WEEK FOURTYONE
Monday, October 6th through Sunday, October 12th


The 41st week (I think) of the year has had a very lack luster start. I’ve come off of some very solid weeks with nothing under 3500 in the last three, but that lucky streak seems to be coming to a halt.

The remainder of Sunday and most of Monday was spent putting in my reset. Once that came to an end I was able to drop my loaded trailer at the customer and put in my MT call. The problem with that is that it is now 10pm Monday night and there is no freight available. Big surprise. I had already prepared myself for this inevitability, but it was frustrating none the less. I wasn’t actually expecting to get a load out tonight, but I was hoping that I would get a load offer that picked up sometime in the early morning hours of Tuesday, but that was not to be. I was simply told to check back in the morning.

The weekend wasn’t a total waist, I did manage to get out and see what was in the area. I had shut down at the WAWA on the corner and found a good little place to eat just north of here. A place called Boston Gourmet Pizza, or something like that. The food was really good and they had a number of HD bigscreens to watch the games on. So at least I got to see some football. My brother was even kind enough to send me a phone pic form the inside of the Cowboys stadium. He was just trying to get even with me for the Wrigley pics I sent him earlier in the year.

I had been told to check back around 7am but found myself awake by 4 on Tuesday morning. I went ahead and sent in a message looking for a load and was stunned to be offered a load that picked up in Jersey City destine for Menomonee, WI (1200mi). And to top it off, it was preloaded and had been since last night. Ok, that bothered me a bit, but better now than never. It was still early enough that I should be able to duck into and out of the Jersey before traffic went to the dogs.

As I was jotting down the info when I heard another beep and was devastated. Apparently the load had been put on hold by the shipper; something about it being some kind of import product and it didn’t have proper clearance to leave the yard yet. That’s just plain mean; I would rather have received a “no freight” message over being teased like that. Just to please me they did send a “no additional freight at this time” message. Ugh!

The wait for a load offer lasted until about noon of that day and the Qcom finally bore the good news. Pick up outside of Philly between 21:00-23:59. Drop delivery to KY (899mi) anytime Wednesday. OK, I like the anytime drop, but that 9pm pickup stinks. Not being one to sit around and wait, I put it in gear and headed on over to the customer. I wasn’t going into this one totally blind. It was one of our regular customers and it would be a drop and hook. The only question was, “would it be ready when I arrived?” The answer would be no! This would usually bother me because my 14hr clock would be running, but in the particular case I wasn’t concerned. It was past noon when I started my day and I had no intention of running into the wee hours of the morning. I was content knowing that I would be sitting in their yard as soon as the load was ready and then put as many hours in as I could before getting tired.

The anticipated wait ended up being nothing, because I had been sitting in my truck for all of 10mins when I got the call to go back into the shippers’ office. Hot dang, I’m off and I will be able to beat the rush hour traffic out of town on top of it.

Now, I had no real intention of running all night, but I have a hard time leaving hours on the table and I found myself running until after midnight. I had all the rest I needed over the last couple of days anyway and wasn’t tired. So after what started out looking like a dismal day turned into a solid 600 miles, although I had to run a little later than I’m used too. I didn’t really need to drive that late into the night because this is a anytime drop delivery and it wont get me there any sooner, but it will give me more hours to work with once empty because now I only have 5hrs of drive time to get to where I’m going instead of 8. Therefore, I will have 6hrs available after putting in my MT call instead of 3. It may not make a difference, but just incase it does I’ll drive the hours now instead of later.

On bad thing about driving until 1am is that you can’t start your next day until 11am, and I was awake long before that. Time to go, gotta go. The magical hour finally came around and I made my way to KY and arrived by 4pm and did my drop and hook thing at the Wal-Mart. My load offer was slow in coming and I finally decided to head to a nearby truckstop after waiting for 30mins or so. Of course, as soon as I pulled out of the gate the Qcomm went off with an anytime hook pickup 100 miles away anytime today going to GA (414mi) with an anytime drop the next day. Perfect, works for me.

I knew where the customer was, so I didn’t wait around for the load info or directions. The Qcomm was a little slow today and I didn’t feel like waiting around for it. I put in the 1½ hrs or so to get where I was going and pulled into the customers drive. I grabbed the Qcomm to get the load info and was presented with a little problem. As I read it my thoughts were as such, “oh yeah, they have two plants in this town” and of course I had gone to the wrong one. Not really a big deal, it was only about 2 miles out of route. I just had to get back on the road and drive another 15 miles to the next plant.

The drop and hook pickup went well, but the trip out of the plant was a night mare. I had the misfortune of being behind a Schneider truck, (I have nothing against Schneider, it just happened to be an orange truck in front of me this night) and it had to be a trainee in the drivers seat on his first trip. I’ve never seen a truck move through the paces so slowly, but I understand and putz around behind him. This patience came to an end, however, when we made our way out to the main two lane leading away from the plant and proceeded to drive 25mph in a 45mph zone and continued to do so for 15 miles. On top of that he insisted on driving with at least a 1/3 of his truck over the center line, therefore preventing anyone from passing (made for some close calls with oncoming traffic). Not that I was going to try to pass at 78,000#, but the 20 or so cars behind him by the time we made it to the turn off were probably in a much worst state of mind than I was.

I eventually made my escape from the Great Pumpkin when he headed off in the opposite direction at the main junction and made my way on down the road. I was once again looking at a late night because I was forced to sit until 11am while waiting for my 10hr break to conclude. By the time I had made it to Nashville I had decided to call it a night a bit early, but finding parking at that time of night wasn’t going all that well and after pulling into a couple of truck stops with no luck I realized I would have to get a little further away from town to find a spot. No big deal really, I had the hours available and continued on. There is a truckstop on the top of Monteagle that has a huge dirt lot next to it, always plenty of parking up there.

Sure enough, I had just enough time on my log to arrive shortly after midnight and found an abundance of available parking and put in for the night after another fine 650mi day.

Thursday had me looking at a short 200mi hop down into the Atlanta area to drop my trailer, but I once again had a late start and wasn’t able to arrive until 3pm. That’s getting a little late in the day and I wasn’t overly confident about my chances of getting a load out. I would also have to deal with rush hour traffic if I didn’t get a load right away. Once I dropped my load I put in my MT call and waited for the all too familiar, “Slow freight, check back in X hours”. Sure enough, I eventually got a message that there was no freight available for today and they were working on load offers for the following morning. So there I sat in McDonough, GA without knowing which way to go. I couldn’t stay at the customer and there is no parking to speak of in the area. Just a couple of very small truckstops and a Waffle house, but I had no doubt that no parking would be available. I swung by just in case, but as suspected, no spaces available. That left me with the option of going 15 miles south to the nearest truck stop or 50 miles north to our terminal. It would be very helpful to know where my next P/U would be so that I wouldn’t rack up unnecessary out of route miles. Well, I have a 50/50 chance that I will make the right choice, but not knowing what lay ahead I opted for the closer truckstop and hoped for the best.

Now, I had been lead to believe that I would not receive a load offer until the following morning. But oddly enough, 20mins after pulling into the truckstop I was sent an offer to P/U a load of beer the following morning and running it over to TN (335mi). What crap! It was now Thursday and this loaded was to be picked up Friday morning and wasn’t scheduled to deliver until Saturday morning. That a whopping 335 miles after only 200 miles today for a grand total of 535 miles over 2½ days. NOT good!

There is a little bit of hope attached to this load however. First, it is a Bud load and they are always preloaded, but are usually not ready much before their PU time, and often are late. I have plenty of drive time left for today and decided to head on up and find out what I can about my load. Even if it’s not ready I will be able to drop my empty trailer in their lot and spend the night in one of the two truckstops on the corner nearby. To bad I didn’t go to our terminal after leaving my last drop, it would have saved me 30 OOR miles and a ½hr of my log.

Upon arriving at the Bud plant I checked in an let them know I was early for my PU scheduled for the following morning at 8am. Of course it wasn’t ready, but I was encourage to hear that it was scheduled to be loaded at 4am. They gave me an automated phone number that I could call so that I would be able to pick it up as soon as it was ready to go. I was allowed to weigh in a get my info into the computer to speed up my checkin on the following morning, dropped my trailer and headed off to the truck stop for the rest of the night.

My next hurdle was dealing with the delivery time. As scheduled, it was set to be there Saturday morning. I was headed to a small beer distributor and had to assume that if they would take a delivery on Saturday morning, there is no reason they wouldn’t be able to accept on a Friday. And since it was only 255 miles away, I would be able to have it there by mid-morning (if the load was ready by 4am as I had been lead to believe). I thought about calling the customer to request an earlier delivery, but doing that would give them the opportunity to say no and I would be dead in the water. If I just pulled into the gate this afternoon, they might just be willing to fit me in.

A phone call to Bud first thing in the morning let me know that the loading of my trailer had not yet begun and I set the alarm 2hrs off and tried again at that time. This time around it was loaded and ready to go and I headed on over. I had hoped to get an earlier start, but it was not to be and by the time I pulled into Buds gate I found myself looking at a rather large line of trucks waiting to check in. Thanks to my arrival last night I already had all of my information entered into their system and was allowed to take the by pass lane to get my trailer. I was very thankful that I had stopped in the night before, it ended up saving me a fair amount of time this morning.

