Yeah, yeah, I had to use that song title eventually. Given that I'm now going 2,100 miles east and my truck is down for good, this seemed like an appropriate time to do so.
And, well, they are sending me back east in a rental car. I'll pick it up from the nearby airport, drive 25 miles west to the truck to gather my possessions, get some lunch (since a friend recommended a sushi place), then start the process of heading 2,000 miles east. I anticipate being home sometime Friday evening, if all goes well, but that may change depending on just how aggressively I try to make time on the road. I'm tempted to stay here one more night since it may take me all morning to get my stuff out of the tractor and there are some friends I'd want to see one last time, then stop in Fort Stockton tomorrow night, enabling me to reach Pensacola by Thursday, if I do a thousand miles a day. More likely, however, is that I'll be stoppnig for a night in El Paso and Houston. Given that I'm not restricted to 60 miles per hour nor 11 hours per day, I have a lot of flexibility.
As for actually getting back to work, though, there's no telling. Apparently there's a waiting list for equipment right now and I'm squarely at the bottom of that list. I'm supposed to call in tomorrow to get a better idea of what exactly that means, but my initial inkling is that I won't be back out on the road for at least another week. If they find me something while I'm heading east, they'll just ask me to drive myself to a new(er) truck, wherever it happens to be. If not, at least I should know how far down the list I am by the time I get home.
On a final note, the guy I spoke with in ops repeated that this is not my fault at all, but did suggest that if I ever have the misfortune of ending up in a situation like this again, I should call the company CEO at home.
I hope you're not down for too long hun. Are you being paid anything for this down time? Do you have somewhere to stay in the meantime?
ReplyDelete-Starla