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

Thankfully the one pallet of stuff was ready and got loaded pretty quick, sometimes convention stuff can be a nightmare. Wide open spaces too compared to some other convention centers Ive been to. Parked at the small mom and pop place off exit 299 and will go all the way back west again to get the other stuff in the morning. This is one of those days I miss being a self dispatched and planned owner operator.....even though paid for this goose chase crap I was still uber angry.....

 

Pretty sure that was their intention all along. Just told you different so you would play nice. Just sayin’.

 

Woke up this morning at the rest area near Mars Hill, NC, off I-26. First time I've driven this part of I-26, and the rest area was gorgeous. A++. Would rest again.

I was 50 minutes away from a 9:00am Boar's Head delivery, and not much buffer to make on-time delivery. Soon as my reset ticked over from 9:59 to 10:00, I put the truck in gear.

Twenty minutes later, Edna beeped at me. I had a new load assignment! A pre-load! And after looking it over, I made a phone call to my new DM who is out of training and working without adult supervision. There were two points of interest to discuss.

Item #1: The appointment time listed for the pick-up was noon. The shipper was in Atlanta, and was 3hr 15min away from the Boar's Head delivery I was heading towards. My appointment time at the BH distributor was, as mentioned, 9:00am, and my ETA was 8:45am. And there was at least one truck ahead of me. For me to make the listed appointment time for the shipper, I would've needed to be leaving the BH distributor empty right then. Not still heading in their direction, 30 minutes away, and still needing to deliver all that lunchmeat.

This was not necessarily a problem, I told her. Very often, these places are FCFS. And they're probably not going to care if I show up at 2:00pm vs. noon. But just in case I'm wrong, I brought it to her attention so that appropriate steps could be taken.

Item #2: The delivery time for the receiver was 2:00am, in Memphis. Based on the HOS I had available at the time I received the load assignment, I could either deliver the load legally, or I could deliver it on-time. I couldn't do both.

So!, I told her, how about I drop this load on the West Memphis yard instead, and y'all can split it and find some other driver who likes being awake when it's dark to deliver it across town at 2:00am. She agreed that this sounded like a good idea, and sent in the split.

I got unloaded at the BH distributor in Flat Rock, then moseyed my way to the shipper in Atlanta. As I anticipated, they were FCFS and the noon appointment time was more of a guideline. They got me in and out pretty quick, and I hit the road at 3:10pm with 6hr 40min on my 14-hour duty clock and 6hr 15min away from the West Memphis yard.

Needed to fuel up, and just as I pulled in, Edna beeped at me. At the exact same time, my phone rang. It was my new DM! She had a question!

"The load planner says that he doesn't have anybody available to deliver that load at 2:00am. Can you make it to the receiver before you run out of hours?"

I said that yes, this would be possible, but I would run out of hours while at the receiver.

"The load planner wants to know if you can run that load to the receiver whenever you can get there and see if they will unload you early."

I said again that I would be left out of hours if I did that.

"The load planner says you can try to get them to unload you early. And if they don't, you can just take the load back to the yard and they can reschedule the load."

And I said "You're not understanding me. When I get to Memphis, I will have 20 minutes left on my 14-hour duty clock. I will have given Abilene a very solid 14 hours worth of work. You guys are asking me to work another couple of hours on top of that, maybe more. And I ain't gonna. Fourteen is all you get. So I will be dropping this trailer on the West Memphis yard."

She agreed that asking me to work more than 14 hours would be excessive, so that's alright.

And now I am parked for the night at JohnBoy's favorite truck stop. Had my first shower since Saturday (yesterday was a trial as well, but not the fun kind of trial that makes for amusing trucker stories on the Internet), and we'll see what tomorrow brings.

 

That should be mandatory across the industry

 

Schneider used to do that with their dispatchers in the 90's. Of course they got the graviest runs and motels every night. So they never learned anything.

 

Carolina Trailways, back in the 60s and 70s, every person in management that had any authority over the drivers, except for the president, had been a driver. This bull crap of hiring a dispatcher "off the street" was never heard of.

These "kids" that they hire off the street to dispatch, plan loads, look for loads and make appointments,if they had to deal with a bunch of union drivers, the company would go broke within a week. Most of them cannot even read a road map and without a computer in front of them, they are entirely ";lost".

 

A lot of them will tell you this… It’s only An inch on the map..lol

 

Driver with 1.5/4.0 million safe accident free miles over 10/40 years of driving get dinged $350 safety fine for doing 1 over the legal posted limit.

Can’t make this poop up.