By 7am I was rolling down the road and 4hrs later I found myself pulling into the local Bud distributor’s gates. Not a big place, for sure. They only had 3 dock doors for deliveries and they were all full. After a short self guided tour of the place I finally found the shipping office on the opposite end of the building and handed over my BOL. I didn’t bother mentioning the fact that I was a day early, but as it turned out that wasn’t necessary because she figured it out all on her own. “You’re early, aren’t you?” I quickly confessed my sin and told her I would be happy to come back in the morning if need be, but she said they would fit me in shortly. Sure enough, within the hour I was backed to a dock.

The unloading process seemed to take a little longer than reasonable and it was interrupted by a small accident. The fork lift driver managed to dislodge a case or two and the shattering of glass was followed by a fair amount of beer leaking through the floor of my trailer. Just great, that’s one sure fire way of guaranteeing that my next load will either be a floor load or one of our loads that stipulates “no odor or trailer will be rejected”.

Once I got the green light I pulled up to inspect the mess. If it had just been the small area in which the breakage had occurred it wouldn’t have been all that bad, but after driving over it with the forklift a few dozen times it made for quite a mess. I grabbed some paper towels and went to work. It was a fairly hot day and once I mopped up the worst of it the remnants seemed to be drying at a fairly good pace. Upon returning to the truck I found that I had not yet received a load offer and decided to head on over to a nearby Wal-Mart to stock up. I also wanted to grab a bottle of Vanilla extract to tame down the smell of beer in the back of the trailer. Hot days mixed with beer splashed around in the back of a closed trailer make for a rather distinctive smell. I wasn’t about to complain though, at least I was sitting empty a day early once again.


I returned to the truck to find a load offer. I hadn’t been hopeful of such an event and was pleased to find one waiting for me. It was a PU about an hour away, and just as I had suspected, a floor load of paper rolls. The floor of my trailer would have to be 100% dry and thanks to the temp being close to 90° and my little 3hr layover it appeared that it would not be a concern by the time a arrived at the shipper.

The trip over was a back road jaunt and took a little longer than I care for, but this was by no means a hot load. Even though I had managed to unload a day early, it ended up netting me yet another load with a drawn out delivery schedule. This was Friday and, of course, it didn’t deliver until Monday in Omaha (774mi). That’s another 2 ½ days on a rather short run. These live loads and unloads are killing me. As always, I will try for the early unload, but I won’t have this load to the consignee until Saturday, late afternoon, and am not at all confident that they will be open when I get there. As a worst case scenario, I will have enough time to put in an unneeded reset and in the process have enough time to rent a car and head on up into Iowa to visit my grandmother for the day. Not a bad idea in either case. It has been awhile since I was able to swing by and I was looking forward to seeing her.

By the time I made it to the shipper the floor of my trailer was completely dry and the vanilla had done its job and there was no hint of beer. The loading was amazingly quick, it took all of 10 minuets to load the 7 rolls of paper and I was on my way. The rest of Friday passed painfully slow as I was force to use back roads through Tennessee for most of what was left of my day.

I’m not sure what it is about these fine folks of TN, but they are in absolutely no hurry and seem to have an inordinate amount of free time on their hands. I have also discovered that as long as you are on a 55mph, 2 lane highway, they are more than content with driving somewhere between 45 and 50mph. Here is where it gets strangely interesting; every once in awhile there will be a passing lane so that slower traffic can pull over and allow the people behind them “ME” to proceed at a more reasonable speed. It is at this very moment that the slower traffic suddenly finds that their car will indeed go 63mph. Oddly enough, that is 1mph faster than my truck goes. But a strange freak of nature occurs at the very moment the passing lane comes to an end. The very vehicles that had momentarily found a burst of speed immediately revert to their preset speed of 50mph. Very strange indeed.

Late morning Saturday found me in our Kansas City yard and I considered working out a Tcall. There was enough down time on the load to justify it, but I was starting to look forward to my visit with my grandmother. I decided to eat the short week and start with a fresh 70hrs next week. I pulled into the customer’s lot Saturday at 5pm on the off chance that someone would be there, but as I had figured, the place was locked up tight. Our terminal was only 4 miles away, so I headed on over and dropped my trailer in the yard. By the time I was situated it was too late to rent a car and drive up to Iowa tonight. I went ahead and made reservation for a car for Sunday and spent the evening in the Casino across the street and started by reset.

Sunday would not have been anything to write about other than my very enjoyable visit with Grandma, but I figured I’d make it interesting by locking my keys in the truck. Wow, I haven’t done that in years. I ALWAYS keep a spare key in my pocket that I never use, well almost never just incase I’m dumb enough to slam a locked door with the keys in the ignition. It happens occasionally.

Well today I had decided to put on a fancy pair of pants so that I would look nice during my visit. In doing so I left my spare key in the pocket of my jeans. I then absent mindedly walked across the casino parking lot to see if there were any cabs in the area and somehow left my other set of keys in the ignition. Fortunately I always keep a small supply of bailing wire wrapped around the frame on my tractor for what ever quick fix is necessary and was able to form it into a hook. It took me 45mins, but I was finally able to latch onto the door handle through the ¼ window and pop it open. It’s a good thing I’m driving a Freightliner, they are probably the easiest truck on the road to break into.

The casino had great security too. He drove by me twice and never asked a single question. I suppose he figured if I was going to be that blatant about it, it must be my truck.


WEEK FOURTYONE
Monday, October 6th through Sunday, October 12th
Miles include deadhead

Oaks, PA to Hopkinsville, KY………………………………………………......899mi
Owensboro, KY to McDonough, GA…………………………………………..514mi
Cartersville, GA to Clarksville, TN…………………………………………...335mi
New Johnsonville, TN to Omaha, NE………………………………………...774mi

Total Paid Miles……………………………………2512 Miles

Actual Miles…………………….2623 Miles

2512mi x 2512 = $1080.16

Definitely one of my worst weeks with Crete. Freight has been slowing down for some time and it finally hit me. I am finding that the wait between loads is increasing and when I do get a load it often has an excessive amount of down time associated with it. I have been able to lessen the sting somewhat by making early pickups and deliveries whenever possible and have been fairly successful up to this point. Even with a reset at the beginning of the week and a layover thrown in shortly there after and topped off with yet another unneeded reset at the end of the week I turned it into a reasonable week. 2512 miles in a little over 4 days of work. I could have Tcalled my last load also to increase my miles for this week, but the idea of visiting my grandma was much more appealing.

There’s always next week

I'm tryin', I have a reset coming up tomorrow, maybe I'll be able to know a few weeks out.

I don't dispute your numbers but cant get anywhere near them myself whats the trick to it

His numbers are not the numbers commonly quoted to me by Crete drivers I've spoken with in my travels...which were 1800-2200 ... I will not dispute his numbers ,But I would say if you're a new driver considering crete don't plan on 3k mile weeks as a regular thing .

All I can suggest is that you read the updates. I try to convey my mindset and methods that I employ to get the miles. I've never had a problem getting miles until recent weeks, and I attribute that to the economy. I'm still doing fairly well, although I've had a couple of bad weeks. One closed out around 1600 and I just finished this week with 2200mi. Other than that most have been acceptable.

The miles are still here, but I have been doing much more sitting around than in the past. In the first two year with Crete I had a total of 3 layover days. In the last 2-3 months I've had close to a dozen or more. This does seem to be very common with most carriers in this economy and I don't see an improvement anytime in the near future.

I haven't been posting lately due mostly to the fact that there doesn't seem to be much interest of late. The software change seems to have chased a large number of the regulars off, but I'll go ahead and post a backlog of recent (or not so recent weeks). Looks like I have 7 ready to go.

WEEK FOURTYTWO
Monday, October 13th through Sunday, October 19th


Although I had to take an unwanted 34hr reset to finish off last week, it afforded me the chance to visit family while I was in the area so it wasn’t a total loss and I had a fresh 70hrs available for the week that followed.

I was still under dispatch on last weeks load and had a 05:00 appointment time first thing Monday morning. I headed on over at 4am in the hopes of getting the unloading process started a little early. I had hoped it would be a drop/hook, but I had stopped by on Saturday when I pulled into town and knew that there were no Crete trailers on the lot, live unload it is. When I arrived I found two other Crete trucks had beat me there. One was in the door with his 4am appointment and the other truck was a 6am appointment. He wasn’t happy to see me pull in because it meant that he would have to wait for is set appointment.

The fork lift operator was aware of the fact that he had a truck scheduled at the top of each hour and made no attempt to speed up the process. He managed to time it out perfectly so that I backed into the dock at my appointed time and pulled out empty with just enough time left for the next truck to do likewise. It’s interesting that I was loaded with the 7 rolls of paper in less than ten minutes at the shipper, but some how it takes almost a full hour to take the same 7 rolls off. Must have been a union shop!

The empty call went in and I had a single load offer within short order. It was a healthy deadhead trip down to Kansas City and then on to Columbus, MS (873mi). The P/U was a live load and I was looking at a few hours of downtime if I showed up as scheduled and hoped that if I pulled in a few hours early I might be able to get loaded. Never hurts to try and I pointed the truck southward.

