8/5/10

A couple of days ago, I showed a video of Basil Marceaux.com to a friend of mine.  My friend observed at the time that it would be awesome to see Mr. Marceaux.com appear on Red State Update.  Awesome things do sometimes happen, my friends...




That'll leave a fella ready to pledge allegiance to the Republic on his day off. I can tell you that much. 

Unfortunately, however, sometimes a day off turns out to be another day of work.  These fucking guys and their sick calls are simply amazing to me.  Two more today.  So the dispatcher called me this morning to see if I could cover a run today and then take tomorrow off instead.  I checked my log book and saw that I had plenty of hours left before I would need another restart.  Since my only plans for today had involved going to a bar and watching the Tigers lose to those thugs from Chicago, I decided that working wouldn't be so terrible.  A Friday off might be nice, after all.

My run had three stops - two in Saginaw and one in Northville, on the way back to the dairy.  It paid $153.79, which wasn't terrible, but the 4pm pull time meant that I would spend an extra half hour stuck in rush hour traffic.  What are you gonna do?  Just part of the job.  The three milk deliveries went fairly easily for me, although I did end up taking one of the old trucks with a manual transmission.  This one had a somewhat functional air conditioner, so that was helpful, but it also had its own share of issues. 

To put it more succinctly - today's truck was a hunk of shit.  This isn't simply a matter of me being accustomed to the shiny new trucks that I usually drive either.  Until a month ago, I spent all of my time in a truck with a manual transmission and a little over 500,000 miles on it.  The one I drove today has 531,000 miles on it.  The difference was astounding.  I can't imagine that my old Kenworth would seem so dilapidated after another 800,000 miles on the road.  The typical stuff related to driving an old truck was all well and good.  The bumpy ride, the noisy engine, and the grubby interior were all to be expected.  What wasn't expected was that the damned transmission would pop out of gear whenever I went over a bump in the road.  I may not have mentioned this before but I live in Michigan.  Our bumpy roads are legendary.

Cruising down the highway comprised quite a bit of today's work, so that part wasn't bad.  The truck seemed to stay in gear fairly well whenever it was in 10th.  The other aspect of my shift, of course, would involve actually delivering milk.  The way the loads were set up was fairly favorable to me.  My first stop took seven pallets and only gave back three pallets of empties, creating a little extra working space within my trailer.  Then the second stop took nine pallets, leaving only four more for my final delivery.  It was easy enough for me to set those four pallets aside before loading up as many empties as possible.  (Sixteen empties, in this case.)  At the final stop in Northville, I just watched as the dairy guy took his four loaded pallets out of my trailer and replaced them with four empties.

For the second time in as many trips with one of these old trucks, the fuel gauge had escaped my attention in the early going.  I had enough to make my 211 mile round trip, but it was pretty close.  Calling in sick isn't the only hobby that my coworkers like to pursue.  A handful of them are also quite fond of leaving empty fuel tanks for the next guy.  Anything you can do to skip those last ten minutes of work, eh fellas?

The timing of a day off tomorrow should end up working out rather favorably for me.  I have some errands to run and so forth, including getting my car back from the body shop and dropping Mom's car off at her office.  She and my father have been at their place up north all week, so I've been using her car the whole time.  She has to work tomorrow though.  Dad isn't working, so he can give her a ride in the morning.  Then she'll have her car for the drive home and I'll have my car and everything can seem normal for at least a day or two.

8/4/10

I don't want to disrupt an ongoing narrative, so I'll go ahead and share the following info with you - my ankle is fucked.  Fortunately though, I wouldn't have to lump any pallets of milk today.  All I had to do was take a trailer out to Grand Rapids and then bring another trailer back to Livonia.  In related news - if you think I went to Grand Rapids today, you're wrong.

My shift wrapped up last night at 1:45am, so I was available for work today any time after 11:45am.  I saw that my Grand Rapids run was scheduled for 11am, so I notified the night dispatcher before I headed home.  She adjusted my start time from 11am to noon and sent me on my way. 

