Today was yet another one of those long and frustrating days that I'm glad is over. I woke up at 3AM, got a shower, and hit the road. Dropping the loaded trailer off was the easy part, but the first trailer I was told to pick up was part of a dedicated account's fleet, so I couldn't take it. Operations assigned me a different number; unsurprisingly, that one wasn't there. I needed to go back to the office to clarify a few things anyway; they assigned me another trailer and I went on my merry way.
Only after arriving at the next place did another problem arise: the trailer I picked up had a hole in the roof. This isn't something that I could likely have seen; it was still dark when I picked it up, so there wouldn't have been any light shining into the trailer to give it away. But it did mean that I had to wait on hold for 20 minutes to get someone on the line. Ultimately, after an increasingly frustrating series of phone transfers - and well after my trailer was actually loaded, despite me asking the shipper to wait - I was told to take it to a repair shop on the way and hope it doesn't rain on the way there.
Thankfully, no rain was involved, but I did have to spend an hour and a half at the shop waiting on the repair. As such, I had just over two hours left on my 14-hour day, leaving me enough time to drive roughly 130 miles. I ended up using every minute of it, too; the truck stop I'd originally planned on going to apparently doesn't exist anymore, but I did find another one just as the clock rolled over to 6PM, the fourteen-hour mark. So I parked, ate dinner, and now am relaxing before bed. The only problem is that I won't be able to leave until 4:30AM (figuring in a 30-minute pretrip, as usual) and I'm 200 miles away; there's a nearly-zero chance I can make my 8AM appointment tomorrow. I've sent in a message telling operations this; hopefully the customer will accept it if I'm 30 minutes late or customer service can get it pushed back an hour or two.
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