Charlotte, NC - A whole lot of malarkey

I'm starting to run out of polite ways of titling these posts. Really, I'm trying to be nice. My parents read this after all.

Things started out from Tampa on Friday, when I got an assignment to pick up a load going to Albany, GA. I was promised decent miles, among other things, but the 300-mile run wasn't even ready to be picked up until 2 AM the next morning, leaving me a nearly 12 hour wait just to get started. At least I had parking available. My DBL insisted that he told me that was the case, but he had never communicated that to me. At least he confirmed I could deliver it Saturday, as long as I arrived before 2 PM. I got there around 10 and, after weathering intermittent severe thunderstorms, made it out of there and parked at a truck stop in time for lunch. I got an assignment while waiting, but it was one that I couldn't pick up until 9 PM, so I just got it early Sunday morning.

Sunday was relatively uneventful, since it was the only day out of this entire series of events that I simply had to worry about driving. Four hundred miles in total, taking me up to Memphis. I found parking at one of the truck stops there, leaving me about 15 miles from the delivery, though that proved to be a nearly half-hour drive on the city streets. I left at 3:30 AM Monday, arrived at 4, checked in at 4:25, and backed into a dock by 4:35. That's about when things started to go downhill. Specifically, I found out that I wasn't going to be able to hire a lumper, per the instructions of the shipper; if I did so, it was coming out of my paycheck as I was not going to be reimbursed for it. Nowhere on my work assignment did it say I was going to be responsible for unloading the truck, but I was basically told that I either had to do it or I was going to be out $75. I was also told that my DBL should have told me what the terms of the load were, among other things, none of which I'd ever been told by anyone. It took me three hours to finish pulling the freight off, during which time I received more than my share of harassment by the people working the facility. The part that ticks me off the most? Another Schneider driver was backed into the dock right next to mine and he was allowed to hire the lumpers without any problem at all.

After finishing that up, I picked up another load, though this too had its problems. Specifically, just after I arrived, I received a message saying the load was cancelled. I go to check in and get told the same thing; the message was waiting for me when I got back to the truck, along with one saying I was back on the load. I call in, find out that they were working on it but it might take half an hour, so I get to sit and wait. At this point, I'm completely exhausted from having to unload 16,000 pounds worth of stuff from a trailer earlier in the morning, frustrated that I keep getting conflicting information that varies simply depending on who I talk to, and have long since exhausted my patience. Forty-five minutes later, after receiving no confirmation from anyone, I call ops and get told that things were good to go about 40 minutes ago; this was never communicated to me. At least there were no further incidents: when I went to check back in, I was assigned a dock, loaded, and ready to go in less than 45 minutes.

The rest of the day was generally uneventful: I scaled the load out and found it to be legal on my first try, got lunch, fueled up, and ended up stopping at a Pilot in Birmingham, AL. The truck stop was a mess, to say the least, in part because the parking spaces were actually too short for two 53' trailers to be parked back-to-back. I ended up backing into the trailer behind me and most of my tractor was still in the aisle. The guy behind me left before I could even apologize for the collision (not that anyone cares much about trailer-to-trailer rear bumps like that), so I backed out of the way to ensure I wouldn't be blocking anyone else. That made getting out a bit harder, but at least I was able to sleep without being disturbed.

That brings us to today, Tuesday. I got a work assignment while I was about 20 miles from the consignee, so I pulled into a rest area to check it, just in case something was amiss. It's picking up from the same place I'm delivering (very good), but is a live unload (bad), a lousy 150 miles (bad), and the unload's expected completion time wouldn't leave me enough time to even legally pull off their property, much less drive back to the operating center here. I sent in a message saying that, if I arrived on time and it took the expected two hours, I would have no time to leave; I got back a reply telling me that it shouldn't take that long and that I should be fine anyway. While I was on the yard - and fighting with a painfully stubborn trailer tandem slider - I called and asked for help planning it out. I asked my DBL to either try get the appointment moved up or to confirm that it would take under two hours, and get back to me as soon as he found out what could be done about either of those. Of course, he never got back to me at all, nor was he even at his desk when I called in after my fears were confirmed: at 4:15 eastern, there was no sign of my trailer being done.

