Snackbar is chillin'....at Shaffer

The only Leonard's facilities I have been to are the banana loads up there in Wilmington, and they are small cross dock facilities (the one has a big parking lot, but only a small cross dock building to unload bananas and put them on outbound reefers.) Seemed like nice enough people for the few brief times I speak to them about my load.

 

Well, my Garmin Nag-a-gator said that I turned 10020 miles in February, with 4.5 days off. Made it to Erick, OK as I planned for a 34, and even squeezed in a brief stop at Wally on the way. I have a 10:45 appointment Weds in Mira Loma, so I'll be on vampire shift once I start rolling after my break...so I'll have plenty of hours to run for 4 or 5 days... hopefully not up to Washington and Snoqualmie...that place got slammed with snow. I have managed to miss all the big storms thus far, I don't want to break my winning streak.

 

Some people!!!!! This is what I woke up to this a.m.(his drivers side front wheel and tandems are well over in my space)







This guy was a little off, he has this much room on his passenger side



View attachment 363207


And no, it isn't a Swift O\O it's





Truck number

 

Pretty soon, Skynet will be a reality, and humans will only be there to service them

 

Not sure what is going on in Lincoln lately. On Shaffer's load call macro on the PN, everything has to match...what's on the b/l as far as temp and cycle has to be the same as the load info sent to the driver and, because they use 'wifi connected' reefer units, the trailer's settings must be the same as well. Since coming back out from hometime, EVERY load has had a mismatch. When my Asset Manager is in the office, it's resolved with a quick update to him over the PN and then the load call goes thru without a problem. But....when it comes to after hours and weekend dispatch, it's sometimes an arduous task to get them to change anything without repeated messages, confirmation message requests (sometimes from more than one person) and a frustrating hassle...pretty much like any other MEGA afterhours dispatch system. Now, I can't throw the people in Lincoln under the bus because it could be bad or incomplete info sent from the customer. It could be the CSR not following up with the info that was sent. Or, it could be the person entering the info into the system once the load is booked before it's sent to the driver. I just know it's frustrating as hell when I have to sit, burning time, waiting for them to correct and respond so I can send in my load call...I have gotten to the point where I send in a correction, wait 15 min, send in my load call and roll. If they fixed it and didn't say anything, all goes thru and there is no harm, no foul. But usually, they haven't gotten to it, I get an error, then sometime in the next few hours, I start getting messages once they actually notice that there is a problem. I seldom had this issue with Magnum or while I had a brief visit at Prime...

 

Looks like I will be running the stereotypical vampire shift that reefer drivers are known for. After I get empty tomorrow morning, I take a break until midnite, then pick up a load going to Hermiston, OR for Friday morning, which means night running again.

I did manage to turn 683 miles today which gets me within 8 hours of my light weight delivery tomorrow. All told, this week will be in the upper 3000's...but I am willing to bet that I will hear from Deland about my idle time for last month...it was very high, so I imagine I will be heading to a shop soon to figure out why.

 

An APU is a must with my next employer, that's for sure