La Crosse, WI - %*($(

So, things were going at least reasonably well. I should know better than to expect that to hold out. I drove across town to the shipper and... well, first, I had to check in. Then I had to wait for some ass that decided he was going to block the driveway rather than park across the street where he was supposed to. Then I spent fifteen minutes getting lined up with the dock only to find that the trailer tandems - which were working just fine when I had to move them for an unload - now had one broken pin. I spent perhaps fifteen minutes beating on it with a hammer and crowbar, hoping to force it to move, but no go. Somehow one of the springs isn't moving at all.

So I call it in, get the usual mumble mumble, and get told to take it to a place... four miles away, down the Interstate, where they don't have useful directions. I call them myself, find out where I'm going, and now I'm waiting in their lot. Apparently the "night" crew doesn't show up until 2:30 and they're not even going to look at the trailer until then. Thus, unless they manage to fix it in ten minutes flat, there's no chance of me picking the load up on time. In turn, that means I'll almost certainly have to get the load appointment rescheduled, which throws the delivery into question, and pretty much screws over everything else.

When I have some idea of when they're going to have the repair finished - and while it's a simple fix, they don't seem to be in any hurry to get on it - I'm going to have to call operations and find out what we're doing about the load. If the shipper's open later in the evening and doesn't mind taking me, I can at least get the load picked up, but then I'll find it extremely difficult to find parking on the road. The only thing I had going for me was that I could probably have made the Gary OC tonight, or at worst have to park at a cluster of large truck stops near the Illinois border, but now I doubt I can even make it that far.

They're just starting work on this now. They asked me to get out of the truck so they could move it themselves, which struck me as rather odd, but I'm just too irritated at this situation to argue.