deliveries, but I had to start at 9am instead of 12:45pm.  The yin and the yang, I suppose.  My run was a drop/hook turn going from the dairy in Livonia to another dairy in Indianapolis.  Five hours down there, drop the trailer full of cottage cheese, grab a trailer full of empty cases, and five hours back home.  Not a bad way to make a few dollars.  I got stuck with a truck that had sketchy air conditioning, so the heat and humidity made things a little unpleasant, but I'm a big boy.  I can handle a little sweat every now and then.

The logistics of having your car dinged up can be a little tricky, it turns out.  In order to expedite the process, I chose to use the local body shop that was recommended by my insurer.  This way the claim will be paid directly and they can just cut me out of the entire process.  The downside is that this particular body shop has no loaner cars.  And I have a job.  See the problem here?  So the friend who was borrowing my car when it got whacked yesterday wound up having to drop me off at work this morning.  Then he took my car to the shop and dropped it off this afternoon.  Then another friend gave me a ride home when I got back from Indy.  I have tomorrow off and the damage isn't too severe, so we'll hope that I can have my car back by Friday morning and life can go back to normal.  We'll hope.

Speaking of hope... very little left in terms of this baseball season, it would appear.  Such a shame.

7/27/10

Another day, another phone call while I was still in bed.  This time the good news was that my car was hit while parked at a restaurant in Livonia.  My buddy had gone up there to do some political work or something.  A guy came in and asked if anyone was driving a silver Mazda 6.  Yep.  We have a winner.  After a brief chat with the insurance people, I had an appointment for an estimate at a body shop in Taylor tomorrow.  No big deal in the grand scheme of things, I suppose, but it's just one more hassle.

Then it was time to head over to another friend's house and do some tailgating.  There was no sporting event or anything to attend.  It was just a beautiful day, so beer and sausage seemed like the perfect complement.

I have a three-stop load going to Flint, Burton, and Frankenmuth for tomorrow.  It pulls at 12:45pm, so maybe I'll actually sleep through a morning for a change.  We'll see.

7/26/10

As I suspected might be the case, it seems to be taking me a while to adapt to being in Michigan on a permanent basis.  For instance, yesterday's work took me past a handful of golf courses.  My reaction was the same as always - I thought to myself that I should get out and play a round or two the next time I got home.  It wasn't until this morning that I realized that I didn't have to wait a feeks if I didn't want to.  Golf courses are not merely something to see from the window of my truck.

So did I play golf today?  No, no I didn't.  On the other side of the coin, I also was reminded today that things tend to 'pop up' when you're not rolling down some remote freeway without anybody else around to bug you.  I got a call from work this morning, asking if I would like to make some money on my scheduled day off.  Nope.  Thanks for asking though.  Back to bed.  Another call came later in the morning.  The dispatcher put on his best Monty Hall persona and made me a pretty compelling offer.  I pull a "dispo" load today (more on that in a minute) in exchange for a day off tomorrow.  The dairy had put us in a bind today, apparently, and we were short on manpower.  Fair enough then.  So much for my day off and so much for the golf course.

I had no idea what a dispo load was.  I'm still not even sure what "dispo" means.  Here's the skinny on the run though.  The dairy, for one reason or another, had been short on chocolate milk in recent days.  As such, a given store may have ordered fifty cases and only received twenty.  If that store's next milk delivery was a couple of days away, then there would exist the possibility of the store running out of chocolate milk.  This is not something that the folks at the dairy would like to see happen, for obvious reasons.  Kroger is a pretty damned important customer.

So we get these dispo loads.  Nothing in the trailer but gallons of chocolate milk.  Each store along the route (I had eight today) gets a certain number of cases and that's that.  There's no other product mixed in.  There are no empty cases to retrieve.  After shuttling a few trailers from the terminal to the dairy and earning my extra fifteen bucks this afternoon, I grabbed my paperwork and found my loaded trailer.

The entire load consisted of four pallets of milk.  I had two stops in Dearborn, one in Richmond, three in Macomb, one in Sterling Heights, and one in Livonia.  That's a pretty good way to learn some store locations, since I had only been to one of the Dearborn stores befores.  The other seven locations were new to me.  Only the Richmond store got a full pallet (54 cases). Each other store got between 9 and 34 cases. I just had to pull the cases of milk off my trailer and let the stock room people stack them. Then I had to try and make sure that the remaining milk in the trailer was secured and the load was balanced.


This run was also a good way to make $200 in a relatively short period of time.  I started my pre-trip inspection at 7pm and finished my post-trip at 2am.  The run paid $197.35, to be more accurate, but it's safe to say that it beat my initial $20/hr target range.  I spent more time trying to get someone to open the door at each stop than I did unloading milk.  There was a produce truck in the dock at one of the Macomb locations when I arrived, so that cost me a half hour of waiting.  Then there was a lot of construction on the way from Sterling Heights back down to the store on 8 Mile in Livonia, burning a few more extra minutes.  In theory the run could have taken even less time, but I think it went about as well as could be expected overall.  I hit the more congested areas late at night after the traffic had eased up and so forth.