By the time they were done, it was just about 4:30, leaving me half an hour to drive and at least 25 minutes away from the operating center. After fighting stupid four-wheelers, city busses that stopped everywhere except their designated stops, badly time traffic lights, and the usual freeway problems, I arrived at the OC at about 5:07 PM, just barely in time to legally round my driving time back to five o'clock. This is not a situation that should have arisen at all; when I said I wasn't going to be able to make the delivery and have hours to leave, I should have been taken off the load right there unless it was confirmed that the times in question were not accurate. No confirmation, once again, a trend that I'm finding to be exceptionally frustrating. While here, I got a PM done on my new tractor, so I don't have to worry about maintenance for a while. I'm parked next to the only truck in the entire yard that's idling, annoyingly enough.

I'm going to head to bed shorty, after sending in a message marking myself as available in the wee hours of the morning. If the Qualcomm wakes me up with a work assignment, fantastic; if not, I've set the alarm for 6 AM just in case things are slow. Given that freight is apparently balanced here right now, it's a 50/50 chance that I'll get something that requires me to get moving before sunrise. However, given the sheer number of issues that I've listed above, I will likely be calling operations and asking to talk to someone higher up to figure out why so many things are going unresolved and being left to me, the driver, to clean up after their mess. There's really no reason for this.

Tampa, FL - Same stuff, different month

Operations has a remarkable way of dismissing even simple requests they dislike as being unreasonable. They insisted that I go to this guy's apartment anyway, only conceding that it would be safer to get the key while sitting in the complex's office. I got the key, quickly put my stuff in the rig, and returned the rental. It took about half an hour for me to get a work assignment after that, though what I have is pretty lousy. The trailer won't be ready for me to pick up until either two or three in the morning (I've heard both numbers twice), but at least I can deliver it the same day in south Georgia. Freight in that area usually isn't too bad, since we have two large accounts out of the city, so there's at least a chance I'll get some respectable mileage after that.

The "new" truck I've been assigned is another '03, like my old one. Also like my old one, it has about 730,000 miles. However, they've upgraded a lot of things on the rig: it has a CD player with built-in alarm clock, a nicer air conditioner, and an auxillary heater. According to the ex-driver, they've also done a lot of repairs on it, such that this thing is probably as good as new overall. There's no telling how long I'll be driving this one, but I'm not going to complain if I keep it for a while.

Tampa, FL - You want me to go where?

The situation with work is getting increasingly bizarre and frustrating every time I call in. I've been telling them all week that I'd like to move to Indianapolis if possible, but they've continued to insist that I pick up a truck from someone living in St. Petersburg who was fired after having multiple accidents. It wasn't until yesterday, after they'd already arranged a rental car, that they bothered to tell me why they weren't even considering Indianapolis, despite my willingness to drive up there myself. Among other reasons (which they never bothered to elaborate on), they'd want me to have my CDL in the state before they'd reassign me to the operating center. Had they told me that on Monday, when I first brought up the idea, I could have gotten all that taken care of by now. Instead, I'm here in this quagmire.

The situation here is roughly as follows: when I called in yesterday afternoon, despite being told that we'd arrange things via a conference call before I even got started, I was simply given the former driver's phone number and address (which says something about our company's privacy policies) and told to call him myself, then hung up on before I even had a chance to process what I was told to do. Needless to say, I have not called and will not call. I most certainly will not meet this guy at his house; it's just common sense to not meet a stranger in a place where there would be no witnesses if something were to go awry. Operations' insistence that he's not a weirdo and they wouldn't send me down here if he were a threat are not comforting, since unassuming people can snap and, well, I can't say I'd be cooperative if I were on the other side of this situation.

So I called in, conveyed about half of what I've typed above, and basically said that if it's not arranged via a three-way call I'm not going to even attempt to deal with this. Unsurprisingly, the other driver didn't answer when operations tried calling, so we just left a message on his voice mail asking him to call. I got off the phone at 10 o'clock (eastern) and said that I'd call back in an hour if I've not gotten a call from the office before then. As it is, I don't think the rental car is going to get returned by noon, but that's not exactly my problem at this point. Given that the guy no longer works for us, he can't return the rental car (frustrating, but understandable), but operations insisted they would not put me in a position where I had to rely on him for a ride and was quick to offer a taxi ride from the airport if it proved necessary. In light of that, I'm going to propose that we meet at a fast food restaurant in a locaton convenient to both the former driver's residence and the truck's location, where I can take the keys and don't risk being alone with someone potentially dangerous.

I'll probably update again later in the day when I have more information.

Pensacola, FL - Days at home

Just a short update for those of you following along. I was supposed to have next weekend off, so I'm not going to get assigned a truck until after I come back from my scheduled time off. I'll be calling operations on Monday and finding out where we have a truck, if one is available, and making arrangements to get to it.

