I'm baaaaaack!!!!!!!!

Okaaay...the "Oh, I don't know if I can handle this" comment was a joke; I've done that from time to time. It's called sarcasm, or perhaps parody, in light of how little work I've had lately. In case anybody hadn't noticed...I an flabbergasted that anyone took that literally, especially in light of the previous 280 pages.

According to Celadon policy, anything over 12000 on steers is verboten; it was not possible to get the load legal on drives and keep the steers legal. If it had been, I would have moved the fifth wheel. I HAVE done this before, at least once. Any violation there would be on me, since company policy excludes 12001 pounds on the steers.

Shipper was closed at night and wasn't open to rework the load til 0800; so scale at night scale in the morning same difference; still had to wait. Parking at Ontario was EXTREMELY scarce by the time I got there so I elected to wait til morning since a space presented itself as I was pulling in. Also I had been on a cycle of waking at 0400-0430 for a week, and at 42K it was close, so lacking your omniscience and prescient hindsight I made the judgement call to sack out and scale in the morning.

Dispatch not only agreed with me, they tried to relay the load to another truck in Sacramento. He couldn't get it legal (steers at 12080). Guess what? They put the load right back on me. I wonder why that is?

In spite of what the hindsight quarterbacks have to say, I did it right. I'm not in trouble with the company; the CSR who didn't reschedule the load is. The dispatcher who didn't relay the information is. I'm operating within the parameters of my employer's system.

Even my dispatcher couldn't tell me why they wanted to relay the load to a guy with even less hours than me, and a heavier tractor. The other driver thought he could move the fifth wheel and get it legal and it didn't work; something I could have told him before he attempted it or the relay cost me 3 hours. Somebody at Corporate dropped the ball, and now the load gets there Friday morning instead of tomorrow night.

But hey, having my professionalism called into question is awesome. I know what I'm about.

 

When did I blame dispatch for the load being overweight? I said he didn't communicate to CSR. Did I load the trailer? Did my dispatcher? At what point did I "lay it all on the dispatcher?" The guy didn't communicate to the CSR that the load was spooched and they freaked because they didn't find out about it til it was too late, in spite of the fact that I had been in constant communication with dispatch from the time he got to work.

I was advised by dispatch to go to line 5 and move to nearest legal parking (which was the Petro) when the shipper told me I couldn't park there or anywhere in Corona. I was not progressing the load and was houred out.

Yeah, I fueled in the morning. I'm not a Supertrucker like some people, I drive for a company and have to fuel their equipment where they tell me. The fuel solution I had was good, if close. The rework brought me close enough to empty that between dispatch and myself we decided it would be prudent to put a little fuel in it to avoid a problem going up the hill to the first scheduled stop. I had no reason to believe a 42000lb load was not going to be able to get legal. They put too much in the nose. Maybe I should have paid one of you a few bucks to convince the company to change their policies.

The time got wasted waiting for the shipper to open, which took hours. Not off my clock but out of my day as I had been awake. The clock got eaten up in LA rush hour traffic to the shipper and back to the Petro, then back out of town. Avoiding that traffic was the whole point of getting up at 0400 to begin with.

Know what? I'm done repeating myself; in fact, I think I'm done dealing with all the armchair quarterbacks here who think a basic journal of musings, philosophy, humor, and day to day living is a license to tell me how to live every detail of my life, or that I answer to any of them. I've gotten to the point that I'm getting skittish about posting anything more substantial than a stupid joke.

Maybe the whole journaling thing was a nonstarter.

Talk amongst yourselves--I'm out.