Today was a day in which absolutely nothing was accomplished. I arrived here in Laredo around 4:30 PM yesterday, parked the truck, and went to bed exceptionally early. It's nice catching up on sleep! I woke up... still nothing. I waited until about 12:30 this afternoon to call in and see what freight's like. Unsurprisingly, it's not that good down here; I found out, though, that they have drivers doing load saves down here to keep us from just sitting around. Meaning, in other words, they're trying to give us loads that would break up a layover.
Not ten minutes after I get off the phone, I have a work assignment come in. It was supposed to pick up here at the OC and deliver to somewhere else in Laredo. Because we're paid on book miles, which are calculated city to city, a run that stays within a single town is zero miles. Unhappy about this, for several reasons, I call in and find out that runs like that are paid at a flat $25, plus any applicable detention pay. Since this was expected to be a two hour unload, I would likely have received an additional $15 for that, bringing the total to $40. Layover pay is $90. Meaning, in other words, I would have received $50 less by working than I would have earned for sitting still another three hours.
However, note that I'm referring to this load in the past tense, not as one that I actually took. I can't refuse a load (not without risking my job, anyway), but when I got over to the trailer, there was no paperwork on it; it just had a slip saying to see the fuel desk. I went inside, talked to the people there, and found out that they didn't have the paperwork either; they sent me into the office to see who had it in there. So I went in there and not even they knew where the paperwork was at first. When I told them, rather tersely, that I needed the paperwork to move the load since it was due for delivery in the next 90 minutes (I'd lost nearly an hour trying just to find the trailer and doing my pre-trip), they looked in one last place. Sure enough, the paperwork was there... along with a note saying that customs had rejected the load and that nobody could legally touch that trailer or its contents until we had the okay.
So, all that done, I had to go out, call operations to get taken off the load (and spend 25 minutes on hold), unhook from the trailer, and find another parking space. The lot here is in such bad shape that I got stuck in gravel. I eventually got out, by playing with the power divider, dumping the clutch, spinning the tires, and generally doing all sorts of things that the mechanics would probably really prefer I not have done to the truck. However, since I did ask for help and the shop basically told me to figure it out on my own, I really don't feel guilty about anything I did there. I parked in a space that I wasn't going to get stuck in (another 75 feet from the building) and have been sitting here since.
Though operations said they'd give me another load as soon as they could, it's been about six hours and I still haven't had anything come in. I'll probably set the Qualcomm right next to my pillow, so any incoming message beeps will wake me up, but I'll be very surprised if I get something before about 8 o'clock in the morning. In any case, if I'm still here at 4:30 tomorrow, I'll get credit for another day of layover, but I'm going to call in tomorrow just to make sure that everything is in the computer. I don't want to get short-changed on pay again.
No comments:
Post a Comment