Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

In my experience as an OTR, "Northeast" means "New Jersey". It's very rare that I drive I-95 past Newark, and I can probably count the number of times I've been to or through NYC to points beyond on one hand.

But I go to Jersey all the time. Don't even see what the big deal is. As long as you time your trip to avoid DC rush hour, it's fine. And I'd rather drive the NJ Turnpike than I-81 through Virginia or I-85 through North and South Carolina to be honest.

 

That moment when you're chatting with the other drivers here in the driver's lounge of this repair shop and they tell you that they've both been here a week waiting for their trucks to get fixed...

Like, there is a Kenworth factory two miles from here where they actually make the things. You'd think this shop would be able to step it up a bit.

Hopefully I won't be in the same boat. Both of these guys didn't even get their trucks looked at for two days, whereas mine got put in a repair bay this morning.

 

Ya, the few times I’ve had to stop at a Dealer, it’s been longer than I would like but maxed at one day... in when they opened... out when they closed... then I started my clocks... LOL

 

Today I was fueling the truck at the Pilot on 95 North exit 1 in Georgia.
I saw one driver taking a turn to tigh and he destroyed another beautiful black Freightliner in the corner with his trailer.
Snap, crackle, pop! Head lights, hood, mirror, bumper and radiator! All destroy!
Poor guy! He just was in disbelief on what just happened to his truck.

 

Wait... I take that back... the “last” time I swapped trucks to avoid the 4-5 day wait to fix my truck.... oops, my bad... but I guess I was still out of there before they closed... LOL

 

I did the same thing to someone else's truck when I first started driving. Less than two months out out of training. Was at the PFJ right there in Greenville, IN, just east of Indy. Early December. It was 1:00am and I was circling the lot looking for a parking space. And for about five seconds I forgot I was driving a truck.

I was driving with the window down, and suddenly I heard this terrible crunching sound. "WTF was that?!?" I asked myself, and looked out the window to see the side of my trailer tearing off the front of some other dude's truck.

And man, to be SO CLOSE to parking and putting her up for the night and getting some rest, only to have to shelve all that and stand around in the cold doing insurance paperwork and taking pictures in the dark with a crappy cell phone camera for two hours just because I was too freakin' dumb/inexperienced to make a wide enough turn.

I still got off better than the other guy, though. I didn't do any mechanical damage; everything was purely cosmetic. Tore off his bumper, headlight, damaged some of his other front and side panels. But he was no longer legal to drive until he got it fixed. Whereas I was able to roll out the next morning without difficulty.

Plus he was sound asleep in his bunk when all of the sudden some doofus ran into his truck. Having been on the receiving end of that myself, I can tell you it's a terrible way to wake up.

 

In other news, the problem with my truck was that someone -- either the factory, the dealership, or our own shop -- forgot to update the software on the computery bits that monitor the transmission. So there was nothing mechanically wrong with the unit. The computer just didn't know how to process the signals it was getting and so it thought something had gone horribly wrong with the transmission. One software update later and I was back on the road.

No clue why it took 'em 7 hours to update some software, but...

 

LOL!
No not this time.