Snackbar is chillin'....at Shaffer

I kinda got that impression as well, pretty much how Lincoln views their 'valuable assets'. Now, every time I take my POS to the shop, I get the pamphlet on how to run the opti-idle, like it's rocket science...the problem is, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works for a while, then decides not to...without me changing anything. Yesterday, 98° outside, 81° and climbing inside, and it took 3 tries to get it to start, and then once it started it went to straight to "continuous interior comfort" and ran for hours until the sun went down, then cycled all night just fine.

 

Ops decided not to poke the bear any more with that unproductive load I said no thanks to yesterday. Only, they waited until I was a half hour away from delivering in Gas City to offer a better run. Frankfort IN to Springfield MO that can deliver anytime tomorrow. The one problem, an 11 am live load appointment. Had I known about this load yesterday, I could have left much earlier than I did. The route between Gas City and Frankfort should have been easy, but, many of Indiana's counties are closing state routes entirely to do construction. What should have been a 65 mile jaunt turned into a 90 mile scenic tour of rural central Indiana...and some roads were definitely not made for 53' x 102" trailers, but that's where the detour routed me...so be it. As long as there wasn't a low clearance or a weight restriction under 17 tons, I'll run it.

 

I think I figured out why we get all these repeats on the nanny and reminder messages. A qualification to work in the office must be having a certain level of A.D.D., and they get distracted easily and can't remember if they sent out the message or not. I can't count the times that I send in a temp change or a PTA update only to have to send it again because it was overlooked. Or provide the same info to more than one person because they're too busy to look on the system to see that I had already sent the info in. Today, I made it to my live load an hour late (with prior warning to dispatch). Upon check-in at the 'Welcome center'(a.k.a. security), they told me that I could turn my reefer off, it was a dry load, they don't ship anything but dry out of this location (my load info said precool to 35, cycle mode). After backing into my assigned door, I messaged my AM about the change in temp so he could fix it in the system so that my load call could go thru without problems. So, an hour or two later, I'm loaded and have paperwork in hand. I proceed to send in my info, and roll out quick because they currently only have one inbound lane and one outbound lane while they are doing construction and there isn't anyplace to sit other than the driveway to send in your info once you get your bills from the exit side of the welcome center, and can only sit there until the next truck is leaving. I didn't make it to the main road and *beep....beep*...2 messages, 1 about a temp mismatch and the other telling me to verify my b/l info before calling dispatch. So appearantly my AM missed my earlier message or was away from his desk for some reason, and his coworker/backup had their head up their butt and didn't bother to do their job backing him up, again. If we screwed our jobs up as often as the office screws theirs up, we would be out the door on our butts.

 

Heck of a long commute