Lost in LA,a nudder rookie oops!

I totally agree with that^

 

LA is a piece of cake compared to NYC or Jersey, and there are no tolls!! However they do baffle me with all the road an exit closures especially at night.

 

Hell NYC aint that bad, its a small area. LA is a BIG area you can get lost for days and days. If it goes really wrong you could end up in mexico...

 

My very first paid solo load was in Los Angeles. No GPS. But I did have the computer and MapQuest (car) directions (better than nothing). Emptied out and trying to get to the next place (Compton lol) following MapQuest's directions come to a light that says right and left turn is truck route but straight ahead No Trucks. Of course I need to go straight ahead to get on the onramp-- it's right there! So I turn right and go about 10 miles -- no where to turn around, no entry to the freeway, finally turn around in a Dollar Tree back lot and go the No Truck way as other trucks were doing as well.. Lots of stress. Love the GPS for getting out of jams like that now.

 

I was in Cerrritos Ca. to pick up a load. I got off the freeway and then turned right instead of left. Drove along for about a half mile and wound up right in one of those circles? A cresent? Anyway it was all residential.
Well I stopped right away to figure a way out. Meanwhile cars were just parking behind me instead of going around. You know how they do that.
Anyway I had my brakes applied and was figuring out what to do when a siren went off and a voice on the loudspeaker blared "Stop the vehicle now!" Huh? I'm stopped!
A cop ran up to my door and yelled at me "You have to get this truck out of here now!" "You're telling me?!" I asked. "Let me see your bill of lading!" "Uh...I don't have one." "Why not?!" He kept yelling....Strange. "Uh...I don't have a load?"
Taken aback a little he looked around.."Can you go around the loop and out?" I looked again. "Yup. I can wipe out those cars and that fire hydrant too" He looked again. I said " Look...IF you can control traffic I can probably back into that street that is coming onto the circle and turn it around that way." "Ok Lets do it." He said.
He cleared the stupids in their four wheelers and I pulled forward then jackknifed into the side street. When I could turn out the way I came, I looked into my mirrors and saw the cop. He was bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, just roaring with laughter. I decided to get gone while he was in a good mood.

 

I used to work out of Cerritos across from a big food plant (Kraft?) driving straight trucks and too often I would be rolling back in from the borderlands in the early morning and see another lost trucker headed over the freeway to the residential areas. That place is almost a truckers' nightmare with the way they crowded up the residential areas to the industrial and commercial ones and the local cops are not that tolerant anymore is my understanding.

Your story reminds me of the time I was sent to drop a load of piping to a temporary jobsite in Fairfield, California and went around a tight curve as the directions said to do, found no road past a point a few hundred feet ahead and after getting out my handheld spotlight discovered that the adress would have to have been out in the bay by at least a few blocks if the directions were actually correct. I was quite sure that I was driving a truck that said Freightliner and not Fishliner on it so I pulled up literally to the waters edge end of the pavement, got out with the spotlight, got the solution to my current problem reconnoitered and got back in and very, very carefully then reversed through a tight left turn.

I merrily crept the truck back up the only street I could go up by then, a mostly quiet residential one paralleling the one I had come in on and backed up to where I was able to get out onto the closest main drag. Some local folks having a right fine shindig had noticed a truck slowly creeping by in the light fog in reverse through their high falutin' neighborhood no less and called the local cops in order to determine that they, the partygoers, were not completely falling down drunk and actually had seen a truck passing by their humble but noisy abode.

The only officer to show up was kind enough to wait until l had backed my way out onto the main drag and pulled over before asking just what was I up to. After showing the very nice officer all the documentation and explaining my taking the only solution to my nonnegotiable, nonamphibious truck problem we figured out the real problem: My dispatcher was an IDIOT and had misstated the adress by several blocks in the Qualcomm directions and on my paperwork. A few more minutes spent carefuly following the directions given by the kind police officer to the actual delivery location ended my predicament and left the partygoers to seek out actual hallucinations as the night and their party progressed while I finished my day's work and went off duty.

 

LOL Sounds about right! Dispatchers suck. Being a word weaver myself, I really enjoy your writing style

 

All I want from Dispatch is an address, not directions. Before I go to a big city that I don't know, I check my map. I also go to Google street view to get a good look at an area before hand. I write down all the important info I need, and after all that I let the GPS guide me in. Oh ya I also call the customer. This works for me and takes a lot of stress out of it.

 

Denadii Cho: Thank you for the complement about my writing style. I have been at best a contributing writer and am working on leaving an editorial position to go back to full time truck driving. Good luck with your writing efforts.

Beer Runner: The company I worked for at the time insisted on QC and printed directions use only and I think GPS was either not available or unaffordable to me at the time. If I return to OTR work then I expect to install a trucker friendly GPS and a laptop with a good quality printer as I learned the hard way that a dispatcher is only as good as the information provided and too often there are mistakes made from the start. By the way do you haul Bud products ever? I hauled for Bud out of Colorado and Texas.

 

Nothing to do with Kali, but three times in a few weeks I got the wrong address on the Qualcomm. When I can I'll look at Google maps and such before trusting dispatch.

It's almost always some place there are no driver directions to.