CRETE - A Year in Review

Hey ya'll!

Happy Happy, Joy Joy.

It's good to see the regular crowd of Crete haters (or is it just the disdain of us OTR drivers in general) are hanging around. NO, I'm not referring to SS. At least this good man has the ability to post mindful, thought out opinions. As misguided as they may be, they deserve some respect. I feel for you SS.

My first week out of the house was gang busters, as is somewhat common as Crete sets me on a beeline course for the east side of the country. I ended up with 3600+ miles during my first 7days on the road. Great miles, but when it takes me 7 days to do this it usually has a disastrous effect on the following week. The main reason for this is that I find myself out of hours on day eight and have to take what is basically a pointless reset. Why pointless? Because the reset carries me into the morning of day 9, in this case, Saturday and concluded at 6am. But as of Midnight, I actually picked up something like 7hrs and could have put in for a load anytime after that. But then if I get a load that would require me to pull out before 6am, I would miss out on the reset and have to deal with tight hours at various points through out the week.

I know it sounds like babble, but it is a annoying juggling act to deal with. I have to decide if I should put in for a load on Friday with only 2 hrs available on that day and 7 the next or do the reset and start Saturday off at 6am with a fresh 70hrs. During plentiful freight it's a no brainier. Take the reset and get started on another 3600mi week. But the economy is horrible and to make matters worse, this is a long Thanksgiving weekend.

I made what turned out to be the wrong choice and did the reset only to be given a load that picked up the following day and delivered 1000 miles away in PA 3 or 4 days later. It was time to "pester" dispatch once again. I eventually wiggled out of that one, but the resulting load wasn't really all that much better.

Basically, it's just been bad. But then that really isn't anything new over a holiday weekend. It's kind of hard to come by freight when the majority of those responsible for loading and unloading it go home on Wednesday night and don't return until Monday morning.

The end result is a lot of trucks sitting around waiting for freight to fall out of the sky. I was a bit surprised though because the lot I pulled into on Thursday night after making my drop delivery had 6 Crete trucks sitting in it waiting for loads. I slept in the following day and when I took a look out the window they were all gone, so there must have been freight moving somewhere. It made me feel fairly confident that I would be able to get a load out when my reset concluded Saturday morning. Wrong!

It's been rather frustrating ever since. I was offered a load out Saturday going to NY that would have concluded the calender week with 3500mi or so, but I would have been there Sunday night and it had a Wednesday delivery on it with no oppions for a tcall. There was no logic to sitting around for two plus days, so I took a shorter 500mi run going up to WI where I would only have to sit for one day waiting to deliver. I figured I would just write off the rest of the week and hope for better miles this week after putting in my second 34hr reset in 3 days. There was an attempt of tcall in Ottawa (Longbow, I was in Ottawa on Sunday, there were all kinds of empties over here), but I didn't really expect that one to work out anyway.

Like Longbow, I ran into the empty trailer shortage up in Chicago last week after running a shag load for dispatch. Instead of delivering a shag, they had me running around to pickup a load that was on the verge of being a late pickup. It was only a 500mi run that didn't deliver for 5days, so they told me up front to tcall it in Romeoville. I knew it was going to be a problem from the moment I accepted the load. Why? Because I currently had an empty trailer. I would have to drop that empty trailer at the customer when picking up the proloaded trailer that I was suppose to drop in our yard and as I suspeceted from the start, there were no MT trailers. No MT trailer means no load.

Well, you can just about guess how well it went over when I was told I would have to wait for a MT trailer before I would get a load offer. It was a drawn out battle (I'm in the middle of last weeks update with details), but I won.

I now find myself down in Georgia. I though things would improve for me, miles wise, once I got down here, but that hasn't been going all that well either. I dropped my load last night with 2hrs left on my log. I could have shut down for the night but decided to put in for a load and see what happened. As it turned out, that wasn't such a good idea.

Appearently one of our drivers had a breakdown, (I'm guessing its one of the new Cascadias because it was raining all day, their electrical systems don't do well in the rain) which prevented said driver from delivering his load. I now found myself located in relatively close proximity to this orphaned trailer and got "repower duty".

So here I sit under a 180 mile run that started last night. I had enough time last night to pickup this load and get to within one hour of the Wal-Mart DC. I then sat for 13hrs before knocking out the final hour of drive time to make my 10am appointment, arriving one hour early. The good luck continued when I was informed that there were no open docks and they would let me know when something was available.

Thirty minutes later I'm told to back into door 6 when the "yard dog" pulls out the trailer that is currently occupying that door. Thirty minutes after that I go back in to inform them that door 6 still has a tailer in it. (I assume it has something to do with two hostler trucks sitting in the middle of the lot with mechanics under them). At that time I'm told to go to door 16 instead. Finally, I get into positions to back up to the dock and open up the trailer doors only to be hit with a wave of despair. I can't believe this, front to back, floor to ceiling, an entire trailer full of toy tractors just big enough for a toddler to scoot around on and they are individual stacked, on the floor. No pallets, no slip sheet, no shrink wrap, NO WAY!

I'm looking at a 3hr unload in a best case scenario.

So much for best case. I've been here since 9am and it is currently 1pm and instead of driving I'm on a message board. Good Grief!

Mid-day Thursday and I'm sitting at 1500mi. The weekend will make or break me.