The early arrival worked out to my advantage and I was assigned a dock door and the loading commenced and ended in a very timely manner. I was ready to get this load to where it needed to be, but once again I was under a load that had a ridicules delivery time attached to it. It was now late morning Monday and I had 690 miles to go with an 8am Wednesday delivery time. Well, I’ll be there by 8am alright, on Tuesday. There is no possibility of a Tcall because we have no terminals between here and there. This is also a live unload, so an early drop/hook delivery is out of the question, but the BOL shows that this load is going to a small local business as opposed to some Big Box warehouse type of place. So I hoped that I would be able to find a little flexibility when I get there a day early and head that way. Once again, I had considered calling the customer to request an earlier delivery time, but it’s much easier to say no over the phone than it is face to face and decided to take my chances, the worst thing that could happen would be to have them ask me to come back the next morning. I can’t really see that happening and wasn’t too worried about it.

I pulled into the customer’s yard at 8am, one day early and they didn’t even flinch about my early arrival. Business as usual and I was unloaded within the hour and waiting for my next load offer. The wait was once again a short one and a single load offer. Live load not to far away going to Columbus, OH (698mi). Good miles, but they did it to me again. Another stupid delivery time that will have me sitting on my butt for over 30hrs. It is now Tuesday and this load has a 3pm delivery on Thursday and like the last load, I should have it there by 8am the day before that. This is also a live unload destine for a Big Lots warehouse, so an early delivery is out of the question. At least this time around it’s going to a place that happens to have a Crete terminal close by and I prey for a Tcall. As long as I don’t dilly dally around and get there early enough in the morning I don’t see how they could refuse the request. If however, I take my time and pull into town midday there would be a much greater chance of being refused.

I arrived at the shipper in the middle of nowhere Mississippi to find what looked like a bunch of large, run down, tin cover shacks and was sure I was in the wrong place, but as it turned out I was where I needed to be. Definitely not what you would call modern facilities, but they were turning out their American made furniture. What do you know, there is actually some manufacturing going on in the fine country.

When I pulled in there was another truck that had just beat me to the punch. I would have to wait for them to load him first and was told it would take about 1½ hrs (45mins to load and they had a 1hr lunch break coming up). Yup, that’s 1¾ hrs, but this is Mississippi so I can’t really hold it against them. They eventually got me into a door and loaded and I was ready to go after spending 3 hrs there. It could have been worse, while I was waiting for my turn three more trucks pulled in behind me and they were running at a pace of about one truck per hour. Sure am glad I pulled in when I did.

That little delay had put me a bit behind schedule, but I was still on pace to make it to our Columbus yard before noon tomorrow. I drove out the rest of my hours for the day and started my Wednesday as soon as I could so that I would have a fighting chance at a Tcall. I had a little over 300 miles to knock out and was able to pull into Columbus by 11am and put in my request along with an offer to shag a load if they needed help.

The reply that greeted me was, “Ok to Tcall, what empty trailer do you have?” Alrighty then, that’s what you would call a mixed bag of good and bad news. Good news; I’m going to be able to get out from under this load, so I won’t have to sit around all day waiting to deliver tomorrow afternoon. Bad news; I’ve already done a lot check and there isn’t an empty trailer in sight. I informed dispatch of my little predicament along with an offer to re-power any load that was sitting in the yard.

There were a number of preloaded trailers in the yard that had been Tcalled by other drivers. Realizing that I would have a hard time getting a load without an empty trailer, I foolishly hoped that my offer to re-power would be successful in moving me on down the road. There were even 3 loads going to the NJ and NY areas. Not my favorite destination, but it isn’t anyone else’s either, so I figured it would be a slam dunk to get one of those if dispatch thought they had a sucker on the line. No Luck! Or depending on how you look at things, luck was with me.

Now I didn’t exactly get a message from dispatch telling me that they didn’t have a load to re-power, what I actually got was a silent Qcom. I wasn’t going to complain too much and get the good luck gods mad at me. After all, the Tcall was successful right! I assumed dispatch was a bit busy and applied a smidge of patience to the situation. Even if things went horribly wrong and I didn’t get a load for the rest of the day, I would still be getting a load out in the morning and that sure beats the 3pm delivery time that my previous load had attached to it. I was feeling a tad grungy and decided to hit the shower and hope for some information by the time I was finished.

My eventual return to the truck garnered no change in my current status, “driver W.O.T” (without trailer). It was now more than obvious to me that there were no loads in the area that I could bobtail to and dispatch wasn’t in the mood to deal with me as things stood. I made one more pass around the lot to see if an empty had magically appear in the last hour (nope) and set my mind to remedying the situation.

First stop, the Sears DC (or is it a Target, can’t remember) adjacent to our terminal always has a number of our trailers. The big question was, “do they have any empties?” It’s a real hit and miss kind of thing over there. The big problem is that some Crete drivers know that they can pull in at any time and will be given an empty if they have one on the lot (I should probably kept that to myself, too late). I was feeling lucky when the guard told me that “there should be a some available”, and let me wonder off to find one. My optimism quickly faded to false hope soon there after when a couple of trips around the lot turned up nothing but loaded trailers. I even stopped in at the shippers office to inquire about any soon to be unloaded trailers; again, no luck.

All hope was not yet lost; still have a spot or two that I can check out (going to keep those my little secret).

My first option was only about 15 minuets away and usually rewards me with an empty about 50% of the time. They almost always have empties but success often depends solely on the mood of the receiving clerk on any particular day, but I was going to have to wait to learn my fate. There were three other drives in front of me vying for her attention. The first two were processed in a timely manner, but number three was a time consuming problem. Something about an invalid drop number ensued by a lengthy discussion about a live unload as opposed to a drop delivery. Whatever the cause, the result was 30mins of me pacing back and forth, certain that there was a fresh message on the Qcom with a load offer that could be pulled at any time due my failed response.

The big moment finally arrived and I once again found myself in the graces of good luck. One trailer left and it was all mine. Skipa de doda, skipa de day, my oh my what a wonderful day. This day’s events aren’t exactly flowing at a timely pace, but I’m making progress. As soon as I hooked to my new found treasure a message was shot off to dispatch and I made my way back to the terminal, confident that a load offer would soon follow. This time I wasn’t ignored, this time I got a message, “check back in one hour”. Ugh! Well at least I’m on the load board and in line.

Just as the prescribed hour was about to expire, the Qcom came to life and the long awaited load offer was presented. I would have been just as content with a slap in the face, but the load offer was just as effective. It was a one, two punch kind of thing, followed shortly there after by an upper cut. My head was spinning as I made an attempt to process what I was reading. The first stinger was the realization that the load I was to deliver was a preloaded trailer, usually a positive, but in this particular instance it was just short of maddening. Why? You may ask. BECAUSE the blasted thing is sitting two spaces away from my, IN THIS YARD! I can’t help but reminisce of an earlier time, a more relaxed time, a peaceful time, you know! A time long, long ago when I had asked about re-powering a load. A time before now, a time when I didn’t have an empty trailer.

OK, here comes the left hook. 108 miles! And the knockout blow, it delivers tomorrow.

….7….8….9….10!

So I’m being a little dramatic, what’s it to ya.

There was, of course, the final kick in the gut as I lay unconscious on the mat. I disconnected my recently acquired, swept out trailer only to watch someone else bobtail into the yard and casually back up to it in less than one minutes time, completely unaware of the days events that lead to his timely good fortune.

After having a little time to digest all that had just transpired I got myself into the mindset of tomorrows delivery and consoled myself with the fact that I was allowed to Tcall my load and would be rolling tomorrow morning instead of sitting around until midday. I had put in a shade over 300 miles for the day anyway and I needed to do some laundry so not all was lost. If things went well I would be unloaded by 8am or so and be off on my next load anyway. The short load wasn’t really what got to me; after all, I had offered to take a shag earlier in the day. It’s just that I could have done without all the waiting and trailer hunting between now and then. But as we all know, that’s truck driving.

Thursday morning started out nice and early so that I could make my 7am delivery and get on with the rest of my day. I had rolled out early enough to arrive about an hour early, but due to Cincinnati’s lovely rush hour traffic, the final 5 miles crawled along at a 25min pace and I pulled in about 30 before the appointed hour.

This particular load had me a little confused from the start because of some conflicting information in the load plan. One sentence emphasized that this particular receiver would only accept two loads a day and that I should call ahead the night before to make sure they would have empty trailers available; making it sound like it was a drop/hook load. If so I would be able to show up early. But the very next sentence specified that I must arrive by my appointment time, “no early deliveries”. The two statements combined made no sense and I pulled in not really knowing what to expect.

I had followed a roll off dump truck into the property and he had set to work switching out a dumpster and I went inside to find out where I needed to be. Once I had hunted down someone that knew what was going on he was quick to tell me that my load was a live unload, but an appointment had not be set. As a matter of fact he told me that someone from Crete had called the day before and was told they were over booked for today and instructed them to call another department to make arrangements. Apparently that call was never made, but Crete sent me in anyways. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about how this was working out and was getting the sinking feeling that I was going to be stuck with this stupid 100mi run for a good part of the day.

