Dalton, GA - An exercise in frustration

Today has been one of those days in which even Murphy's Law just doesn't seem to go far enough. I ended up getting to the consignee later than expected due to traffic. The consignee didn't have an empty trailer. The Atlanta OC didn't have an empty available. Ops felt like making up excuses relating to policies I was already following instead of trying to actually fix the problem; it's the first time I've ever hung up on someone after they escalated a shouting match. I arrived at the shipper fifteen minutes late and was accepted, only to find myself at the back of a line seven trucks long. The scale at the shipper was on the fritz so I still have no idea if this load is actually legal or not. I had to go fifteen minutes over my 14 hour limit just to get to the nearest truck stop after that.

All told, I'm a full three hours behind schedule now. I need a small miracle tomorrow - namely, going at least 600 miles without any delays or issues whatsoever - just to have a small chance of getting to the consignee at the time I'm currently expected to be there. Failing that my odds are completely nonexistent and I'll be losing time on Friday. I'm really not expecting much of anything good at this point, though. The only even slightly favorable thing is that I plan on calling my DBL's boss at some point later in the week, explaining what happened, and asking to be moved to a different board. Today was very much the last straw in dealing with that.

Wilmington, OH - South for the winter

After spending a considerable amount of time in New England, I'm
finally getting a run that takes me toward the center of the country.
In this case, my destination is Kentucky and my estimated time of
arrival is about 10 o'clock tomorrow. I'm not sure what's going to
come after that, as usual, but ops said there was no freight down
there and thus no reason for me to try press on and make it there any
earlier than I'm already going to arrive. Hopefully something will
come available by the time I reach the facility since rural Kentucky
is definitely not an area that provides much hope of finding freight.

Things recently have been rather steady, though. It seems like I could
be running as many miles as I want, as there's rarely a shortage of
freight. Yesterday was the first day in nearly three weeks that they
just couldn't find a load for me, regardless of where I was; I had to
kill most of a day in western Ohio waiting to pick something up this
morning. Once I had the load, though, I had to make a couple of
detours. First I had to get a damaged tire replaced to ensure the
trailer was safe to haul, then I had to detour around a DOT scale
since there was no way of ensuring my weight was legal before I'd have
crossed it. It's a good thing I took the side trip; I was 750 pounds
overweight on the trailer tandems. Beyond that, it was just a straight
shot down I-71 to get here. The McDonald's at this exit has twice as
much parking as the truck stop, so I parked here instead since the
truc stop was already full.

In the morning I just need to get up, get fuel, get food, and get
moving. There's really not much else to this run now that I have the
weight legal and a decent trip plan in place. The only concern now is
hoping that ops finds a run for me to get me back out of there,
preferably in the direction of a city actually worth being in.

Westborough, MA - Two long weeks

I apologize for not updating this more often, but the last two weeks have been utterly insane; I completely ran out my 70 hours in my first seven days on the road. In the eight days since then, I've logged another 67 hours. I've had time to do little more than work, eat, and sleep. If we're still in a recession, it's clearly not affecting any of the customers that I've been hauling freight for. There have been a few minor hiccups, but overall things are going pretty darn well out here. I'll try to update more often in the future, but there's just too much to write about retroactively.

Beaverdam, OH - Out of the frozen tundra

Though things here in the midwest aren't nearly as bad as they are out in the Rockies - it's above freezing and there's no risk of snow - the weather has been unseasonably cold over the last few days. It's brushing rather close to freezing, but nothing going below that mark. Things have cooled off quite a bit with work as well. While I had been running close to that seventy hour limit last week, that came to a very sudden halt when I arrived in Seville on Saturday and found that there was no freight whatsoever for me to take if I relayed my current load. As such I was left taking an unwanted 34-hour restart; the only positive things are that I get a day of layover and accomplished some personal errands.

Things today were about as simple as they get: an early morning start to drive straight to a consignee. I stopped for breakfast and a short nap along the way, but the trip itself was dreadfully uneventful. I was unloaded in about one-fourth the time I was told to expect, though, so I made a phone call to find out whether or not I'd be getting another load any time soon. Ops originally said that there was nothing around but, upon finding out that the area planner was doing dispatch, they also informed me that they'd lined up a 750 mile run to Georgia. I stopped briefly for lunch on the way since I needed to kill about 45 minutes before I could arrive at the consignee. Upon arriving there, I found out that they were in the process of loading another one of our trailers, rather than live loading the one I brought with me. They took their sweet time with it, but I ended up getting out of there about 20 minutes earlier than expected. After one final stop to scale the load, I came down here for my break.

