EPES TRANSPORT-Greensboro, NC

Well after 2 weeks looks like ill be joining y'all on the east coast. Running up to northern Virginia for a Thursday drop, thinking they may keep me for a bit since I've for @ 10 more days till due back home. Any tips y'all wanna pass along would be appreciated and paid back with some Texas BBQ and hospitality when I get the chance.

 

northern va is no problem.......it doesn't get fun until you get to dc and points north of there lol........2 things come to mind in that area....don't park at the walmart off 66 in front royal, va and the flying j at the 323 off 81 is always a cluster......tight parking, always more trucks trying to park there than they have spots, don't think about trying to park there after around 1700 and if you have to fuel there plan to hurry up and wait.

you gotta love shippers. love to hate them. fusion paperboard in Versailles, ct. don't trust the scale there it's about 700 light. and don't deal with the attitude from the chick loading on dayshift. rob i'm sure you'll appreciate this one when you read through here since you tanker guys don't deal with this annoyance lol

roll in there to load. hurry up and wait. enclosed docks with about 2" clearance on either side maybe a little less with the doors open have to squeeze in there.....poor lighting so it's a black hole. I can tell just from initial contact this girl is a real ray of sunshine. had no clue yet the jeckyl and hyde I was dealing with. she gets me loaded and I roll out and go to strap the rolls down and can tell already it isn't good. she's got them single stacked all the way to the doors and 42,276. roll across their scales anyway. showing 24860 / 34980. duh. roll back around and tell her.

I get this 'well i'm just a girl I don't know anything about drives or tandems or what needs to go where and MOST drivers that come in here want it loaded light on the front.' all i'm thinking is don't play this i'm just a girl #### with me if you don't know how to load you shouldn't be on the forklift. so I made it simple for her and told her it's light in the front and heavy on the back I need it evened up enough to make it legal. she doesn't want to do that. by this time her supervisor is there and she's telling him 'I know this guy wants me to empty this trailer and reload it. I just know he does. i'm not doing it. he'll sit here all day if that's what I have to do'.....and i'm standing in the bay in the door beside mine listening to this and just look up and say to nobody in particular that until the weight is legal i'm not driving it anywhere and i'll stay here all day or until tomorrow until it is. at the time I had no clue how prophetic those words were.

so he starts working it out with her what has to be moved. well if we move these two rolls and double stack that one blah blah blah. and she's trying to get out of doing anything. typical union shop. do as little as possible. so she starts taking rolls off and rearranging and after what I already knew wasn't long enough I get a green light. pull out and look and not much better and still too close to the rear. she just double stacked a couple on the back and didn't really move anything. I get up there and strap them in good and tight and roll back over the scale. 29,400 / 34,400. pull back around and she's standing there outside the shipping office with her hands on her hips and a don't #### with me look on her face lol this isn't going to be good. tell her the weights. out comes mrs. hyde lol........we go from i'm just a girl that doesn't know #### to yelling with an attitude that 'I've been loading trucks 15 years 5 trucks a day I know how to load a ####### truck'.......I, in my usual calm professional demeanor just look at her, know what's about to happen and say ' you just told me 30 minutes ago you were just a girl and knew nothing about weight distribution. now you're an expert. you can't be both. according to your scale, it's still overweight on the rear. some of that needs to be shifted forward not just stacked on top of each other on the rear.' I thought her head was going to spin around on her neck and explode. so we go through the dance again. if nothing else I got a lot of practice today getting into a really tight enclosed dock. so she goes at it again and after what again felt like really not enough movement I get the green again. all she did this time was pull a few off and triple stack a couple just forward of the axles. looked like ####. I strapped them in again, with 3 straps this time, and back over the scale I go. 29220 / 33900. ####. close but legal so off I go i'm just not dealing with her again.

oh before all of this I pick up this empty in plainfield at the lowes and somebody left me a present with no mudflap on it lol so i'm already going to have to stop and get that fixed......so I head on down to the TA in Branford which is the closest place both with a shop and a cat scale. wait in line to get repairs and get that taken care of and then i'm out of time. roll over the cat scale and into a parking spot. go in and get my weights and......wait for it......lol........

29220 / 34640 actual, correct, certified weight. I was pretty sure this time it was MY head that was going to spin around and explode. I was livid. not at her she already had proven she could care less about the legality of the load......but at myself for not taking it back to this expert 15 year truck loader and making her do it one more time. I should have figured being a shipper's scale that it wasn't going to be right that close to the edge. so go to bed and decide to run it back up there when I get up and make them fix it. then had trouble going to sleep I was so bent out of shape over it. i'd hate to see what my blood pressure was lol

so call dispatch when I get up and tell them the problem. they said it was a good catch and run it back up there and get them to fix it. get there and explain the problem to the guard. she calls the shipping desk. they're trying everything they can to get out of reworking it. did I slide the 5th wheel? do I have too much fuel? can't I slide the tandems back? yes, no and no. I tell her to tell the shipping guy this load weighed legal on their scales but I have a certified scale ticket here that says their scales are wrong. this load doesn't go anywhere until it gets reworked. they send the yard dog up to check things out. show him the ticket and he asks the same things. 5th wheel? fuel? tandems can't go back any more? walk back and show him where i'm at. all the way back as far as I can go. he looks and says he doesn't even have to see any more he sees i'm 9 holes back no way that's going he drove otr 15 years he already knows I can't slide it back anymore. he tells them it's going to need rework I can't adjust any more.

they're hemming and hawing about it once I get in the door. back into the black hole again, in the dark this time with even worse lighting lol i'm getting pretty good at it. they don't want to deal with dayshift screwup. we'll get to you when we can. that was an hour ago as they're working every trailer in the dock except mine. and my clock just running. somehow I've got a feeling i'm going to be here in the morning when mrs hyde shows up. boy isn't THAT going to make her morning.

just another day at the office right? you gotta love it.

no wonder so many don't make it in this business. if you don't have a sense of humor and patience you just won't last.

 

So how much are you getting paid for all the fun? They do have something for that right?

 

Lol yep. After 5hrs sitting in the door before he decided now might be a good time to rework me I rolled out of there with 8hrs detention pay which I'm pretty sure got charged back to them. Took the sting out of the bs just a little

 

Went down to Volvo corp office today, they are looking for about 20 more OTR drivers for input on a sleeper cab concept . Not sure if I can post her number? They have some cool ideas ! But can not really go into detail.
Where did frog man and epes guy come from , and what did I miss ?

 

Thanks for the heafs up, ended up stopping lil short @ J at the 374. Nightmare getting in here due to construction they have going on. (1/2 the fuel islands are tore up) got about 250 to the drop then well see where to next. All I know is that looking at the map Im way to close to DC for my liking. LOL.

That and this Cascadia is NOT liking these hills at all. Got passed by a loaded school bus going up one. Ouch.

 

I think I'd take 100 seals that have to match over that bs with inaccurate shippers scales and having to run 55 miles each way back to the shipper for bad attitudes and rework any day of the week lol

 

Dinky and epesguy were one and the same.

the frog moron is his 'friend' from over at USA. those 2 never have gotten along.

they got into another pissing match in another thread and the guy followed him over to this thread yapping his trap for the second time much the same way sellars followed me around for awhile.

Dinky was a little ####y under his new name so he went bye bye again. i'm pretty sure if he'd have kept his mouth shut and kept a low profile they might have let him get away with it.