This isn't the first time that ops has completely ignored my mac 18 (the message that tells them when I'm available and for how long), but it is the first time that they've left me in this much of a clusterfuck because of it. I'd originally sent in that I want to park for the day by 6 PM since, past that, it's increasingly difficult to find truck parking. I was done with my previous load around 1 PM local time, went to a nearby truck stop, and parked there to wait for a load. When the Qualcomm beeped just before 5 PM eastern, I figured that it was something for me to pick up tomorrow morning. Instead, it was something that had to be done by 10 PM tonight, with a delivery 250 miles away by noon tomorrow.
Even if I left immediately, it was pretty unlikely that I was going to get it there on time, so I tried calling operations to find out who put me on the load and why I was given a load that was just setting me up to fail. Of course, first shift shut the phones off early again, so I was whisked away to support shift, who can never actually answer anything. I was just told to pick the load up anyway, despite my protests and my complaints that I was going to be short on hours, and to update once I had the trailer loaded with information about my estimated delivery time.
Arguing clearly wasn't going to go anywhere so I growled in protest as I left the truck stop to head here to pick up the load. It took two hours to get here, as expected, but the trip itself was quite stressful. I missed a turn at one point and then ended up stuck behind someone doing 45 in a 55 with no way of passing him for at least 25 miles; he kept accelerating to 60 as soon as I had enough clear road to get around. I found the facility without further incident, though, and checked in only to find there was a considerable line of trucks ahead of me (I counted seven). The facility is first come, first serve as well, so despite the issues with my hours of service and the fact this is a just-in-time, service critical load for a major corporation, I'm stuck at the back of the line waiting for a dock to come available. Even now, more than an hour and a half later, there's still at least two trucks ahead of me, plus the ones in the facility's three docks.
Once it became obvious that I wasn't even going to have enough hours to get to a safe and legal parking spot for my DOT break - the nearest truck stop is about 45 miles away - I called in to ops to protest again. That went absolutely nowhere, despite being on the phone for just over an hour and explaining, repeatedly, when I started, how many hours I used, when my 14 hours for the day expires, that there's no way at all for me to deliver this on time, that I need to relay the load, that customer service needs to talk to regulatory if they think I can do this, and pretty much every other protest that is laid out in the above text. And, despite all that, I'm still on the load and customer service won't take me off of it for any reason short of the truck catching fire.
The only thing I can do at this point is wait to get loaded, go the 45 miles to that truck stop (regardless of how many hours I actually have left), scale it out, and hope that there's somehow a parking space available. There are two rest areas along the way, which improves my odds just slightly, but I'm not at all confident that I'll be able to get a parking space at midnight, which is about when I'll be arriving. I'm supposed to give another update to customer service once I'm parked for the night and have a better ETA, but based on the information I have now, I'm going to be at least three hours late.
In the morning I plan on having a long discussion with operations about this load. There is no excuse for any of this happening, at all, and I'm not going to let people just get away with this crap this time.
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