Gary, IN - Round trip

Today was an exercise in frustration for much of the trip. I woke up this morning to a message from operations, telling me that the load to Utah wasn't going to be ready until the 13th, so they were going to find something else for me. Given that I no longer had much of an incentive to move in a hurry; I went inside and got breakfast from the cafeteria.

I left a bit later this morning than I intended (nearly 9 AM), though I'd hoped that was late enough that rush hour traffic would have let up. While that might have been true, traffic was still horrible due to the snow and ice on the road. Things improved slightly once I made it into Wisconsin, but didn't significantly improve until I made it around Milwaukee; once I started up US 41, traffic had thinned out enough that the few cars that insisted on doing less than half the speed limit were no longer an issue. I received another work assignment while driving, though I didn't have a chance to check it out until I dropped the load. Once I saw what I had, I was rather underwhelmed.

Instead of getting to drive 1,400 miles out to Utah, I got a 600 mile load to Erie, PA that was scheduled for a delivery at 9 AM on Monday. In other words, I'd probably have been parked for two days. I went to the shipper to pick the load up, but called and set up a relay here at Gary, since neither I nor operations thought that sitting for two days was a good idea. The load was satisfyingly quick - 19 pallets of canned veggies - and I was on my way in less than an hour. Once again, traffic was decent going down 41, but got steadily worse as I approached Milwaukee and it started snowing again. Even so, I was able to make it down to the OC with about half an hour to spare; I was able to breeze through Chicagoland without issue.

However, when I arrived at the operating center, another issue became apparent: the customer hadn't paid for freeze protection on this load. And, because they hadn't done so, operations wasn't even going to take the trouble to research the issue; they told me to simply drop the trailer and forget about it. Meaning that, unless it's an incredibly warm night tonight, there will be more than 20 tons of frozen (and thus rotten) canned food. I asked them to send a message out to the truck explicitly saying that I'm not responsible for what happens to the trailer or its contents; I had such a message within five minutes. The situation still makes me extremely uncomfortable, since I know that much food could do a lot of good, but because everyone involved is too cheap to ensure that it's edible, it's likely to simply be wasted.

Having sorted out all that crap, I went out into the lot to drop the trailer. The problem? There's so much ice and packed snow - made worse by a brief shower of freezing rain - that I'm stuck. I can't get enough traction to get out from under the trailer. I was told someone would be coming to pull me out in "five to ten minutes" but that was almost half an hour ago now. I see lights coming this way; if it's not the yard guy coming to pull me out, I'm going to walk back to the shop and find out what the hold up is. Soon as I can get the tractor parked, I'm going to get a nice, hot meal, then going to head straight to bed. I'll worry about pretty much everything else in the morning. After all the frustration of today, though, I'm nearly tempted to just take a day off...