All was not lost however, the gentleman in charge of receiving was very understanding and knew that I was just caught up in the middle of some bad communication and said he would sneak me in so I could be on my way. All I had to do was back up to door four and he would unload me. That sounded simple enough, but when I went outside to do just that I found that the roll off truck that arrived before me had decided to use that very area to drop his empty dumpster while he hooked up to and pulled out the full one. Urgency was not on the mans list of personality traits and I spent the next 30 minutes watching him lumber around and do whatever it was that caused time to crawl.

I was eventually able to bump the dock and found myself unloaded shortly thereafter and waiting for my next load offer. My reward was a drop/hook pickup in the middle of Cincinnati with and appointment delivery midmorning tomorrow in Montgomery, AL (591mi). Not exactly a screaming deal, but not really anything to complain about and I made my way to the shipper through more of the lovely rush hour traffic that rivals some of the worse in this country.

Other than dealing with three trucks maneuvering around in a very small yard the pickup went fairly quickly and I was on my way. This load was also a drop delivery, but it was one of those that specially stated that I was not to deliver it early. That’s a bit of a bummer, but wasn’t too big of a deal. It just meant that I would have to take a 13hr break tonight instead of a 10hr break.

Friday morning arrived and I dropped my trailer at its appointed time and found myself an empty trailer with grand plains of getting one of those nice weekend runs where I could run most of the miles off today and tomorrow with just enough time to put in my reset. At which time I could sit around and count up all the good miles for this week. Instead I started counting minutes that turned into hours. Almost immediately after sending in my MT call I received a message from dispatch that there were no loads available in the area and to “check back in three hours”. This was something that I had not expected on a Friday morning in this part of the country. I never have a problem getting a load in these parts. That all changed today.

After the initial three hours where up I sent in a little reminder of my loadless presence in the world only to be told to try back in a couple of hours, “you might want to find a place to park”. So there I sat, empty on a Friday morning with nothing but a long weekend to look forward to, not good.

I sat for a few more hours and by this time it was starting to turn into early afternoon and I decided I had better head on over to the TA to claim a spot for the day. It was 15 miles away and I don’t usually like to drive that far when I don’t know which direction my next load will take me because it can run up my out of route miles, but it was starting to look like I might be here for awhile. A few hours later I was finally sent a load and it definitely wasn’t anything to get excited about.

Apparently there was a regional driver on his way into town so that he could spend his weekend at home. I was to repower the load he was bringing in from Atlanta and deliver to northern Indian (736mi), Monday morning at noon. Ouch! That hurt. Remember, this is Friday. Oh well, I’ll take my lumps and hope for a better week next time around. The other driver didn’t show up until 8pm, and by then I had been up all day and decided to stay put for the moment and take off very early the following day.

I started my Saturday at 2am so that I could pull into our Indy yard before they closed the shop up for the day. My truck needed a little work and since I had plenty of down time on this load it seemed like as good a time as any to have a few issues taken care of. I had heard rumors in the past that the Indy shop would actually let you set an appointment and I thought I’d give it a shot. Sure enough, I told them I would be there by 1pm and they said they would have a place for me when I got there.

It’s a good thing I called, because when I arrived I went in to write up my truck and was told they were booked up for the day and they wouldn’t be able to get me in. “But I called in and made an appointment” I says, and then he sez “Oh, that changes everything, put it right there and well get to work.” WOW, does that make my day, I actually feel like a real person. I could get used to shops that work like that.

By the time the truck came out of the shop I had decided to call it a day. I could have put in the final 180 miles to my final destination and looked for a place to park in the middle of nowhere for the rest of the weekend, thus giving me a 3000 miles week, but I opted to hang out at the terminal and knock out a reset. This load didn’t deliver until noon on Monday anyway, so I would have plenty of time to get there.

Can’t wait to see what next week has in store for me.







WEEK FOURTYTWO
Monday, October 13th through Sunday, October 19th
Miles include deadhead

N. Kansas City, MO to Columbus, MS..................................873mi
Pontotoc, MS to Columbus, OH...........................................698mi
Columbus, OH to Fairfield, OH............................................108m i
Mariemont, OH to Montgomery, AL......................................591mi
Montgomery, AL to Indianapolis, IN (first leg)......................575mi

Total Paid Miles……………………………………2845 Miles

Actual Miles……………………..2847 Miles

2845mi x .43 = $1223.35

WEEK FORTY THREE
Monday, October 20th through Sunday, October 26th


Well, I’m sitting around in a truckstop with nothing better to do, so I guess this is as good a time as any to whip out an update.

This week started out with me sitting in our Indy yard. I had decided to hold up here at the end of last week to get some work done on the truck during my reset. With that accomplished, I was ready to hit the road first thing Monday morning and make my delivery in the northern part of the state. I had pulled out with enough of a time cushion to arrive about 1 hour early but hit a snag when I got close to the receiver. I was only about 5 miles away when I can across a closed road and was forced to take a 30 mile detour through a number of small towns with a lot of stop and go traffic. It was close, but I managed to pull in with 15mins to spare.

The first thing that got my attention was that every dock door was occupied, and most of those where reefer trucks. I knew what that meant before I even went inside. This was a Meijers DC and I was looking at a live unload. Not exactly a grocery store warehouse, but it was operated just like one. That’s means I showed up for my appointment and was told they were behind schedule and I would have to park in the lot with my CB on and wait to be called in for a door assignment.

More waiting was not what I had in mind. I had already been under this load since Friday night (after unloading Friday morning) and put in an unwanted 34 reset. Now here I sit late Monday morning, waiting once again.

My wait was lengthy, but I guess it could have been worse (not really). I got the call on the CB to back up to my door and was ready to be unloaded 2hrs after my appointment time. As I sat in the truck waiting for the unloading to begin a noticed the truck next to be who had also just dock head on into the office. Oh yeah, this is a grocery store warehouse kind of operation. Looks like I better go inside to make sure they know I’m docked and ready.

Upon passing this information on I was then informed that the lumper service would need $75 to unload my truck (this cost is paid for by Crete). I hadn’t seen that coming, I was under the assumption that this was a customer unload facility, but the large number of reefer trucks unloading here should have been enough to make me realize otherwise. “OK”, I say. But then I begin to wonder and step back up to the window to inquire about the breakdown (if it didn’t require too much work I was thinking about doing it myself to speed things up).

Breakdown is a term used in the industry to refer to how the customer wants the product palliated once it is taken off the truck. It is not uncommon to have to restack pallets of products to conform to a customers needs. A pallet on the truck might have been stacked 8 tie (cases) high, but the customer may tell you that all pallets must be 6 tie high. That would mean that 2 tie would have to be pulled off of each pallet and restacked on another to conform to their needs. Another common scenario would be a pallet on the truck with lets say, 20 different products on one pallet in the truck, like 20 different flavors of soup stacked 30 cases high. Each of these different flavors would then have to be separated onto 20 different pallets to separate the product. It can often be very labor intensive and lumpers will charge as much as $200-$300 for the more complicated loads.

Anyway, back to my situation. I had been quoted a price of $75 which indicated to me that there was at least some kind of breakdown associated with this load. I knew it was all fruitcake, but thought there must be more than one flavor involved or perhaps the pallet height would have to be adjusted due to the $75 charge. If it were just a straight unload, just pulling pallets off of the truck, the price should be less than that. But then, lumper services often overcharge. At this time I was told that was the cost to simply pull the pallets off the truck, no additional breakdown was required. Well, that clenched it. I wasn’t about to pay (let Crete pay) that kind of money to these rip off artist and I told the lady behind the window that I would do it myself. She looked at me like I was crazy.

It would be great if I would get the $75, but this industry doesn’t work like that. Trucking companies, at least Crete, doesn’t really want their drivers unloading trucks unless absolutely necessary. It’s just another way for a driver to get hurt and paying these high fees to drivers would just encourage us to unload. As it is, Crete pays $35 to pull pallets off of a truck. Not a lot of money, but I had been sitting under this load for awhile and didn’t exactly have the best week. So $35 was better than nothing and it wasn’t going to be that much work anyway.

I was also in luck because they let me use one of their powered pallet jacks instead of the hand pump models that most companies make driver use. This would make for a very quick and easy $35. Just as I was getting started, one of the lumper guys came over and made on last attempt at talking me into letting them do it. I just told him that if they weren’t so greedy and charged a fair price up front I wouldn’t be back here doing it myself. He then offered to adjust the price, but by then I was in the mood to get to work and said “no thanks, maybe next time”.

It took a few minutes to get a warehouse guy to tell me where they wanted the fruitcakes and I went about my duties. After getting about half the truck unloaded I was approached by this same person and told that I had stacked the pallets too close together because he need enough room to walk between them to put his little stickers on them. I really wanted to ask him why he didn’t say something from the start, especially since he had walked by a half dozen times before that (I assume it had something to do with me not using a lumper), but decided to just say, “Not a problem” and reshuffled the 20 or so pallets around to suit his needs and continued with the rest of the trucks contents. It was also at this time that he handed me my signed BOL and told me they were going on break and he didn’t want to wait around for me to finish. If I had used the lumpers I would have been waiting around that much longer with a half unloaded truck, if they would have even bothered with started unloading me before their break that is.

