Houston, TX - An exercise in futility

I'm a bit short on time today, so let me just make a brief bullet-point summary of what happened yesterday between my last post and when I arrived here:

• Assigned a preloaded trailer heading to Houston.
• Got to the shipper, found out that my preloaded trailer wasn't loaded.
• Spent three hours waiting on them to finish, scaling the load, etc.
• Attempted to get a snack at a Love's but found the line was nearly backed up to the off ramp.
• Stopped at a Pilot for food and fuel, got in an out in under half an hour with no line.
• Found the consignee: a store, not a warehouse. Ended up driving through the automobile parking to get around to the unloading docks.
• After spending twenty minutes just trying to find the driver's entrance, got the paperwork signed, dropped my load, picked up the freshly-unloaded empty, and went to try drop the empty at a railyard.
• Had to wait nearly ten minutes for a train to pass.
• Arrived at the railyard entrance at 8:58, two minutes before closing. The trailer wasn't "billed" so they couldn't accept it and turned me away.
• Went to the Houston OC to find it was a total mess; there was barely enough room to even drive around in there and at least a dozen of our trucks had parked in the street. Called operations, explained that I couldn't park at the OC, and got told to try the Pilot on I-45.
• Drove ~10 miles to the Pilot, found parking right up front, and took about 15 minutes trying to work into the space.
• Parked, went to sleep, woke up, got food, got a shower, typed this.