So I rolled into work this morning and checked in with the main dispatcher dude.  I knew what was in store for me, of course, but it's SOP to make sure everything is still a go.  Heh.  Yeah.  As seems to be the case every day at this place, someone called in sick.  Flashbacks to my pre-trucking life are inevitable.  Every day, without exception, someone calls in sick.  That's just the way it goes.  By becoming a long haul trucker, I was able to insulate myself from having to deal with the inherent laziness of people, at least to a certain extent.  As long as I did what I was told to do, the scheduling nonsense and all the rest would be someone else's problem.

Now it seems that I'm right back in the thick of it all.  I still don't have the responsibility to deal with employees who call in sick, but I do end up getting caught in the chain reaction that results.  A guy gets sick and can't make his run today.  Another guy can cover that one as a second run, but only if his first one is changed to a shorter route.  He gets the shorter route and the sick fella's run is covered, so now we're left to deal with the longer route that the second guy gave up.  None of the more senior guys want it, since they like their quick and easy runs.  One of those "brothers" of mine was more than content to tack on my Grand Rapids turn at the end of his shift though.  Of course.  So I lost my easy schedule and wound up with two stops in Jackson and one in Hillsdale.  The run paid $148.68, which is somewhere in the ballpark of what I would have made on my originally scheduled run.  It just took a little over an hour longer and involved a lot more work.

I shuttled a few trailers over to the dairy for a quick $15 once I was legally allowed to work again, then made my pull and headed out to Jackson.  The first two stores didn't really seem to have their shit together, so I was at each for around an hour.  During the second stop though, I did manage to get the milk for my last stop rotated to the back of the trailer.  That last stop went very quickly and easily, so the bit of extra time at the earlier stop was well worth it.

As I rolled across US-12, back toward home, I got a call from my dispatcher.  There was a one-stop special order that I would need to deliver once I got back.  Those special orders are the cat's meow as far as milk deliveries go.  Stores occasionally find themselves in a jam and call the dairy for a few pallets to hold them over until the next scheduled delivery.  Today's special order consisted of three pallets going to the store at the corner of Wyoming and 8 Mile.  The thirty mile round-trip paid $49.99 plus my $15 incentive for taking a second load.  An extra hour and a half of work and an extra $65 in my pocket.  That's a pretty solid deal.

By the time I got home and got my shoes off tonight, there was quite a lot of pain and swelling in my recently sprained ankle.  It's less colorful than it was last night, seeming to indicate that there wasn't a ton of internal bleeding, so I'm hoping that a day of rest tomorrow will do a lot of good.

8/3/10

Ankles.  They suck.  At least mine do.  The years and years of repetitive injuries to my worthless ankles have left them in a pretty sorry condition.  The ligaments on the right one are stretched all out of whack and the left one gets pretty painful on cold or rainy days, most likely as a result of my failure to accept proper treatment the last time I broke it.  Hey, guess who stepped in a hole tonight!  Yeah buddy.  Those ligaments in my right ankle got one more good stretching.  It's a swollen purple mess right now.  Fortunately, the ligaments are so loose to begin with that I don't think I tore them this time around.  Walking is rather painful, but at least I can walk.  When those suckers get torn, we're talking crutches and wheelchairs.

Now that I think of it, tonight's injury occurred in a spot where I wasn't originally supposed to be.  You see, I had one load scheduled for today.  It was a four-stop deal in and around Flint that paid $160.89.  Not enough to send anyone to an early retirement, but a decent bit of coin for a Tuesday.  Weekends are the busy times in this gig of mine.  When I got to work this morning, I was told that I had a second run set up for tonight.  The new one had three stops in the Toledo area and paid $137.53.  When we tack on my extra $15 incentive for taking two loads in a shift, what is that?  $313.42, right?  Not exactly a typical Tuesday at the office.