Ontario, CA - Eastbound and down

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.

Ontario, CA - One more day

Unsurprisingly, no resolution came from the mutiple calls I made to Memphis this morning. It seems like they're going to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to find another truck for me somewhere and that I will be picking up a rental car to head east tomorrow. To where, exactly, is unknown at this point. If they find me a truck, I'll be heading there; if not, I'll be going home and, more likely than not, be off the road for a while longer. However, I won't know anything for certain until I call in tomorrow; hopefully they'll be able to give me a definite answer the first time, since it seems like they at least have the information they need to try answer my questions.

For now, though, it's one more day out here in La La land.

Ontario, CA - Uncertainty

After a week off, the usual guy I talk to came in today, which left him rather clueless as to what happened Monday and Tuesday. We (I and the other people in ops) filled him in as to the situation, though he's going to have to make some phone calls and try to work something out. One of the bigger problems is that our west coast operations are regional, so trucks out here generally need to stay out here, keeping me from simply taking one that's not currently in use. Though he wanted to avid ruling anything out, it seems rather unlikely that I'll be assigned another tractor while down here in Los Angeles. If they can't do that, then I'll most likely be taking a rental car from here to either pick up a tractor back east or (equally likely) simply go home and take extra time off.

I'm supposed to call back at 1:30 PM Central to find out what the verdict is. At that time I should at least know whether I'm going back to work or whether I'm unexpectedly getting most of the month of March off.

Ontario, CA - Twilight Zone

For all the things that I expected to hear when I called in this morning, I certainly did not expect to hear that there was no record of anything at all. No record of the accident. No record of the truck being towed anywhere other than the operating center. No record at all of anything that was done yesterday despite talking to operations at least eight times and the accident department twice. Not even a record of the several messages I sent on the Qualcomm indicating that the accident occurred and the information about said accident that I transmitted so claims could start working on getting a police report.

To summarize the above: nobody knows that anything at all happened. So now they're going to "research" the issue and calm me back "as soon as [they] know anything." There's really no research to be done, though, aside from simply reading the notes that any sane person would have taken down yesterday and, if necessary, calling LA Maintenance to find out whether or not my truck is at their yard. If it's there, then the mechanics can look at it; if not, then it needs to be retrieved from the towing company. It's simply exasperating when I can't get even the most basic of information from the company after spending twenty minutes on the phone.

Ontario, CA - Thirty-seven hours a day

When I left off, I had just broken down and was left waiting on a tow truck. The guy who arrived was a bit... clueless, to put it nicely. Senile might be a more apt term. It took four attempts to actually get a hold of someone on the phone, then ten minutes to fix the screwed up directions he'd been given, then another thirty for him to show up at the truck. He spent nearly an hour hooking up to it, only to find that he was missing a fitting for the rig. He left, came back an hour later with the right part, took yet another hour to hook up to it properly this time, and then we went on the way. By this point, it was nearly 2 AM local time; I was dozing off in the passenger seat.

I came to my senses rather quickly, though, as the tow truck driver started hollering "I don't have any brakes!" Sure enough, he was pushing the pedal to the floor to no avail, despite having adequate air in the tanks. The Jake brake wasn't enough to hold the truck back, either; 110,000 pounds (70k for me, 40k for the tow) is extremely challenging even with fully-operable equipment, but without brakes, there's no chance. Then, with no immediately obvious warning, the engine died. He started asking me what to do; I told him to try restart the engine, throw it into the lowest gear he could catch, and fire the jake brake up. That didn't work, though; he turned the key but the engine wouldn't turn over. Thus, in the span of less than half a minute, we lost every means of controlling the vehicle's speed, while still descending a considerable grade. The speed limit on the slope was 40; we were up to 45 with no braking mechanism at all. I'm shuddering just writing about it.

The tow truck driver, however, did about the only thing he could do. He ran well up an upslope on the side of the road, taking it way up the embankment, then bringing it back down. 45 mph fell to 40. Another excursion off-road and we were down to 35. However, the truck was gaining speed ever-faster as the downgrade steepened, we were up to 40 again in the time it took him to catch his break. Then, he simply announced "I've gotta go" and took the thing even further up the side, knocking out several road signs. I clutched my seat belt to my chest, holding on for dear life, while the entire combination bounced violently. I didn't even see the flatbed truck on the shoulder until a split-second before the collision, in which the tow truck's driver's side collided with the passenger side of the flatbed trailer. Then, as suddenly as the vehicle had gone out of control, we were at a stop.

