French Camp, CA - Cluelessness

Since I picked up my load, things had been going fairly well. I managed to drive more than 670 miles each of the last two days, allowing me to stop in far western New Mexico on Thursday and in Bakersfield, CA yesterday afternoon. There are some really nice photos I took along the way; I'll try to upload those sometime later this weekend. I woke up early this morning (technically, late last night), got food, and got on the road the moment my break was up. Five hours later, I found myself at the consignee's locked gate.

Yep, that's right. They have me do 1,720 miles of driving over more than three days, yet don't even bother checking to see whether or not the place I'm delivering to is open. There was a guard on site, at least, who was able to provide me with my appointment number (the one customer service insisted that I didn't need) and who informed me that they aren't open at all on Saturday (despite operations insisting they were open 24/7 and my work assignment telling me to arrive today). I drove about ten miles down here to the operating center, where I'm going to be stuck for the weekend. Relaying isn't an option, though support shift was lying when they told me that there wasn't any freight in the area so I wouldn't have anywhere to go; we have 19 loads here and only three drivers, but since there aren't enough drivers, there wouldn't be anyone to cover the relay if I dropped this off. Even operations admitted that this situation was inexcusably bad, but there's really nothing we can do about it. Customer service pretty much ignores any complaints about their inability to provide accurate information and there's absolutely no accountability even when they screw up like this.

I won't even get to finish a 34-hour restart - I'll be less than an hour short - since I have to deliver it at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon. As such, I'll have only about 20 hours for the next three days, before the 10+ hour days I drove to get out west start rolling off my recap. That might end up working out as days of eleven hours Monday and nine on Tuesday or something similar, meaning I'd never even get to take a full restart. The alternative is that, if freight doesn't stay busy, I end up stuck here for yet another day and a half. I still wish I could get sent to the southern part of the state for various reasons; had I known that this was a delivery for tomorrow, I could have just stayed south and driven up here tomorrow. If it were entirely up to me (even though, in reality, what I ask for doesn't mean a thing) I'd get a load that either delivered to a suburb of Los Angeles or something that I could relay in Fontana and take a 34 hour restart at the operating center down there. In reality, they'll probably have me deliver this, leave me stranded here until Monday, and have me do some crappy run to northern California or Utah.

Oklahoma City, OK - Far West

This morning was rather uneventful. I woke up a bit later than I wanted, delivered my load, then had to sit and wait for nearly five hours for a work assignment. However, my cynicism about the lack of freight was ill-founded. I'm picking up a relay here in town first thing in the morning, then going clear out to northern California with it. Total mileage? 1,720 miles, good for more than $550. I'm going to have two very long days to get out there, though; at least 625 miles tomorrow and Friday, leaving me 350 or so for Saturday morning since this has to be delivered by noon. If I do all that according to plan, I'll only have five hours left on my seventy, so that's going to come into play as well.

The one wildcard in all this is a loud whining noise my truck makes when accelerating. Kilroy (the other Schneider driver who comments here) had an identical problem with his rig just last week and it turned out to be the turbocharger. I sent a message out to road repair and they said to check all the fluids for now and to come by an OC as soon as possible. Fontana, CA has an operating center, but it would be about sixty miles out of the way. I could just make it there, if the next two days go perfectly and operations allows me to relay the load. Alternatively, I could hope to get routed back there after getting unloaded; I'd have just enough hours on my seventy to make it. I'll have to call first shift in the morning to try and work out some sort of plan about all this. :)

Schneider Screws Drivers

All pay increases suspended. Layover reduced to 65/incident from 90/day. 401k matching "deferred" to year end. Pay cuts for new hires effective 3/1.

I don't even know where to begin so I'll edit this post or make a new one later.

West Memphis, AR - Long morning ahead

After delivering my load in Michigan, I was given a load going down to Mississippi. Given the length of the trip, I took a detour through Indianapolis to get maintenance done. I wanted to spend the weekend up there and relay the load off, but the shop was working remarkably fast; despite a rather long list of write-ups, they had it done by dinner time on Saturday. Since that was too late in the day to do anything useful, I left from there first thing this morning and came down here to the Memphis area. From here, I still have about 225 miles to go to my delivery and I'll have a little over four hours to do it in the morning. That's cutting it closer than I'd like, to say the least, but it should be doable barring any sort of calamity. The downside, though, is that Mississippi is a black hole for freight. If I'm not stuck down there for at least a day, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

La Crosse, WI - Further insanity

So here's how the rest of the afternoon went. The shop said that fixing the tandem slider on the trailer would be a very time-consuming process (4 to 6 hours), so Schneider Maintenance came up with a "solution" that took less time: cutting off the pin that wouldn't work. As another driver put it, that's roughly akin to healing a broken finger by cutting it off. But it did at least allow me to move the tandems when I returned to the shipper, more than an hour after my original appointment.