Even with the little reshuffle of pallets I had my truck empty within 40mins, had just added $35 to my paycheck and was out the door at least an hour faster than if I had used the bloody lumpers. Can you tell that I don’t have a high opinion of lumpers.

Time for the empty call; I cross my fingers and hope for a load offer but get the seemingly standard, “Light on freight, check back in an hour”. There was no long term parking available at this customer and I pulled out and headed to a nearby truck stop. I was just getting ready to settle in for what I anticipated to be a length wait and was very surprised to hear the familiar beep of the Qcom. Not only did I get a load offer, I get a choice of two loads. One was headed to PA and had very agreeable PU and Del times (drop and hook on both ends) and the other was going to NC with less than optimal circumstances. Not only was it a live U/L, but it was a two stop delivery with late night appointment times. With those choices and not really wanting to have anything to do with PA, I went with the NC load. I also had home time in for this week and it got me close to the house, sort of. Not close enough to deadhead, but close enough that I could get to our Spartanburg yard in SC and rent a car if I couldn’t get a load to the house. I actually expected things to work out this way because I didn’t think I would have any luck getting freight out of the middle of NC going to the east side of the state. I had just as much confidence in getting a load out of PA going home and that would have been a much further drive in a rental car.

In any event, it looks like my fear of delay has been squashed. Well, not exactly. It was a load for today, but not scheduled to pickup until 6pm-10pm. In reality, not all that bad because it was already closing in on 2pm and I had a good 90min trip to get there. I’ll show up early and hope it’s ready to go, if not the wait shouldn’t be too bad.

I arrived at the shipper with a preloaded trailer number in hand and saw it sitting in their yard and figured I’d be on my way in short order. But it was not to be. Even though the trailer was loaded, the paperwork had not yet been finalize and was told to check back in an hour or so. Back to the truck I go.

I patiently wait for the hour to expire and head back into the office. This time the paperwork is ready to go (I didn’t even want to know how long it had been sitting there) and I grabbed my trailer and headed out the door. Even with my delay I manage to get my trip to Charlotte (883mi) started by 5pm, one hour before the scheduled PU time. Between getting hungup at my delivery today and my little snag here I lost a lot of time and decided to head back to where my day started, arriving in the Indy yard just short of my 14hr clock with a grand total of 434 miles. Tomorrow will be a better day.

What do you know, all of that and it’s only Tuesday morning. I have a lot of miles to go today and my first live delivery is scheduled for 7pm. I sat tight for as long as I dared to avoid starting my 14hr clock too early. I was going to need most of it today and if I started too early I would run the risk of running out of hours before making my finial delivery. As long as my first delivery goes without too much of a delay I would be fine, if they hang me up I might have a problem.

I managed to time my departure satisfactorily and arrive at my first stop 30 minuets early. It took a while to hunt down someone in receiving but I was able to bump the dock as scheduled and had the first half of my load off the truck within the hour. So far so good, plenty of time to get to my final stop with a little time to hunt down a truckstop once empty. Hopefully the Pilot just up the street will have a spot open at 11pm (I hope you sense the anxiety in that statement).

My last delivery was only about an hour away and I made it by the prescribed hour of 9pm to find that this would not be a live unload. Happy Happy, Joy Joy. They had empty Crete trailers on the lot and told me to drop mine and help myself to an empty of my choice. I was in and out in no time and found that I had a number of choices when it came to finding a parking spot to call home for the night at the local Pilot.

It was late and my MT call garnered no load offer, but I had expected that. I was hoping for that magical load to get me home. I was still 250 miles from the house, too much to expect a deadhead and too close to actually get a load. I figured I’d wait for the load offer and if there was nothing that worked for me I would simply park the truck at our terminal in Spartanburg and rent a car.

I awoke a 5am to find a load offer on my Qcom. It was an ugly little run of 191 miles and was a preloaded trailer sitting in our yard. But I wasn’t about to complain because it delivered to Darlington, SC and put me within 130 miles of the house. It would have been nice if I could have delivered it today, but it had a noon appointment the following day. Again, I’m not going to complain (too much).

Since I had all day to pickup my load I took my time and eventually found my way to a Pilot that was only a few miles from the delivery point and called it a day, a very short day. This won’t do too much for the ol’ paycheck, but home sweet home makes it all worth it.

I arrived a bit early for my Thursday delivery in the hopes of getting home just a little sooner, but this particular receiver seemed to have a very tight schedule and I ended up waiting around for a couple of hours to get a door. While I was there I had a chance to chat with a Knight driver and he was saying the same thing that so many other drivers are. He used to get plenty of miles, steady 3000 miles a week, but that was then. Now he said that if he got 2200 miles he considered it a good week, and he often ran 1500-1700 a week. My miles have been slipping a bit lately, but I’m thankful that it’s not that bad for me.

Once I finally got backed into a door things moved along quite nicely and I was soon empty and ready to point the truck homeward. I sent off one last message to dispatch to ask them if they needed me to do anything else, if not I was headed home. I got clearance shortly thereafter and managed to make it back to the house with enough time to put in a quick 9 holes.





WEEK FORTY THREE
Monday, October 20th through Sunday, October 26th
Miles include deadhead

Indianapolis, IN to Middlebury, IN (final leg)...........................161mi
Portage, IN to Gaffney, SC................................................ ....883mi
Spartanburg, SC to Darlington, SC.........................................191mi

Total Paid Miles…………………………………………..1235 Miles (short week due to home time)

Actual Miles…………………….1410 Miles (130mi due to deadhead to the house)

1235mi x .43 = $531.05

WEEK FORTY FOUR
Monday, October 27th through Sunday, November 2nd



Home time flew by once again. I had planned on leaving the house on Tuesday morning but found that I was running out of time to take care of what needed to be done and put in a call to my FM to request another day at the house. A quick explanation of my reasons was all that was needed and I was granted the extra time.

Wednesday found me back in the truck and ready to go. I sent of a ready call to dispatch and got my load offer in short order. Just as I has expected (and feared), I was to pickup a load of Campbell’s soup and run it up to the last place on earth that I wanted to be. Yup, PA it is. Looks like a 558mi run to York. This state is really starting to get on my nerves. It is almost a guarantee of another layover day. Considering the fact that I only had three days of layover in my first two years with Crete, I am now finding them to be business as usual in the Keystone state.

This particular load had an open delivery anytime the following day, but I had plenty of time to get up there tonight. All I had to do was pickup what I assumed would be a preloaded trailer and head on up. For all practical purposes, I would be out of hours by the time I dropped the trailer at the customer tonight, but by getting it there ASAP I would get myself on the list for a load out in the morning. If I held up short to guarantee me a parking spot for the night and waited to deliver the load until the first thing Thursday morning, I would find myself much further down on that list. The only problem that I could foresee was that I would be driving around looking for a parking spot tonight (not always an easy feat in those parts). If worse came to worse I would have just enough time to make it to our terminal, but that would be a last resort because it would run up the out of route miles. I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

When I pulled into the Campbells plant I was relieved to find that my trailer was indeed preloaded. There were a couple of other Crete trucks sitting there that were not so lucky. I didn’t envy these drivers. I’ve been held up here for hours in the past. Today is my luck day, I even found that I would have the dubious pleasure of pulling a bigger than life Crete billboard around for awhile. At least the guy in the picture gets a red truck.




My run up to PA passed quickly enough and other than sitting in line for 30mins once I arrived, I found myself empty and ready for my next load in short order. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I was told to find a place to park and check back in the morning. I had anticipated just such a message and had already found a spot at the good ol 83 Dinner. Just in time too, it was one of two holes left and there was a truck on my tail to get the other one.

Ok, Thursday is here and day one back from hometime went well enough, now here I sit in PA, once again waiting for a load. I didn’t even have time to send in a message to inquire about a load this morning. I awoke to find a blanket message that had been sent to all trucks in the area. It went into some detail, but the short of it was “no freight, don’t bother us so we can spend our time fining you loads, we’ll let you know when we have something for you”. Oh boy, this is going to be a long day.

The wait wasn’t quite as long as I thought it would be. It was shortly after noon when I got the beep. I was thrilled to get a load offer so soon in this part of the world, but that elation was premature. My heart sunk as I saw the pickup date. It was to be shipped tomorrow just 30 miles up the road and not until 1pm to top it off. Ouch! As bad as that was, the worst was yet to follow. The delivery was an appointment drop next Tuesday at 6am. It was a drop delivery, but I had been to this customer a number of times and they don’t allow early deliveries which was not a pleasant reality. Not only will I be sitting for over a day in PA before I can pickup this load, I would find myself at the customer’s door two days prior. Even though this Dallas run had good miles on it, 1462, my layover today combined with the downtime on the back of this load I was looking at 5 days before being empty again. What a sinking feeling. I realize that freight is short these days and it would do no good to complain. I was grateful that this load had some decent miles on it and more importantly, I was finally going to get away form PA. There is always a silver lining, sometime you just have to look a little harder. I just looked at it as one of those things and accepted the load without delay. The rest of Thursday was spent in the back of my truck, sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant. This is so much better than spending time at the house. That’s truck driving.

The situation wasn’t quite as dire as it initially seemed however. I would be there two days early, but I had an ace in the hole. The Wilmer yard was only about 25 miles from the customer and I held out hope that my situation could be remedied once I arrived. I’ll just make it a point to get there as soon as possible and hope they have enough freight moving in the area to justify a Tcall.