Anyhow, I got back from my first trip at 7pm and dropped my trailer full of empty milk crates.  Once I found the trailer for my next load, I backed under it and stepped out to connect the air and electrical lines and do my inspection.  OUCH!  Fucking hole in the parking lot, right in front of that trailer.  I think the only thing that saved me from further damage was that I was still holding the handle of the truck when I felt my ankle buckle.  This isn't my first rodeo when it comes to ankle problems, as you're surely aware by now, so I'm trained pretty well.  I reacted almost instantly by pulling all of my weight off that leg.  It's gonna be pretty tender for a week or so, but it'll get better.

So yeah, a $300 Tuesday.  Just between you and me, I'd prefer something a little lighter on the pay scale.  By the time you make trips to Flint and Toledo, mixing in seven deliveries, a drop/hook, and a fuel stop, you've burned damn near fourteen hours.  In a former life I was that guy who chased every last dollar.  Not anymore.  There's a point when it's just too much.  I think we reached that point this evening.

On a positive note, I didn't really screw up any of the deliveries.  My total Line 4 time for the shift was 6.25 hours.  That included all seven stops, fueling, dropping, hooking, and inspections.  Just a couple of weeks ago, I don't think I would have come close to finishing both trips within fourteen hours.  Now I'm still not fast, but it would be hard to deny that some progress is being made.

I should get a little relief tomorrow, both in terms of my ankle pain and my work schedule.  Unless something changes, I'm only scheduled for one run out to Grand Rapids and back.  That trip involves mainly setting the cruise control and holding the steering wheel for a few hours, rather than walking repeatedly in and out of the trailer.  I've made the turn in Grand Rapids without any delays the last couple of times, so here's hoping for a quick and easy shift tomorrow.  That would be the perfect way to set up my day off on Thursday.

Speaking of perfect, is this the perfect campaign ad for our man Basil Marceaux.com?  I think it just might be.

8/2/10

I had a bright idea this morning.  Then my bright idea didn't quite work as expected, so I came up with another bright idea.  This one went nicely according to plan.  Since there was no dog at my folks' house when I got there, I needed something else to keep me entertained.  Cooking is fun sometimes, so I decided to give that a shot.  I had seen a recipe in a magazine a while ago and today seemed like a good time to put it to use.

My mother doesn't have a food processor, so I spent a good bit of time chopping fresh basil, fresh rosemary, and fresh parsley by hand.  (I think the recipe called for some other kinds of herbs, but I went with what sounded good to me.)  I wanted the flakes to be as tiny as possible, but I didn't want to use the dried stuff that they sell in shaker bottles.  Ergo the chopping took quite a bit of work.

Then I mixed the herbs with butter (not margarine), lemon juice, and some dried grated lemon peel.  I scooped the mixture onto a sheet of plastic wrap and then used the plastic wrap to help me form the butter into a log.  With the log of herb butter in the freezer, I had time to kick back and relax for a while.

Once my butter had firmed up but not completely frozen, I took it out and cut it into disks. Then I balled up the hamburger meat and pressed a disk of herb butter into an indentation in the center of each ball.  I worked the meat over the butter and pressed it into patties, keeping the herb butter disc centered in each patty.  The burgers went in the fridge and it was time for me to go to bed.

Only I didn't go to bed.  For one reason or another, I wasn't tired.  I should have been tired.  I had been awake for around 24 hours, but I wasn't ready to sleep.  Whatevs.  I got my call with tomorrow's work assignment at some point in the afternoon.  My pull time is set for noon, so I concluded that I may as well not go to sleep during the day today.  This way I can sleep tonight and then get up for work tomorrow.

I woke on my parents' couch at 2am tonight.  According to my sources, I fell asleep even before Dad did.  That never happens.  Guess I really was pretty tired, eh?  I remember having a delicious dinner, then taking some of the extra food over to a friend's house.  I then went back to my parents' place and sat down to watch TV for a while, as my last load of laundry was in the dryer.  Then... lights out.  I don't even recall deciding to close my eyes or anything like that.  I just crashed.  Fortunately for me, I had awakened to use the bathroom at a pretty good time.  I was able to get my shit together and make it home by 3am, so I'll get plenty of sleep before I head to work tomorrow.

A day off twice a week... I don't hate it.