Lagrange, GA

The last two days have gone so smoothly, there was nothing worth posting about. So since I'm posting, you just know something went wrong. :)

In this case, I woke up about 3AM to make sure I had the time to get a shower before I had to hit the road. I turned the key on to activate the Qualcomm (message system) and saw that I had a pair of delivery messages ... but I didn't have any pick up messages to go with them. As I was looking at that and trying to figure out what was going on, the truck started beeping. At first I figured it was just the low air warning - my truck has a strange tendency to lose about half the air in its tanks some nights while not losing any on others - but I looked under the curtain to see "WARNING: LOW COOLANT LEVEL" flashing brightly on the display.

So, I did what any rational person would do. I wigged out.

Once I finished saying "oh shit," "damn it," and "fuck" about ten times each, I climbed out and tried to see anything I could. There was (and still is) a rather large pool of fluid under the truck, which at least suggests that it was a problem that didn't exist until I got here. However, as there was so much fluid - the truck's cooling system holds fourteen gallons - I had no idea where it could have come from. So I called maintenance and was told to pour water into the tank to see where the leak was. They said it would take several gallons and I'd probably have to go back and forth; I joked about it being such a big leak that it would be empty by the time I got back there. Unfortunately, that joke turned out to be a lot closer to reality than they anticipated.

Even as I was pouring the water into the system, I heard it splashing on the ground. At first I just thought I had missed the tank, but I then noticed it was flowing freely out of a hose connected to the bottom of the coolant reservoir. So, having established what the problem was, I called back to get them to send someone out. They said it would be about an hour to 90 minutes... and that was nearly two hours ago. I'll be calling them back as soon as I post this to find out what the problem is.

It gets even more frustrating, though. While I was waiting, I sent a message to overnight operations explaining the situation and asking them to resend the pick up information. They asked me whether or not I could take the load; I told them I needed the pick up info first before I could give them an answer. They then told me it needed to be done by 9AM... in a message that didn't include any other relevant load information. So, for a third time, I asked for pick up information, only to receive a message telling me I'd been taken off the load entirely due to the break down. Now, if this place is within a hundred miles and service gets here within the next hour, I could still have made it easily; they wouldn't even give me the information I needed to make a decision. I'm going to be making a very angry phone call to operations as soon as first shift comes in asking why the overnight people completely refused to give me the rest of my work assignment. Because of this crap, I lost at least 784 miles, since that's the distance to wherever I was supposed to pick up the load to the place it was to be delivered. If I don't get a new assignment with at least that many miles, I'm going to remain pissed off; the focus of that will simply expand to first shift as well.

At least, on the bright side, I didn't make the mistake of starting the engine to run the air conditioning or to recharge the batteries. That would not have ended well.

Update (5:30AM): I just got off the phone with maintenance and found out that they sent a message out explaining the problem ... to the wrong truck. In any case, I found out that they called six different vendors but nobody would even answer the phone. As the guy in maintenance put it, he called everyone within forty miles and couldn't even get someone to tell him no. This isn't the first time they've had a problem even getting an answer, either, according to the person on the phone. So, as such, I'm slowly losing time for the day because there's absolutely nobody who can get this truck fixed. I guess I would have had to get pulled off that load anyway at this rate.