Friday eventually rolled around and I was anxious to get going. This load had a pickup window of 13:00-24:00 today. This means that it is a preloaded trailer and in most cases I can get away with showing up much earlier to get my trailer. But in this case I knew better because I had tried that in the past with this customer and found myself waiting for my trailer. They had never had a trailer loaded early in the past and I didn’t figure today would be any different.

Getting started too early in the day would burn up my 14hr clock if I had to wait for my trailer, so I held out as long as I could stand. The appointed hour finally drew close and I headed on down the road and arrived one hour early. This turned out to be perfect timing because I was told that my trailer had just been released and was sitting in the door waiting for me. In no time I was hooked and headed to Texas.

My ultimate plan was to Tcall this load at our Wilmer yard if all else failed, but in the mean time I would be driving past two of our other yards and do my best to get rid of this load along way. My first attempt came when I pulled into our Knoxville yard after a day of driving. But first things first.

This trailer, unlike many I hook actually had a current PM service sticker on it. As a matter of fact it had been through a shop less than two weeks ago, but that did little to prevent one of the air pods from springing a leak. Nor did it prevent the previous driver from dropping it here in need of repair. Thank You!

I had to stop by the New Kingstown yard just up the road to get fuel anyway, so I’ll see what I can do about getting it repaired once I get there. That turned out to be wishful thinking because I was told it would be tomorrow before they would be able to get to it. Unfortunately that is a common occurrence at many of our shops these days and the fact that I had all the time in the world to deliver this load didn’t give me any pull to get it done any sooner. It wasn’t a bad leak and I opted to head on down the road with our Knoxville yard in my sights. The guys in our Knoxville shop are top notch and work fast, so much so that I make it a point to pull my trailers through here anytime I’m in the area. Today was no different. I pulled up to the door and within 30mins I was parking my trailer in the lot and sending off a message to dispatch trying to work out a Tcall.

Did I say that the Knoxville mechanics are awesome! For any Crete drivers reading this, make it a point to get your work done there. Especially trailer PMs. They are fast.

The Tcall attempt (along with an offer to shag a load in the morning) didn’t go quite as well as my trailer service however. My biggest obstacle seemed to be the fact that I was trying to get rid of this load on a weekend. They actually responded in a tone that lead me to believe that they could Tcall the load, but they also let me know that they had a number of trucks in line for the morning loads and I probably wouldn’t be offered a load until the following afternoon. As bad as that sounded, waiting a day here would be better than waiting for two days in Dallas. I mulled it around for awhile, but this load still had over 800 miles left on it. Even if I did get a load out of the area tomorrow (Saturday), there would be a very good chance that it would have a Monday delivery and an ever greater chance of being less than 800 miles. A bird in hand kind of thing, so there really wasn’t any compelling reason to Tcall at this time and I had put in a good 600+mi today anyway. I decided to let it rest for now and try my luck tomorrow when I was down by our Memphis drop yard. At least I have options with this load.

Saturday was a late start because I wasn’t able to get into town until after midnight. I made one last attempt at arranging a Tcall in Memphis before heading out and was told to check with them when I got in town. I did so and got a message similar to the day before. I would be able to Tcall, but freight was short and I would have to wait around for a load. So off to Texas I went. I didn’t waist any time along the way so that I could show up as early as possible in the hopes of getting a load out of TX. When all my driving was done I pulled into Wilmer late Sunday morning and sent in my plea. “I’m in the Wilmer yard with a load that doesn’t deliver until Tuesday, how about a Tcall. Empty trailer xxxx is available. I can repower a load or run a shag for you in the morning if it helps you out.”

I didn’t expect a response anytime soon but they tricked me and replied with, “Tcall OK, no shags available, will send out load offers for tomorrow”. Great!, Tcall good, tomorrow, not, but I wasn’t about to complain. It wasn’t a total loss, I had run over 600 miles for each of the last two days and put another 200 behind me today. Anything is better than sitting around until Tuesday. With that I headed into the terminal to clean up and settle in for the night.

I was completely in the mindset of spending the night at the terminal, but I returned to the truck from my shower to find a little present waiting for me on the Qcom. Not only was there a load offer, they were giving me a choice of 2 loads. One going to Omaha and the other to Memphis and they both had live appointment deliveries, yuk. The mileage was almost identical with deadheads thrown in and I was just about to take the Omaha load because I figured it was further away from PA and should afford me a better freight base once empty, but at the last moment I realized that load delivered a day later. Not good, so I went with the Memphis load.

Now instead of spending the night in TX I had a load that picked up tomorrow morning with 200mi deadhead. I would be able to run up to OK City tonight and put in some good miles before the day ended. All is good. I managed to make it up to OK City with about 15hrs of spare time before my pickup, so I walked over to Bricktown to get a good meal and catch a movie.

Well, there’s another week in the books.


WEEK FORTY FOUR
Monday, October 27th through Sunday, November 2nd
Miles include deadhead

Maxton, NC to York, PA................................................ .558mi
Lancaster, PA to Wilmer, TX.........................................1441mi
Edmond, OK to Oklahoma City, OK (first leg)..................230mi
Total Paid Miles…………………………………………..2229 Miles (short week, home time. Wen through Sun)

Actual Miles……………………. 2283 Miles

2229mi x .43 = $958.47

WEEK FORTY FIVE
Monday, November 3rd through Sunday, November 9th

I drove up to OK City last night to put myself into position to pickup my load this morning. It’s a 9am appointment and I assume that it is a live load. I arrived about an hour early to find out that I was picking up a preloaded trailer and it was sitting there and ready to go. Sure would have been nice to know that earlier so I wouldn’t have had to sit around all morning waiting for an appointment time. Oh well, I’ll know better next time around.

As I was signing the BOL I was taken aback a bit by the weight of this load. 46,359# was going to put me at the limit. My new APU added a fair amount of weight to this truck and I also made the mistake of topping off the tanks before pulling into town yesterday. I knew this was a heavy load, but the Qcom had listed a 45,000# load. A mind fart that shouldn’t have happened. This concern became a reality when I pulled onto the local scale at the Pilot, 80,400#. Crap! After a little wiggling I was legal on my tandems, but thanks to full tanks of fuel I was over on the drives. I now had the option of contacting dispatch, which could have resulted in a canceled load or run with it and hope that the scales at the AR boarder would be closed. Actually, by the time I get there the load should be much closer to legal. Being a heavy load I figured I would be getting about 5.5mpg and burn off about 300# of fuel by the time I get there. That might just be close enough to get away with, even if they are open. I elected to run with it.

When I finally made it to the DOT scale in AR they were open, of course! The tension was high, but the light stayed green and I was on my way. That will teach me to watch load weights a little closer in the future.

Soon enough I made it close to the receiver and found a parking spot for the night. It would make for a fairly short day of 450 miles, but this was scheduled for delivery first thing the following morning and I should be able to put in some good miles tomorrow.

Tuesday morn started out with a quick hop over to my live unload, which took a couple of hours. My load offer followed and it looks like I’m headed to TX once again. Good news; a drop/hook PU one mile away. Bad news; it’s going to Midlothian, TX (456mi) and has a live unload Wednesday evening at 5pm. 456 miles in 1½ days. Looks like it’s time to start wheeling and dealing again. This load was also scheduled to be picked up after 1pm, but I showed up a couple of hours early to find it waiting in a door. A quick hook up and pre trip (some air into a couple of the tires) and I was off.

I pulled into the Wilmer yard that night for the second time in the last three days and once again put in a request for a Tcall. More of the same, “I’m under a load that doesn’t deliver until late tomorrow, can I Tcall, can shag a load if you need help”. I was once again allowed to Tcall and waited for a load offer. By the time one came through and I got the pertinent information it was too late to do anymore driving for the night and I planed on an early start the following morning.

Here we go again; right back to the same place I picked up my heavy load just the other day. This time it’s going to the middle of nowhere MS(755mi). And this time I won’t top off the tanks. See, I told you I learned my lesson.

I also know that I don’t have to wait for my appointment this time around and pulled out of the Crete yard at 3:30am when my 10hrs were up (after putting just enough fuel in the tanks to get me to the customer). Once again it was a very heavy load, but when I scaled out I was under gross weight limits and even had enough room to put on some fuel, about ½ a tank. This didn’t work well with my fuel solution and I had to make a call to my fleet manager to make some adjustments and stop for fuel a couple of times instead of once, but at least I didn’t have to worry about an overweight ticket today.

Now all I had to do was deal with a 9pm delivery the following day. Again, I was going to be there well before that and a message sent in to dispatch asking for a earlier appointment was answered with a “that’s the earliest appointment available, you can always try to deliver early”. Ooooo, I would have never thought of that. I arrived at 10am and was told to check back with the next crew at 2pm. They start unloading at 5pm and they might be able to fit me in. I never like a delay, but my hours where actually getting short and I had the time to spare. While I was sitting there, another Crete driver pulled up at noon and I gave him the run down. He decided to go in and hear the story for himself and came back grinning ear to ear because he was waiving a check in form. What the %#@&! Off I go to find a different person behind the counter and I too get my check in form. Well, we didn’t get a door at 5pm, but we did get an early door assignment, well, the other driver did. I had to wait for him to get unloaded first. Luck of the draw. This day was shot anyway and it took them 3hrs to pull my load off and I was the last person to pull away from the docks at 10pm. What a fun day this turned out to be. I figured it was over and planned on spending the rest of the night here and found myself a parking spot nearby.