Tomorrow is going to be dead simple: straight down I-75 as far as I feel like going. I'll probably stop about 30 miles north of I-285, since there are two truck stops at an exit in that area and no other ones beyond that point. Then it's an early morning on Wednesday to get the load delivered on time, but nothing like the 2 AM trips I had to make last week. What happens beyond that is anyone's guess, but ops has about two days to figure something out for me.

Keeney, PA - EPIC FAIL

I'm not sure if it's possible for an entire department to be maliciously stupid, but that seems to be the only thing that fully encompasses just how utterly asinine things have become when our customer service department gets involved. Things started off simply enough this morning: the consignee will accept the load as soon as I can get it there. With that knowledge in mind, I started as soon as my break was up and went to scale the load out. After getting the scale ticket, I came back to the truck to find a message waiting for me: appointment scheduled for 11 PM. This conflict wasn't just a contradiction: it presented an impossibility, as my hours for the day were going to run out at 11:15 PM and the consignee doesn't allow parking.

I called in immediately after seeing that mess on the Qualcomm and explained the problem to ops; my DBL agreed that it was not cool that customer service was screwing things up this badly yet again. He said he was going to work on something, probably a relay, and that I should just head to the Carlisle OC. If I didn't hear anything by the time I arrived, I was to call back in and see what the updates were.

Nothing arrived, of course, so I was left to call in. Once again my DBL said that he was working on something and that he had a likely candidate for a relay, but that nothing was confirmed. I ended up calling back in after another hour and found that I was still stuck trying to deliver the thing at 11 PM, but that two people in customer service had talked to two people at the consignee and both said that I could park for the night in a lot they had on the facility. I said that was fine, albeit questionable, but at least I had the names of the people involved this time rather than a faceless case of "customer service talked to the consignee" as so often happens. So I got dinner, waited a couple hours, then hit the road yet again.

Upon arriving at the consignee around 10:15, I found out that everything I had been told about the load was wrong. No, I couldn't have gotten there as early as 9 PM and been worked in. No, there isn't anywhere on their property to take a break even if I don't have enough hours. No, I can't drop my trailer in a dock door and leave to take my break. I called ops again and got the first reasonable, straightforward answer I'd had in quite some time: get out of there and find a legal place for my break while I still had time. I didn't ask twice about that, but I did stop by the receiving office to explain the situation and make one last appeal for an alternative. In the process, I found out that even my work assignment was wrong; it originally said to get there between 7 AM and noon today, but that all unloads have to be confirmed appointments, scheduled in advance, and that absolutely no trucks are handled on a first come first served basis. So, in short, this load wasn't just doomed to fail from the beginning; we never even had a time set up for it. So much for it being a service critical/line shutdown load, right?

One of the few good things happened after I left: I actually found a legal parking place just as my 14 ran out. I called operations yet again, explained the situation, gave an estimated time of delivery, explained that I didn't have a Qualcomm signal, then was asked to send in a message over the Qualcomm with my estimated time of delivery. After facepalming, I explained yet again that I had no signal and repeated that the best I can do now is 11 AM. Ops then tried to tell me to just go back in there as soon as possible to get the load delivered; I told them that I'll go in there when and if I get an appointment and, according to the receiving office, they're already booked solid for tomorrow.

Regardless of what happens overnight, I'll be calling in to first shift when I wake up and trying to get some actual answers from the people who screwed this thing up in the first place. I really hope I get to relay the load, just so it turns into somebody else's problem, as I'm quite tired of feeling like I'm doing the work of almost every department we have in Green Bay. Seriously, is it that hard for anybody up there to just get this stuff right the first time?

Watkins Glen, NY - Operations and irresponsibility

This isn't the first time that ops has completely ignored my mac 18 (the message that tells them when I'm available and for how long), but it is the first time that they've left me in this much of a clusterfuck because of it. I'd originally sent in that I want to park for the day by 6 PM since, past that, it's increasingly difficult to find truck parking. I was done with my previous load around 1 PM local time, went to a nearby truck stop, and parked there to wait for a load. When the Qualcomm beeped just before 5 PM eastern, I figured that it was something for me to pick up tomorrow morning. Instead, it was something that had to be done by 10 PM tonight, with a delivery 250 miles away by noon tomorrow.

Even if I left immediately, it was pretty unlikely that I was going to get it there on time, so I tried calling operations to find out who put me on the load and why I was given a load that was just setting me up to fail. Of course, first shift shut the phones off early again, so I was whisked away to support shift, who can never actually answer anything. I was just told to pick the load up anyway, despite my protests and my complaints that I was going to be short on hours, and to update once I had the trailer loaded with information about my estimated delivery time.

