Charlotte, NC - Spring Training Complete

Despite the fact I haven't done any load-related work today, it's still been a bit of an adventure. When I woke up this morning, I saw a couple of messages from operations telling me that my load had been switched to a relay. Apparently I had my dates all mixed up; the load I has was supposed to be dropped last night by midnight, not tonight. Rather a big oops; that's a pretty blatant service failure. So rather than just sit around and worry, I went inside and called operations to explain what happened: I somehow got the dates crossed up. They didn't seem to be that upset about it, since this is only the second service failure I've had in the seven months I've been working, but I really need to make sure I know what day it is in the future.

Once I got off the phone, I went out to put the paperwork on the trailer, since I dropped it as soon as I got here, taking another driver's suggestion for parking. Turns out that they'd already sent it off with another driver, as it wasn't there by the time I walked across. I hope he (or she) got the bills of lading and such from operations directly. I just have no idea what I'm supposed to do with the original paperwork now; normally it gets signed and I send it in, but I didn't make the delivery, it doesn't have all the information from the consignee. I'll have to call operations tomorrow to find that out, since I've never encountered this situation before. At least now I know why I sometimes I have loads that are delivered 30 miles from an operating center and lack all the paperwork.

After sorting all that mess out, I had lunch, then proceeded to clean out the tractor. It's amazing how much trash can pile up in places that you never think about. I also apparently miss the trash can behind my seat more often than I thought, given the number of old scale tickets and receipts I found next to the bin. I also swept up, something that I haven't done since I got the truck. It was rather embarrassing having a dust pan completely full of.. well, dust, mostly. The boots they issue tend to attract a lot of things. I took a shower once the truck was clean, ensuring now that everything I have is all clean; I did laundry, cleaned up the cab, and had a nice shower.

I finished the shower just in time to head into the evening spring training session. I've been slightly worried about this, since it's the first real training session I've been involved with and I wasn't sure what to expect. The class started with a classroom portion of perhaps an hour and a half, with about a third of that time dedicated to a video explaining how to do all the trivially basic things in as many steps as possible. For example, it took the presenter two minutes just to explain the process of getting in to and out of the truck. While all that was going on, someone looked over our permit and log books to ensure everything was as it should be; mine checked out just fine. After that, we went outside and were asked to demonstrate some of the things we saw on the video, such as opening and closing the hood, getting into and out of the truck and trailer, and climbing on and off the truck's catwalk. Again, all the basic stuff that I don't even consciously think about any more; it's just an automatic behavior.

Then came the part that I'd been most concerned about: the road test. By this time, though, the instructors all just wanted to go home. Rather than it being a long, involved drive, we went around the block. The trainer spent more time reading the newspaper than watching me drive and said I was doing everything well. I was worried he might say something about my tendency to hug the right side of the road or that I don't shift smoothly, but no, he just checked off "acceptable" all the way down the sheet.

So now that I have that out of the way, I got a $7 meal ticket (free dinner!) and a $50 gift card to the company store. Of course, this being my day, even that didn't go smoothly; my "$50 gift card" apparently was somehow issued to someone else on March 25 and has $1.71 left on it. I'll have to contact someone tomorrow about that so it can get corrected; I actually found $50 worth of stuff that I want to buy in the store. Specifically, I want some window screens before the summer sets in, as well as a couple of new shirts. Hopefully they'll be able to correct it or give me a new card or otherwise get it sorted out. I just hope they don't want me to fix this in person since I'd like to leave earlier than that.

Speaking of leaving, I did get a work assignment early this afternoon. I'll be going up toward Greensboro, NC, then delivering that in New Jersey on Wednesday. Since I am not feeling particularly well (exhausted, for some reason) I'm not up to driving overnight, so I'll instead leave sometime in the morning, pick the load up, and drive perhaps a total of 400 miles. That'll leave me 175 miles or fewer for Wednesday, which in turn means I should have a reasonable amount of time left to work after I drop my load off. Hopefully everything will go according to plan on that front.