I put in my MT call fully well expecting a load for the morning and was astonished to get a load offer and it was on a preloaded trailer and ready to go. It was headed to the Atlanta area (469mi) and had a pickup date of anytime today. Problem was that it was now past 10pm and it was about 3hrs away via back roads. Looks like they didn’t get the load covered today and I must have been the only one in the area that could get to it within a reasonable time frame.

The other problem I had to deal with was my shortage of available hours. I ran through the numbers a couple of times and even though it was a fairly short run, I wouldn’t be able to get there until roughly 2am on Saturday. This load had an anytime drop delivery for Friday and I figured if it could be delivered on Friday at 23:59 and be considered on time, then a drop 2hrs later in the middle of the night couldn’t really make any difference. I sent a message off to dispatch to let them know that if I accepted this load it would be a little late due to hour constraints and gave them the option. A few minutes later I got a confirmation from dispatch. “Go ahead and delivery load as soon as you can, will inform customer of late delivery”.

At this point I could have shut down for the night and picked up my load first thing in the morning without affecting the finally delivery time. I was going to have to spend the better part of Friday in a truckstop anyway waiting to gain back hours, but this load was suppose to be picked up by midnight and I had been sitting around all day, so I decided to run on over to Tupelo to get it and find a place to park afterward. If all went well I would be shut down by 3am or so.

The entire trip over was on Mississippi back roads and took a little longer than I had expected, but I finally managed to pull into the shippers yard to find my preloaded trailer waiting for me. The drop and hook was a painless endeavor and I was on my way down the road in short order. It was my initial plan to find a place to park for the night shortly thereafter, but I was well rested from my day of lounging around in the back of the truck and I ended up running down to Birmingham and put in for the night, well day by this point, at my favorite pit of a Pilot truckstop. Parking was very limited, but I managed to squeeze into a spot and prepared to camp out for the rest of the day.

I only had one hour left of my 70, so instead of getting some good sleep and driving the final 3 hrs to my delivery point during the day when I was wide awake, I would now have to sit around all day long twiddling my thumbs. When 11pm rolled around I would be able to take off and as the midnight hour hit I would gain back some hours as I was driving and be able to make my delivery by 2am.

I was mildly annoyed by a message that I received from dispatch in the middle of the day during one of my thumb twiddling sessions. They wanted to know, “Why aren’t you moving, send reason and ETA”. There’s that communication thing again. Apparently night dispatch didn’t feel it was necessary to make the appropriate notations on my screen or update the delivery schedule. They just wanted their load board covered and threw me under the bus in the process.

I simply answered, “Would love to be rolling but out of hours for now, load will be delivered by 2am. Load was accepted only after making this clear to dispatch last night and was approved by them, please read Qcom messages from last night (would be nice if they would have thought of that on their own)”.

That must have satisfied them, at least that’s the assumption I had to make since no one bothered to reply in any form. Again, common practice. They expect complete and detailed communications from us, but offer little in return. Nature of the beast I guess.

Well, after a less than fulfilling day of truck stop camping the magical hour of 11pm finally arrived. I had managed to catch a couple of hours of sleep just prior and was rarin’ to go. I was annoyed that I had to waist my entire day waiting to gain back hours and was also very concerned about getting a load out of Atlanta on a Saturday. Freight in these parts has been a bit iffy and I would have been in a much better position if I had been able to get this load drop early Friday morning. But due to the timing of my last load I had been forced to drive in the middle of what would have been a 34hr reset. The 34hrs were put in, but a short 2hr drive in the middle of it did the damage. That one hurt. If I had been able to do a reset I would have been in a great position. I would have had the load delivered early Friday morning and been ready to go. But it was not to be.

This is the first time in resent memory that I have not been afforded the opportunity to reset and it had very negative results which were immediately felt. Not only did I spend an entire day sitting in a truck stop waiting to gain back hours, I was now delivering my load at 2am on Saturday morning and my MT call garnered me the infamous message, “No freight available, check back at 10am.” Exactly what I was afraid of. Now here I sit in McDonough, GA with no available parking and no load.

There were no viable truck stops in the area and there was little hope of finding a spot at the ones 20 miles down the road at this hour, not to mention the likely hood that I would probably end up driving in the wrong direction. I thought about running up to our Marietta yard, but that was 50 miles north and Murphy’s Law would dictate that regardless of the direction chosen, my next load would be in the opposite direction and the resulting out of route miles would be excessive not to mention what really concerned me, wasting time on my logs. There was a strong possibility of getting a load (eventually) in this very area and I didn’t want to be running back and forth. It was the middle of the night and I went on a search of the back roads in the area looking for a place to park. This is an industrial area and I was hoping to find a warehouse for lease that I could hide in. There is one good thing about and economy like this, a number of warehouses are vacant and after a little snooping around I found one that didn’t have a gate and managed to find a hiding spot out of sight and put in for the night.

The presubscribed hour of 10am finally rolled around and I sent off a message to dispatch in the hopes of getting a load. “Working on it” was the reply. Another hour went by and the Qcom came to life. A single load offer heading to Houston (another fine freight dead zone) that would add 900 miles to my paycheck. Good miles, but I wasn’t at all pleased with the scheduling of the load. First and foremost, the pickup time for this drop/hook load was 11/08 00:01-23:59. That’s anytime today! Well it is now 11am and I’ve been sitting in this parking lot since 2:30 am and I’m just now being dispatched. I’ll simply file that under the heading of “not so mildly annoying”.

Big problem number two; this load has an appointment delivery of 8am on the 11th. A whopping four days away. I pray that I will be able to Tcall this in our Houston yard. When freight is strong it’s not a problem, but with the way things have been lately there was a strong possibility that there would be no freight to keep me moving and I would be told to deliver the load. All I can do is get it there ASAP and see what happens.

OK, I finally got a load that could have been picked up right after I delivered in the early AM, but now that I’ve been sitting here for so long I find myself needing another 1 ½ hrs to complete my 10hr break and have to sit around that much longer. I could have done the extended sleeper berth thing, but I didn’t really want to deal with the constraints that would follow later in the day and sat tight for a little longer. I was finally able to start my day shortly after noon and headed on up the road to get my waiting trailer. The rest of Saturday and Sunday were spent making my way to Houston and I arrived in town in the late afternoon. Time to see what I could do about dumping this load.

Finding an empty trailer here is never a guarantee. It’s not exactly what you could call a large yard and I was worried that I would be unable to locate one, but luck was with me today. There were actually 3 of them waiting for me along with a couple of Tcalled trailers that delivered in the area the following morning. I was confident that I would be able to get a load out with one of the empties, or in a worse case scenario, I would be able to shag one of the loads in the yard tomorrow morning and be on my way.

I shot a message off to dispatch to let them know that I was in town with a load that didn’t deliver until Tuesday. It was now Sunday night. I also informed them that I had three hours left on my clock for the day, or I could shag a load in the morning. The Tcall was approved in short order along with a message, “do you want a load offer now, or wait until the morning? How much time to you have available today?” I swear, they never read more than the first line of a message. I once again told them I had 3 hours available and waited for my load offer. It didn’t take long to get one and I was soon wishing I had waited until Monday morning because all I got was a choice of two loads. Both picked up in the morning and neither one of them was more than 250 miles. If I had waited until the morning to get a load I probably would have had a better load, but I wasn’t all that upset. I went with a Louisiana load (237mi) that had an open delivery time. I figured I could get loaded first thing in the morning and have it delivered by noon and be ready to roll on my next load. I’m not at all bothered by short runs as long as they are not encumbered with ridiculous delivery appointments. I have never had a problem getting a load out of the area that I was headed and assumed I could make a good day of it.

I was content with the way things had worked out. I had been able to Tcall my Tuesday delivery load and would be on my way first thing in the morning to start out my next week of adventure. With that I dropped my trailer and set out to find me some crab legs for dinner.


WEEK FORTY FIVE
Monday, November 3rd through Sunday, November 9th
Miles include deadhead

Oklahoma City, OK to West Memphis, AR (last leg).............................474mi
West Memphis, AR to Wilmer, TX................................................ .......442mi
Edmond, OK to Indianola, MS................................................ ............755mi
Tupelo, MS to McDonough, GA................................................ ...........469mi
Winder, GA to Houston, TX................................................ ................900mi


Total Paid Miles…………………………………………..3040 Miles

Actual Miles…………………….3110 Miles


3040mi x .43 = $1307.20

WEEK FORTY SIX
Monday, November 10th through Sunday, November 16th

Black Monday is in the works. I had Tcalled my load in Houston Sunday evening and been offered two less than desirable loads. I went with a short hop over to LA that I was to pickup here in Houston this morning. My intention was to drop this load before noon and be on my way with my next load. It didn’t exactly work out that way.