Arguing clearly wasn't going to go anywhere so I growled in protest as I left the truck stop to head here to pick up the load. It took two hours to get here, as expected, but the trip itself was quite stressful. I missed a turn at one point and then ended up stuck behind someone doing 45 in a 55 with no way of passing him for at least 25 miles; he kept accelerating to 60 as soon as I had enough clear road to get around. I found the facility without further incident, though, and checked in only to find there was a considerable line of trucks ahead of me (I counted seven). The facility is first come, first serve as well, so despite the issues with my hours of service and the fact this is a just-in-time, service critical load for a major corporation, I'm stuck at the back of the line waiting for a dock to come available. Even now, more than an hour and a half later, there's still at least two trucks ahead of me, plus the ones in the facility's three docks.

Once it became obvious that I wasn't even going to have enough hours to get to a safe and legal parking spot for my DOT break - the nearest truck stop is about 45 miles away - I called in to ops to protest again. That went absolutely nowhere, despite being on the phone for just over an hour and explaining, repeatedly, when I started, how many hours I used, when my 14 hours for the day expires, that there's no way at all for me to deliver this on time, that I need to relay the load, that customer service needs to talk to regulatory if they think I can do this, and pretty much every other protest that is laid out in the above text. And, despite all that, I'm still on the load and customer service won't take me off of it for any reason short of the truck catching fire.

The only thing I can do at this point is wait to get loaded, go the 45 miles to that truck stop (regardless of how many hours I actually have left), scale it out, and hope that there's somehow a parking space available. There are two rest areas along the way, which improves my odds just slightly, but I'm not at all confident that I'll be able to get a parking space at midnight, which is about when I'll be arriving. I'm supposed to give another update to customer service once I'm parked for the night and have a better ETA, but based on the information I have now, I'm going to be at least three hours late.

In the morning I plan on having a long discussion with operations about this load. There is no excuse for any of this happening, at all, and I'm not going to let people just get away with this crap this time.

Charlotte, NC - Time for a tranny

I ended up delivering a load to Marietta, GA, then found out that I was being held for another customer. Given that nobody could assure me that I was going to be sent back to Charlotte for my truck, I wasn't about to accept that for an answer. A couple phone calls and a bit of firm discussion later, I was assigned two loads: one to save, and a 1,000+ mile run that would take me back through Charlotte. I agreed, though I had my doubts about being able to make the load save in the first place.

My fears proved to be well founded: the journey was significantly longer than the paid miles and, coupled with a delay due to road construction on I-20, I ended up being a solid twenty minutes late for my delivery. This put me on standby, pushed me behind the 10 PM appointments, and turned a 30-minute live unload into a two-hour waiting game. If things went well, I could have just made it back here last night; these delays ensured that the best I could do was Atlanta, since the handful of truck stops along I-85 would likely be full.

Delays didn't end with that live unload, either. The next load was a preloaded trailer pickup from a facility that was listed having 24/7 access to trailers. Turns out that it wasn't; the guard was on an hour-long lunch break when I arrived and I lost nearly 45 minutes more as a result. I called operations to complain; their suggestion was that I just take my break somewhere else and pick the load up in the morning. In hindsight, that might have been a better idea, but I stubbornly sat there, waited, and left with the trailer around 12:30 AM.

Upon arriving at the Atlanta OC, I didn't know what to expect for parking; it's one of our smaller yards and it tends to fill up quickly. I was fortunate enough to get parking in the very front row, in one of the few spaces reserved for transient combination parking. I promptly went to bed, slept for nine hours, got food with the remaining time, and hit the road. There were no further delays on the way to Charlotte, as I was leaving Atlanta around noon and arrived here before rush hour settled in.

My first stop was to head to the shop and find out whether or not my truck was done. Turns it it wasn't; the issues I was having were linked to the truck's entire transmission failing, a seven-hour repair job. As such, the estimated completion time was pushed back from 10 AM this morning to 4 PM tomorrow. I called ops to find out what they wanted to do and, ultimately, they decided to keep me on the load in the hopes that my truck is ready earlier than 4 PM since that would leave me perilously close to being late on delivering this load. I'm going to be getting in touch with the shop in the morning to find out if there's any chance at all of them speeding things up, since being able to leave here earlier would greatly help my chances of getting the load there with time to spare. If they're late, though, I may be stuck handing the load off to someone else and losing about 700 miles and another day out on the road. Only time will tell.

Charlotte, NC - Ops, we have a problem

Things with the truck have been kinda sketchy for a while, but today they went over the edge. I was finding it very difficult to get the truck into gear and - as the evening went on - it became increasingly difficult just to keep it in gear. This would have been bad enough on its own, but I also lost the high side of the engine brake, which made descending the various long grades in Virginia far more nerve-wracking than they needed to be. Attempting to go down a seven-mile long 6% downgrade is particularly frightening when you smell brakes burning, even if it later turns out to be someone else's.