As I felt myself to ensure that no, I hadn't left this mortal coil, I looked over at the driver. He was in... bad shape. I thought he'd strangled himself on the seat belt; he was dangling limply from it, making a gurgling noise. In panic, I jumped out of the truck, ran toward the road, and started waving for anyone to call 911. My cell phone had died while I was waiting on the tow, so I couldn't. The flatbed driver was still hunting around for his phone when another trucker pulled over and called for an ambulence. By the time I walked back up to the tow truck, the driver had, miraculously, regained consciousness. He was bleeding from his right temple and had no recollection of what happened even after we repeatedly explained it, all classic signs of a concussion. Miraculously, that was the worst of anyone's injuries; both I and the flatbed driver were completely unhurt. The ambulence showed up perhaps 15 minutes later and the tow truck driver was taken to the hospital.

The police came as well, taking statements, information, and all those things that cops do when an accident happens. We were near Castaic, I think; it was on I-5, ear the bottom of a mountain, at a place starting with a C. Additional tow trucks were arranged - I still find it darkly ironic that a tow truck needed a tow truck - because the damage to all the vehicles was severe.

• The tow truck was totaled. The entire steer axle was ripped off, lying underneath his drive tandems, likely aiding as a block. The engine was toast; the windshield, cracked, the frame, warped. It's hard to imagine any components even being salvaged from what's left of that, save for perhaps his passenger side mirror.
• My truck came out the best of any equipment involved. Sadly, that's not saying much. I'm holding out hope that they can repair it, because I didn't see any obvious damage to any major components, though the body needs a lot of work; there are at least two holds that go through to the sleeper. I turned the key to run the diagnostics, though, and "low coolant" was the only alarm tripped, just as it was before the accident.
• My trailer is toast. The driver's side was split open by the flatbed's fender mirror, with a gash going from the front corner to the third-to-last vertical support, roughly 45 feet long. It caused the bottom rail and floor to sag considerably. The freight appeared to be undamaged, aside from the pallets shifted, which was confirmed later in the day.
• The flatbed's tractor is ruined. Massive body damage, multiple flat tires, and what appeared to be a complete loss of engine oil. Amazingly, though, they were able to start it up and move it around on the scene so the tow trucks could work more easily.
• The flatbed trailer is also gone. He was hauling scrap, so it's not like any cargo damage would even be noticeable, but his passenger-side rear tires were gone; we didn't even find them anywhere on the hill.. The front axle was likely cracked as well, but all the pieces were still attached to the trailer, so that might not be a complete loss.

I spent some time talking to the flatbed driver, who was a Mexican immigrant doing cross-border work. He owned his truck, so this has to be a huge blow to him for a whole lot of reasons. His family came up to help him move things out of the rig before they towed it away. Most of the other officers and workers on the scene seemed impressed by the sheer volume of damage involved; several of them said that this was unlike anything they'd ever seen before despite being out there for a decade or more.

It was dawn before any progress was made on disentangling the mess. They had to get a rotator out to just hold my trailer up, ensuring it wouldn't collapse. It took nearly three hours for them to just extract the tow truck from my rig, and another hour for them to pick up the remaining pieces and haul it away. The flatbed took somewhat longer to settle, as they had to move the trailer and truck seperately; they left perhaps another two hours after that. Meanwhile I was left waiting for them to transload my freight onto another trailer, since mine was in danger of collapse the moment that rotator let go. There's still a quarrel going on between customer service and the towing company over that mess, as the towing company insisted on doing it their way, even going to far as to insist they deliver the load themselves. This is the same company who towed my truck in the first place and who is at fault in the accident. I heard them saying they figured they'd lost us as an account even before they started being dicks about the freight situation. Perhaps they just assumed that, since we weren't going to be doing business with them again, they may as well make us regret calling them in the first place. Yeah, that's a great business model...

At least they tried to be civil toward me, offering me space in the sleeper of the semi they'd brought down. I didn't take that up until rather late, since I just wasn't tired at that point; I was more worried about getting the situation resolved before I fell asleep. Ultimately, they put as much freight as possible into their trailer (not ours, another point of contention with customer service), then let me ride along to their facility while we waited for them to sort out towing my tractor. Someone was supposed to come from the OC and give me a ride in the company car to a hotel, but after an hour and a half of waiting, the tow company just had me ride along with someone who had a call going that direction and dropped me off there.

