I ended up delivering a load to Marietta, GA, then found out that I was being held for another customer. Given that nobody could assure me that I was going to be sent back to Charlotte for my truck, I wasn't about to accept that for an answer. A couple phone calls and a bit of firm discussion later, I was assigned two loads: one to save, and a 1,000+ mile run that would take me back through Charlotte. I agreed, though I had my doubts about being able to make the load save in the first place.
My fears proved to be well founded: the journey was significantly longer than the paid miles and, coupled with a delay due to road construction on I-20, I ended up being a solid twenty minutes late for my delivery. This put me on standby, pushed me behind the 10 PM appointments, and turned a 30-minute live unload into a two-hour waiting game. If things went well, I could have just made it back here last night; these delays ensured that the best I could do was Atlanta, since the handful of truck stops along I-85 would likely be full.
Delays didn't end with that live unload, either. The next load was a preloaded trailer pickup from a facility that was listed having 24/7 access to trailers. Turns out that it wasn't; the guard was on an hour-long lunch break when I arrived and I lost nearly 45 minutes more as a result. I called operations to complain; their suggestion was that I just take my break somewhere else and pick the load up in the morning. In hindsight, that might have been a better idea, but I stubbornly sat there, waited, and left with the trailer around 12:30 AM.
Upon arriving at the Atlanta OC, I didn't know what to expect for parking; it's one of our smaller yards and it tends to fill up quickly. I was fortunate enough to get parking in the very front row, in one of the few spaces reserved for transient combination parking. I promptly went to bed, slept for nine hours, got food with the remaining time, and hit the road. There were no further delays on the way to Charlotte, as I was leaving Atlanta around noon and arrived here before rush hour settled in.
My first stop was to head to the shop and find out whether or not my truck was done. Turns it it wasn't; the issues I was having were linked to the truck's entire transmission failing, a seven-hour repair job. As such, the estimated completion time was pushed back from 10 AM this morning to 4 PM tomorrow. I called ops to find out what they wanted to do and, ultimately, they decided to keep me on the load in the hopes that my truck is ready earlier than 4 PM since that would leave me perilously close to being late on delivering this load. I'm going to be getting in touch with the shop in the morning to find out if there's any chance at all of them speeding things up, since being able to leave here earlier would greatly help my chances of getting the load there with time to spare. If they're late, though, I may be stuck handing the load off to someone else and losing about 700 miles and another day out on the road. Only time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment