I'm going to keep this post rather short, just so I can bring things up to date in a hurry. The last load I had was prety much a joke. Though we "confirmed" that we could deliver Monday, the consignee was closed for President's Day. So I dropped the trailer as a relay, grabbed an empty, and quickly got a load of aluminum cans. Despite administrative problems at the shipper, I was out of there within an hour and a half. I shut down in Denver, just because I could.
Yesterday was about as basic a drive as things get: I-76 to I-80. Managed to do 661 miles without even getting clever with my logbook; we have to round everything to the nearest 15 minutes and it worked out such that things rounded to 10:45, fifteen minutes below the limit. Regulatory doesn't even have anything to whine about this time.
I ended up leaving Des Moines a bit earlier than I would have liked, since the weather was supposed to be pretty nasty: two to six inches of snow and 20+ mph winds most of the day. That only started as I approached the consignee, though, and I arrived more than an hour earlier. Granted, it took them 15 minutes for them to acknowledge I was here and another 15 for me to get into one of the docks, but that still puts me half an hour ahead of schedule. I don't think they've started unloading me yet, but I'm on their time now. Once they finish, I drive across town to pick up a load from another warehouse.
The problem, though, is not that I'm getting another load, but that it's a live unload in Michigan. I can't imagine they'll find freight up there at all, so there's a significant risk that I'll be stuck up there for an untold amount of time. Further, my truck's due for maintenance by tomorrow. Last time, despite not even going through an operating center during the maintenance window, I had someone in ops literally yelling and cursing at me for not getting it done on time; the shop didn't seem particuarly happy to see me either. I don't want a repeat of that, but my DBL apparently doesn't care or doesn't see it as a problem if I'm a day or two late, even after I conveyed the reaction I got last time. If anyone chews me out, I'm going to tell them to ask ops why I wasn't allowed time to get the work done.
In any event, this evening is going to be a pain. Given that my next load is going to be extremely heavy (at least 45,000 pounds) I'll have to scale it out, which is going to eat into my already limited time. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to make it to our Gary, IN operating center, take care of some regulatory crap that I'd been neglecting, and get a decent dinner and shower. If not, I'll probably have to stop at one of the places in southern Wisconsin, as there's absolutely nothing worth stopping at in the Chicago, IL area. If I stop there, though, that leaves me more than 300 miles left tomorrow and almost ensures that I won't have enough hours to make it to an OC. If I make it to Gary tonight and they somehow find freight tomorrow, I might at least be able to make it back to Gary or, even better, down to Indianapolis. Knowing my luck, though, they'll leave me stranded up there for days. :p
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