Today's conclusion has to be that I really like my job a lot better when it involves anything other than what it usually involves.  I like it well enough when I'm making regular milk deliveries and such, but it's pretty awesome when I'm delivering empty cases to Tennessee or making a drop/hook in Grand Rapids or running all over Southeast Michigan to unload a few pallets of chocolate milk here and there.

I'm taking the day off for realsies tomorrow, so that's pretty nice.  The swap wound up being a positive for me overall, since I made $212.35 once we add in my three shuttle runs to the dairy.  My typical Tuesday work load would be somewhere around $150 and would take the same 7-8 hours to complete.  Now, if only I could figure out why the air conditioning in my apartment isn't working...

7/25/10

♫ I've seen a rich man beg
I've seen a good man sin
I've seen a tough man cry

I've seen a loser win
And a sad man grin
I heard an honest man lie

I've seen the good side of bad
And the down side of up
And everything between

I licked the silver spoon
Drank from the golden cup
Smoked the finest green

I stroked the baddest dimes at least a couple of times
Before I broke their heart

You know where it ends
Yo, it usually depends on where you start... ♫

I have no idea where or when this little journey that has become the topic of these blog posts will end.  Probably the blog posts will have run their course before the journey itself is over, if I had to guess.  Either way though, I think tonight brought a reminder of one of the places where it started.

Several years ago, I was working as the general manager of the Red Robin restaurant on Monroe Street in Toledo.  The job had been considered a step up for me, after eight years of managing pizza shops.  The money was good.  The benefits were good.  The working conditions were good.  I was miserable.  There should be a public service announcement for you ladies out there who think you want a "career-driven" or "goal-oriented" or "successful" man.  (Just a sampling of buzz words that I've heard from various people over the years.)  If those are code words for money, then just say so and cut to the chase.  If they're actually traits that you think you find appealing, then take it from me - you're wrong.  Those traits are all-consuming.  If one is driven to success, then nothing will get in the way of that success.  At least that was my experience.  Nothing got in my way.  I made a lot of money, advanced past a lot of more experienced people, set performance records, won awards and all that shit.  Not coincidentally, my personal life went to Hell at the same time.

Each morning I would take the restaurant's cash from the previous night and deposit it at our local bank.  One of the assistant managers was usually available to make the deposit, but I desperately needed to get out of that place whenever I could.  I would drive over to the bank, make the deposit, and then stare at the steering wheel of my car, trying to summon the motivation to go back to the restaurant.  Some days were worse than others but very few of them involved happy thoughts.  Our bank, as it turns out, was located inside the Kroger store at the corner of Monroe and Secor.

And so it comes full circle.  After making my two stops in Saginaw this afternoon and then returning to the dairy, I headed southward with my second trailer full of milk.  The first stop was in Monroe, Michigan.  The second stop was in Toledo, Ohio.  Yep, that same Kroger with the bank inside.  I live about 49 miles from the corner of Monroe and Secor.  In terms of real life, however, those 49 miles might as well be 49 light years.

So many memories, both good and bad, and seemingly so far removed from my present life.  Yet, after deciding that I couldn't babysit 150 employees any longer, I left the restaurant business for good and got my financial licenses.  Then, when it became clear to me that my 100 financial clients may as well have been another 100 employees for me to babysit, what ended up happening next?  Screw it all.  Time to run away from society for a while.  CDL school in Detroit, training for a new job in Missouri, lots of alone time on the highways and byways, and eventually this blog.  I think we could say that the voyage may very well have started at that Kroger store on some fateful morning.  On at least one of those mornings, I must have thought to myself that there had to be a better way to earn a dollar.  I probably was correct.

The Toledo delivery tonight only involved a few pallets, so I was in and out of there rather quickly.  Then I had to head across Monroe Street to the Sylvania store for my last stop.  Right past the good old Red Robin.  Ahh, the memories.  The guy working in the dairy department at that final stop was likely the most efficient that I've encountered thus far.  He would take a pallet of milk and then return with a pallet of empty cases.  Then, once I got the milk unloaded and found myself a little ahead of his pace, he enlisted the help of another guy to bring pallets of empties into the loading dock area.  Seven pallets delivered and eight pallets of empties removed - 20 minutes.  That ain't half bad.

I didn't quite beat the arbitrary midnight deadline that I was hoping to make tonight.  I really should have though.  At a few of the stores I wound up standing outside for 10-15 minutes and waiting for someone to unlock the door.  Then, on the way back up US-23 en route to the terminal tonight, I stopped at the Pilot in Blissfield and topped off my fuel tanks.  I had half a tank so I could have gotten by without fueling, but I was hungry, so I figured I might as well make a stop.  By the time I took an extra few minutes to clean out the truck and whatnot, I was there for around twenty minutes.  All in all though, a pretty good day on the road.  My two trips paid somewhere around $260 and I knocked them out in just over twelve hours.

Looking forward to a day off tomorrow.