After delivering my load I put in my MT call and headed on over to a nearby truck stop. The load offer was very slow in coming and I finally broke down and sent in a message asking for a load. Never a good sign, but this was Monday morning in what is traditionally a good freight area and I had assumed I would be rolling in short order. Silly me!

Dispatch took their time, but eventually got around to sending me a message, and it wasn’t good news. “Very short on freight, nothing to offer today, check back in the morning”. Holly crap, that I did not expect. I was shell shocked to say the least, but what could I do. Looks like a fun filled day of truck stop camping once again. It is about this time that I started to wonder if I should have stuck with my original load that delivered in Houston on Tuesday morning, I guess I’ll never know.

Tuesday morning was slow in coming and when I rolled out of bed at 5am I was hopeful of a good load offer to make up for my less than productive yesterday. Horror was soon to follow however when I got the following message. “No freight available, many trucks waiting, working on loads for tomorrow, will let you know when we have something.” Wow, this is insane. Looks like I’m finally going to get my reset in whether I wanted it or not. It was a painful six hours later when I finally got the beep and learned where I was going. A 596mi trip that ended in Cullman, AL on Friday with a stop in the north end of MS along the way that didn’t pickup until 11am tomorrow. Oh the agony!

This is shaping up to be my worst week ever with Crete, let me rephrase that, this IS my worst week ever with no hope of a recovery. Time to bite the bullet and curse Supersnack for passing on his bad luck. There was nothing left to do but accept the hopelessness of the situation and hope for a recovery next week. This seemed like a good time to run down the road to the local Wal-Mart and stock up on supplies. I sure didn’t have anything better to do.

Wednesday finally arrived and I was once again rolling with a whopping 237 miles to my name so far this week. I was headed to P&G up in Pinedale and praying that they weren’t behind schedule as is often the case with that plant. I really wasn’t in the mood to sit around and wait for a trailer at this point. It turned out to be an unwarranted concern, for my trailer was ready to go when I arrived and I was hooked and headed to New Albany, MS in short order. It felt good to be driving again and I knock out the 450 miles or so and found a parking spot just down the road from the Wal-Mart DC and would be at their front door first thing in the morning to make my first delivery of a two stop load.

The second stop was in Cullman, AL for Friday, but that was to be a drop and I would be able to deliver it Thursday morning and intended on doing just that. The only problem was that I would still be in a freight dead zone and wasn’t overly optimistic about what was going to happen after my MT call.

My live unload at the Wal-Mart went by much quicker than I had anticipated and I was able to finalize my delivery in AL by 9am. Time to put in my MT call and see how long it takes them to tell me no freight is available. Answer: 5mins. “No freight will send out load offers for tomorrow when we have something”. Good grief. Off to the local truck stop. I consoled myself with a large cup of Cajun boiled peanuts (love those things) that are available in almost any truck stop in AL and waited for a load.

It was about 4hrs later that I was sent a load that picked up in Muscle Shoals the following day and went 949 miles to of all places, Chester, PA (Phili). Just great, yet another hotbed of freight and of course it didn’t deliver until Monday. Will the agony never end? Not wanting to accept the reality of it, my mind went to work on remedying my situation. My first thought was getting loaded early. It had a pickup window of 7:00-17:00 the following day. This led me to believe that if I could show up before 17:00 today, I might just be able to finagle an early loading. It couldn’t hurt to try. It was getting late, but I had enough time to get to the shipper within that time frame and headed out to accomplish just that.

Directions were less than perfect and the shipper was poorly marked resulting in a scenic tour of Muscle Shoals and I finally pulled into their gate with about 45mins to spare. Close but I made it, to no avail as it turned out. There was actually someone there to load me, but this was a chemical plant and whatever it was that I was to haul out needed to have a Certificate of Accuracy completed once loaded and the one person capable of doing that little task apparently had a dentist appointment and had left early for the day. Isn’t that just peachy. I wish I could have gone with her to take care of the missing filling from one of my teeth that I swallowed with my lunch the other day.

I had seen a small truck stop down the road during my resent wonderings and headed that way for the night after a grand total of 235 miles for the day. This truck driving thing can be a little frustrating at times.

OK, now it’s Friday morning and my running total for miles is right at 1000 miles. I show up at the shipper at 6:30 and am the first one at the gate. I was told yesterday that I could show up at this time to get loaded early, what I was not told was clarified by the shipping clerk on this fine morning. Yes, I would be loaded early, but the lady who was to test the product and fill out the now infamous Certificate of Accuracy wouldn’t be in until 9am “or so”. Oh, gopd god! Information people. I guess it didn’t really make any difference; I had an unbearable amount of time to deliver this load anyway. But a good ol’ fashioned Tcall had been on my mind ever since I was dispatched on this load from hell. No delay is a good delay.

The loading process was quick and the wait for Miss CA was drawn out and I tried to take a little solace in the fact that she was suffering from her trip to the dentist. Yeah, I know that’s mean, but misery loves company and I was feeling a bit lonely at the moment. Time marches on, but at it’s own pace and I eventually got that covenanted little piece of paper and was on my way. To where I really didn’t know. I could have this load to the customer by Saturday morning, but the receiver wasn’t open during the weekend (I had already called to check) and I was locked into a Monday delivery.

My first hope (no real hope at all) was a Tcall at our Knoxville yard and I made a beeline to the yard with that very intention in mind. It was a short trip of 280 miles and I was there by 2pm. I had two things in mind, Tcall and the trailer I was hauling had not been serviced in a coon’s age, at least that is the closest time frame I could come up with because the dates on the sticker were completely faded and unreadable. I knew I could get it through the Knoxville shop in short order, and they didn’t let me down. In and out in 15mins once again. These guys are incredible and this shop had become my favorite stop in our system, hands down. That’s the only good news I could report for this day. The Tcall request fell flat on its’ face. Reply: “Very short on freight, nothing to offer you”. I am really starting to detest that phrase. Oh well, there is always the New Kingstown terminal.

I wasn’t naive enough to think that I would have any better luck up there on a weekend and needed some work done on the truck and decided to hold up here and put the ol’ girl in the shop again. It was almost time for a B service and this seemed like a good time to have it taken care of. I dropped my freshly service trailer in the trailer lot and headed on over to the tractor shop and was immediately accommodated. Love this shop. It took a little longer than normal, but as a conciliation prize they put my truck in the wash bay and actually said “Sorry it took so long, I gave your truck a steam bath for the inconvenience.”

I decided to get an early 2am start out of Knoxville so that I would have a reasonable shot at the elusive Tcall once I arrived in New Kingstown. I also wanted to be in a position to put in a reset there if I wasn’t able to pull on off. If I arrived too late I wouldn’t get a reset in. I didn’t actually need on at that point, but it never hurts to have a fresh 70hrs and I never pass up the opportunity. The New Kingstown terminal was also about 50 miles out of route, but if I was going to be stuck with this ridiculous load, I was going to spend my time off at a terminal where there are some creature comforts available. There would also be a number of options available to entertain myself as opposed to spending the rest of the weekend at a toll road service plaza.

My request for a Tcall in PA garnered me the exact response that I had expected, “NO”. Not quite that blunt, but the result was that I would be ending this week with a dismal mileage total. I’ve always said they can’t all be good weeks, and this one slapped me in the face with a dose of reality. The economy is hurting.

The weekend was actually relaxing once I gave into the finality of it. I consoled myself by going on a spending spree and bought myself a nice flat screen TV/DVD from Circuit City. I haven’t had a TV in the truck for over a year since the last one burned out its DC converter. I never had time to watch it anyway and pulled it out in lieu of more storage space. But now that I seem to be having much more free time on my hands with the promise of more to come, I figured this would be as good time to increase my entertainment options.

I had also been entertaining the idea of becoming a trainer and storage space is a major concern when you put two guys in one of these trucks, especially with the lost space due to the APU install. The APU is a wonderful thing, but space efficient it is not. I had been contemplating the installation of a shelf at the end of my bunk to increase storage and had a rough idea of what I wanted to do. With plenty of time on my hands and the choice of Home Depot and Loews down the street, I set out to put something together. The big problem is that this isn’t my truck, so I can’t start putting holes in everything and had to build something that was free standing, yet stable enough to hold up to the gentle ride one receives in a Freightliner. It ended up costing about $100, (a good chunk of it for tools), but I managed to come up with a solid little shelf that I could put a lot of stuff on. I also hinged the legs so that I can pull it out at anytime and fold it up in a nice little package. Not a perfect solution, but not bad considering what I had to work with. All I have left to do is stain it to make it look all nice and pretty. My next project will be to figure out some kind of mounting for the flat screen so I can store it securely, yet swing it out when I want to watch it. As it stands now I have to wrap it up with a blanket and tie it down with a bungee while in motion.




Well so much for that horrible week, and good riddance.


WEEK FORTY SIX
Monday, November 10th through Sunday, November 16th
Miles include deadhead

Houston, TX to Opelousas, LA.......................................237mi
Pineville, LA to New Cullman, AL...................................596mi
Muscle Shoals, AL to New Kingstown, PA(first leg)..........,829mi


Total Paid Miles……………………………………………..1662 Miles

Actual Miles…………………..1784 Miles

1662mi x .43 = $714.66 (Ouch! I’ll not complain though, there are too many drivers with other companies that would consider this a descent paycheck.)