I don't think I've ever seen traffic nearly this bad in Chicago. All of I-94 - from where I got at the I-80 split to where I finally got off 30 miles later - was snarled. As such, I was a full hour behind schedule just when I got to my delivery point. I had about an hour and a half to spare, so that was okay... but I had another pick up to make by 3PM. It didn't help that I needed to get onto I-90 west and sign that said "to I-90 west" took me on city streets that clearly were not meant for trucks; I think I scraped the top of my truck on a 13'6" high overpass.
When I finally picked up the empty trailer I needed, I was five miles away from where I was to pick up the load and had less than five minutes to get there on city streets. Clearly not going to happen. I'd already told dispatch that I'd likely be late and I'd update with any further delays; I never received a message telling me that this wasn't okay. But when I got there at 3:04PM, both another driver and I were angrily told they were closed and that we'd have to come back at 6:30AM tomorrow. Needless to say, we both were pissed off, especially considering that the only reason we were late was the extraordinarily bad traffic.
About ten minutes on the phone with dispatch got me taken off that load and assigned something else. It's a much longer run - over 900 miles - though it doesn't pick up until tomorrow morning, so I have to kill a night here in Chicago. I'm going to end up all the way down in Oklahoma, so I hope I have enough money to cover all the toll roads; that state is painfully expensive to drive through.
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