A day at the office

So some of you might want to know what it's like for me on Wednesday? I'll tell you ha-ha.
So this morning I woke up by my alarm at 2:15 am and I was pretty tired when I was awoken by that thing. So I drug my self out of bed and into work horray! Then I got to work loggin and got back into my car and drove to where we park our trucks it's on the same property, but it's a ways from our office. Anyhow got into the truck lot found my paper I'm still pretty tired at this point and then walked over to the line up and got into my tractor and hooked it up to my trailer for today.

I then took a look around checked lights and trailer coupling and raised the landing gear all that good stuff and then I grabbed my paper work and went off on my way. My route on Wednesday is not far from the yard not really so I think I only drove 54 miles today.

Any rate though headed out did my first stop at about 3:30am or so took me a hot minute, maybe 45 minutes, but what ever got that done got my second stop it was also pretty early gee maybe 4:15am went to that stop got them off and then went to my third stop my Wednesday route is pretty much a route that could be described in 3rds. Anyhow got to my 3rd stop which is pretty much the end of the first third of my route. They normally get there till 5:45am so I had a good solid hour to rest my eyes didn't fall asleep, but I did shut my eyes and that was good, because I read on here even if you get like 20 minutes of rest sometimes that's enough to reset the chemicals in your brain and you'll be good to go for a minute.

Anyhow took a little break and then about an hour later I was out of my fog and started to wake up and I went off and hit the ground running got my 3rd stop off pretty quick and then that pretty much wraps up that part of the route.

So now I'm on two my 2/3rd of the route which is the biggest part of the route. It's mostly a school district and a golf course knocked out all 4 elementary schools 1,2,3,4 went and did the golf course then went and hit the middle school which took about 40 minutes or so then ran over across the way and did the high school.

The high school is the biggest stop takes about an hour. My freezer on Wednesday is about half the trailer and what happened was this a dock stop and it's a pain to lump the stairs and with 68 coming out of the freezer I said forget it, so I said I'll bust through the bulk head. I had to do a little reorganizing. Well with an over size freezer I had two layers of cases right up against the bulk head it was like digging to China. There was a minute there where just for a split second and I mean a split second there was a little bit of doubt ha-ha, but I was able to dig through and get out of the back and not have to use the side door horray for me. So about an hour and the 130 cases at that stop are done. So now were 2/3rds of the day through the route.

So I drive to my next stop which is a retirement home it's a new account nice folks they just threw US Foods out of there told us they like us better easy stop although they had a good 89 case order which was pretty big for them.

Then I had 4 more schools to do. Now the 4 other schools the one district used to be real big buyers from us, but they must have put out for bids and Sysco out bid us because now we still go there, but what used to be a 4,000lbs stop is now a 20 case stop. It's hard to tell with the non commercial accounts I think with non-commercial accounts a lot of that is contracts and price bidding and long term contracts basically who ever is cheapest on 80% of the stuff is who they buy from and the remaining 20% they get from someone else. I know US Foods doesn't really do schools like they do colleges and stuff, but like public schools and just K-8 schools I heard US Foods isn't interested in that business, they say there's no money in it. That might be true it seems like it's either GFS or Sysco doing the schools. Well there's an Ohio company called Avalon Food Service and they do a lot of the catholic schools, but it seems for the public schools it's either GFS or Sysco.

Anyhow did 4 more schools all pretty easy and quick and by 1:15ish I was headed back in. Got back to the yard about 1:45 and spent a few minutes chatting with another driver about his new Volkswagen and dropping my trailer and parking my truck nothing really on the cutting edge there. The other driver was driving a different truck and his normal truck was parked in the middle of the yard he told me if I parked his normal truck then he would buy me a coke so I did and he did (we have a vending machine in our office)
Then went and did my end of the day paper work and headed home. Not really a bad day, load quality was not the best, well it was hard until the middle school and high school came off after that the trailer opened up and then the old folks home also helped to make room and before long it was no big shake.

Anyhow that's it for me.

 

The thing with us and schools is some routes are nothing but schools and it's actually worse sometimes when you don't have them because come summer you don't know what your doing.

 

Usually when we get to some place about 2 minutes before the window is up they give us the stink eye and get all mad.