By the time I arrived at the operating center, it was nearly impossible to drive. The truck fell out of gear twice just on the half-mile or so stretch of street between the Interstate and the OC's gate, then once more as I tried idling it to the shop. They wrote it up for maintenance, gave me a rough time estimate, and told me where to park it. Good thing, too; I barely could get it into gear at all because the clutch was nearly seizing up and it was practically impossible to shift out of gear without turning the truck off. There's no way at all this thing could have made it to my delivery tomorrow.

A bit of phone tag with operations later, and I was originally told that this was going to be a relay... then ops called back ten minutes later to tell me that there's so little capacity around here that I'll have to take a loaner and deliver it. I was assured that I'd be routed directly back to the operating center, but I'll believe that one only after I have a work assignment that tells me to stop here. Regardless, I'll have to call first shift in the morning to finalize the details on this run, attempt to get the delivery moved up a few hours, and pester them until they give me a run that brings me back to Charlotte tomorrow evening.

Rogers, MN - Back and forth

After getting stuck on a rather lousy run in Pennsylvania, I was given a nice trip out to Minnesota, worth over a thousand miles. Getting out here was pretty easy, despite a few routing mistakes, since there are only so many ways one can go on the Interstate. I arrived here slightly earlier than planned despite the detour, largely due to Chicago traffic being far better than anticipated. I get to deliver this thing around 6 in the morning tomorrow, then take a relay back toward Chicago for a Monday delivery. I need a weekend free. :)

Kennebunk, ME - More early mornings

The last few mornings have been incredibly early starts; I had to be up around 1 AM to try pick a load up Friday morning and had a 5 AM delivery today. Things were going pretty decently yesterday, so I decided to push my luck and try hit a truck stop much closer to the delivery location than I'd originally planned. My hours were running out, so I decided to go to a rest area instead of the truck stop I wanted to reach. That might have worked out well, except that the New York State Police were doing level three inspections. In other words, logbook checks. By the time I arrived there, due to traffic and hills, I was already fifteen minutes over my time for the day.

The officer had his share of issues with the paperwork, though most of them were the sort of mistakes a rookie would make. For one, he asked me to open the trailer to get the VIN and other information off it; that stuff is on a plate right near the gladhands. For another, he thought that "AR" on my logbook was the abbreviation for Arizona, not Arkansas. He also noted that yes, I am pushing it, but "I'm not going to bust your balls for fifteen minutes" he said as he returned everything to me with a clean inspection report. I was forced to park there, of course, but given the shortage of hours I'd planned on that anyway, so I only lost the half hour due to the inspection.

This morning I started as early as I could: 1:30 AM. I had to drive straight through and skip my originally planned fuel stop just to make it on time; I arrived just ten minutes before my appointment time. I checked in, found out we needed a lumper, grumbled about that for a couple minutes, called operations and got "approval" to have them do it, and took a nap while they worked. They finished just after 8 AM, came back with a price, and I called in to get a comcheck for payment. First shift decided to chew me out for not calling in sooner as the genius in support shift apparently decided not to update that information in the computer after I called. I was given a check, but still haven't received an authorization number; without one the fee comes out of my paycheck so I'll need to call first thing Monday morning to get that resolved.

Once the unloading stuff was taken care of, I went to the truck stop I originally was to fuel at and actually filled the truck up with the 51 gallons it needed. Operations wouldn't tell me anything about a work assignment except that I was being held for a customer. Only on the third call was I told that it's unlikely that I'd be assigned anything that would get me moving before a break and I should have considered the time immediately after I parked as the start of my break. I called them out on that, though, and said rather bluntly that if I'm having to get up at 1 in the morning they better find a way of utilizing me since I'm quite tired of busting my tail only to get screwed over again and again. The lady in ops then said she'd see if they'll at least get an assignment pushed out to me before they leave; I had one show up just after 11 for a customer other than the one they claimed I was on hold for.

This assignment is notable for one thing: it's the first time I've been told to deadhead more than 300 miles to get a load. Usually, they try to keep that under 100, or maybe 200 if they're truly desperate to get a load covered, but above that is unheard of for us. I'm not sure what's so special about the load, though; it's a pickup that I can make any time tomorrow (I plan on arriving around 5 AM) and a delivery 500 miles away for Monday at 4 PM. Looking at my hours and the details of this load, I should just be able to make it to the consignee tomorrow afternoon if I try; I sent in a macro asking if we can deliver it then so I'm free much earlier on Monday. If so, I can park on-site there and have a full slate of hours after my break. If not, I can easily claim layover pay for it. So, in this case, I pretty much can't lose. :)