And so, here I am, writing up what is probably my longest post in this blog to date. I've been up since about 7 AM yesterday, more than 37 hours ago. Operations has encouraged me to take my time and get some rest, since even they acknowledged that it's been a long day. On the bright side, they did commend me repeatedly for keeping my wits about me and remaining professional about everything, even as they insisted that I think more about my well-being and less about what was going to happen with the truck, the freight, or anything else that's happened today. One bit of good news: the tow truck driver was released from the hospital with nothing more than a few stitches on his head and on one leg. What could have been a disaster with multiple fatalities ended up as simply a half-million dollars in damage to equipment without any serious injuries.

I'm probably going to sleep at least tweleve hours now, possibly more, then call ops around 11 AM tomorrow morning to find out what's going on. If my truck is indeed totaled, I'll be here until they assign me another unit. If they decide they're going to do the repairs after all, then I'm here until those repairs are finished. Either way, I'll certainly be here tomorrow (I need a 34 hour break anyway.) and there's a chance I'll be here quite a bit longer than that.

California Catastrophe

Grapevine, CA - In which my truck takes a leak all over the road

I was hoping I'd have something nice and exciting to post for my four hundredth entry in this blog. I was right, mostly, but it's not the kind of excitement that I would have hoped for. Specifically, as I was coming down I-5, approaching a rather large hill, I felt the truck starting to lose power. Thinking that it was my turbo, as I'd previously suspected it acting up, I turned down the radio but didn't hear anything out of the ordrinary. As I started up the hill, though, the truck barely had power at all. I was shifting gears nearly as fast as I could take them, losing nearly five mph just in the time it took to get from 10 to 9, which forced me to shift to 8th nearly immediately, and in turn to 7... at which point the engine protect light came on, accompanied by a low coolant warning.

So I pulled off the road immediately, thinking that I might have lost a hose, since I'd already had to gone one replaced on this truck. But, no, nothing nearly that benign...

From Truckin' Around

Yep, that's my radiator. Leaking vast quantities of coolant all over the five freeway. It's stopped now, but that's because there's nothing left to leak out. So I called maintenance and explained the situation to them. They want to repair this at an operating center, so I found out another little gem: we have an OC in downtown Los Angeles, about 80 miles away. They're sending a tow truck up from there, then taking me down, so we're looking at four to six hours according to maintenance. I fear it might be closer to eight, given that traffic in LA - especially downtown - is lengendarily bad. I'm going to have to relay this load as well, since I won't have the hours to deliver it even if they wanted to give me a loaner truck. As such, I'll be in the general area for the foreseeable future, likely at least two days.

I've been told to simply call in when the truck is repaired and I'm ready to return to work, because there's really no way anyone can tell when I'll be able to hit the road again. It just depends on how backed up things are in the shop. I should at least get a 34-hour break in (simply because I may as well get that taken care of if I'm out of service), but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm down for two to three days. The only good thing is that this still counts as a layover, so I'll get paid for the downtime. I'll also get to see a few people down there, if all goes well. This is just hardly the circumstances in which I'd want to meet folks. :)

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...

Houston, TX - An exercise in futility

I'm a bit short on time today, so let me just make a brief bullet-point summary of what happened yesterday between my last post and when I arrived here:

• Assigned a preloaded trailer heading to Houston.
• Got to the shipper, found out that my preloaded trailer wasn't loaded.
• Spent three hours waiting on them to finish, scaling the load, etc.
• Attempted to get a snack at a Love's but found the line was nearly backed up to the off ramp.
• Stopped at a Pilot for food and fuel, got in an out in under half an hour with no line.
• Found the consignee: a store, not a warehouse. Ended up driving through the automobile parking to get around to the unloading docks.
• After spending twenty minutes just trying to find the driver's entrance, got the paperwork signed, dropped my load, picked up the freshly-unloaded empty, and went to try drop the empty at a railyard.
• Had to wait nearly ten minutes for a train to pass.
• Arrived at the railyard entrance at 8:58, two minutes before closing. The trailer wasn't "billed" so they couldn't accept it and turned me away.
• Went to the Houston OC to find it was a total mess; there was barely enough room to even drive around in there and at least a dozen of our trucks had parked in the street. Called operations, explained that I couldn't park at the OC, and got told to try the Pilot on I-45.
• Drove ~10 miles to the Pilot, found parking right up front, and took about 15 minutes trying to work into the space.
• Parked, went to sleep, woke up, got food, got a shower, typed this.