And once again, Schneider's estimated time proved to be wildly inaccurate. The computer said one hour. It took more than three. As such, I'm stuck taking my DOT Break here. Further, there's no way at all I can make on time delivery in Michigan by 4:30 tomorrow afternoon. Even more, if they insist that I try deliver it Friday, I'll be overdue for my tractor PM. The trailer needs to be repaired as well; even though running it with only three pins is legal, that doesn't mean it's safe to simply leave it in that condition. But all this has to wait until morning; I'm not going anywhere for another nine hours or so.

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.

La Crosse, WI - Someone didn't get the memo...

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

Sarita, TX - Going in circles

I had to get up awfully early this morning, so this is going to be a
short post. Ended up leaving San Antonio around 5:30 AM, then headed
down to Laredo. Things went well, aside from one incident about
halfway there. I was in the right lane, another truck was passing me
in the left lane, and a third truck was trying to merge onto I-35. I
had nowhere to go and both the merging truck and I stomped on the
brakes until we both were doing about 25. He got on, I got back in
place, and no damage was done.

I did get a pleasant surprise while in Laredo: A 1,350 mile run to
Colorado Springs. That wasn't entirely without incident either,
though; I managed to break the Qualcomm and lost nearly an hour while
that was repaired, then found that the trailer I'd been assigned was
wedged in between other trailers in such a way that I'd never be able
to get it out; I couldn't even reach the landing gear to raise it up
and, even if I could, there wasn't enough room for me to swing out and
actually leave the yard with it. I hastily found another trailer, sent
that number in, got a message back saying to take it, and went on my
way. The problem? I left Laredo at 12:15, had to travel 220 miles, and
the shipper allegedly closed at 4 PM. I called the shipper myself to
apologize and try to arrange something else, but ended up getting
voice mail... the greeting, however, said their office hours were
until 5 PM. Turns out that was true; they were still there when I
arrived at 4:45.

It's a small miracle I arrived at all, though! The route I was on was
... well, barely legal for an empty trailer. One segment of road had a
weight limit of about 58,000 pounds, while another wound through a
residential area to end up on a dirt road. Yep, that's right: a big
ol' semi going down a lane-and-a-half-wide dirt road. The facility had
just one dock, and a driveway barely large enough to let one one truck
through at at time. I needed nearly 15 minutes just to back in, but
figured it out eventually; I finished it right at 5 o'clock. They
loaded me and sent me on my way.

The accumulation of delays left me rather short on my 14, though. I
originally planned to make it to Corpus Christi, but that was clearly
impossible: I was 150 miles from the city with just 45 minutes left.
As it is, I went about half an hour overjust getting this far, but I
doubt anyone's going to notice thirty minutes. Tomorrow's going to be
more problematic, though: Amarillo, Texas is 694 miles from here, whch
is more than I can do in 11 hours of driving, but not impossible for
me to do within 14. I have no idea how I'll make it work on paper, but
I should be able to swing something, one way or another.For now,
though, I need to get to sleep; tonight's the first night in a rather
long time I'll be getting nine hours of sleep. :)

Theodore, AL - One of those afternoons

I didn't even get started today until nearly noon, and I parked here at 4:15. Only two and a half hours of actual work. Sounds like a good day, right? Well, not exactly. Things started off well enough, but the directions I had to the shipper were horrible; I ended up following them to their old address, on property they still own but at a warehouse rented out by someone else. Turns out I had to go across the street. They loaded the trailer and sent me on my way in about an hour.

Getting out of there, things got steadily worse. Traffic on I-65 in Mobile was much heavier than I'm used to seeing. On top of that, someone had spilled a few empty pallets on the road, blocking two of the three lanes, which forced everyone to the far left lane or the right shoulder. Once out of that mess, I had to try move back left to make it out of lanes that were ending or exiting. Then I arrived at the Pilot here to scale the load, only to find that all 50 parking spaces here were already full. I looked around a bit, just to make sure; during that time, three trucks pulled out and I quickly snapped up one of the spaces. I'll still have to scale the load, but I'll worry about that in the morning.

I plan on getting out of here around 2:15 AM and heading toward Texas. Not sure just where I'll stop yet, but there's a place near San Antonio that seems promising. After a break there, I'll head to Laredo, take care of business there, and hope they route me north. I also have to hope that I dodge the worst of the severe weather, since I can't exactly outrun a tornado in this thing...