CRETE - A Year in Review

WEEK FOURTYONE​

Monday, October 6th through Sunday, October 12th​

The 41st week (I think) of the year has had a very lack luster start. I've come off of some very solid weeks with nothing under 3500 in the last three, but that lucky streak seems to be coming to a halt.

The remainder of Sunday and most of Monday was spent putting in my reset. Once that came to an end I was able to drop my loaded trailer at the customer and put in my MT call. The problem with that is that it is now 10pm Monday night and there is no freight available. Big surprise. I had already prepared myself for this inevitability, but it was frustrating none the less. I wasn't actually expecting to get a load out tonight, but I was hoping that I would get a load offer that picked up sometime in the early morning hours of Tuesday, but that was not to be. I was simply told to check back in the morning.

The weekend wasn't a total waist, I did manage to get out and see what was in the area. I had shut down at the WAWA on the corner and found a good little place to eat just north of here. A place called Boston Gourmet Pizza, or something like that. The food was really good and they had a number of HD bigscreens to watch the games on. So at least I got to see some football. My brother was even kind enough to send me a phone pic form the inside of the Cowboys stadium. He was just trying to get even with me for the Wrigley pics I sent him earlier in the year.

I had been told to check back around 7am but found myself awake by 4 on Tuesday morning. I went ahead and sent in a message looking for a load and was stunned to be offered a load that picked up in Jersey City destine for Menomonee, WI (1200mi). And to top it off, it was preloaded and had been since last night. Ok, that bothered me a bit, but better now than never. It was still early enough that I should be able to duck into and out of the Jersey before traffic went to the dogs.

As I was jotting down the info when I heard another beep and was devastated. Apparently the load had been put on hold by the shipper; something about it being some kind of import product and it didn't have proper clearance to leave the yard yet. That's just plain mean; I would rather have received a "no freight" message over being teased like that. Just to please me they did send a "no additional freight at this time" message. Ugh!

The wait for a load offer lasted until about noon of that day and the Qcom finally bore the good news. Pick up outside of Philly between 21:00-23:59. Drop delivery to KY (899mi) anytime Wednesday. OK, I like the anytime drop, but that 9pm pickup stinks. Not being one to sit around and wait, I put it in gear and headed on over to the customer. I wasn't going into this one totally blind. It was one of our regular customers and it would be a drop and hook. The only question was, "would it be ready when I arrived?" The answer would be no! This would usually bother me because my 14hr clock would be running, but in the particular case I wasn't concerned. It was past noon when I started my day and I had no intention of running into the wee hours of the morning. I was content knowing that I would be sitting in their yard as soon as the load was ready and then put as many hours in as I could before getting tired.

The anticipated wait ended up being nothing, because I had been sitting in my truck for all of 10mins when I got the call to go back into the shippers' office. Hot dang, I'm off and I will be able to beat the rush hour traffic out of town on top of it.

Now, I had no real intention of running all night, but I have a hard time leaving hours on the table and I found myself running until after midnight. I had all the rest I needed over the last couple of days anyway and wasn't tired. So after what started out looking like a dismal day turned into a solid 600 miles, although I had to run a little later than I'm used too. I didn't really need to drive that late into the night because this is a anytime drop delivery and it wont get me there any sooner, but it will give me more hours to work with once empty because now I only have 5hrs of drive time to get to where I'm going instead of 8. Therefore, I will have 6hrs available after putting in my MT call instead of 3. It may not make a difference, but just incase it does I'll drive the hours now instead of later.

On bad thing about driving until 1am is that you can't start your next day until 11am, and I was awake long before that. Time to go, gotta go. The magical hour finally came around and I made my way to KY and arrived by 4pm and did my drop and hook thing at the Wal-Mart. My load offer was slow in coming and I finally decided to head to a nearby truckstop after waiting for 30mins or so. Of course, as soon as I pulled out of the gate the Qcomm went off with an anytime hook pickup 100 miles away anytime today going to GA (414mi) with an anytime drop the next day. Perfect, works for me.

I knew where the customer was, so I didn't wait around for the load info or directions. The Qcomm was a little slow today and I didn't feel like waiting around for it. I put in the 1½ hrs or so to get where I was going and pulled into the customers drive. I grabbed the Qcomm to get the load info and was presented with a little problem. As I read it my thoughts were as such, "oh yeah, they have two plants in this town" and of course I had gone to the wrong one. Not really a big deal, it was only about 2 miles out of route. I just had to get back on the road and drive another 15 miles to the next plant.

The drop and hook pickup went well, but the trip out of the plant was a night mare. I had the misfortune of being behind a Schneider truck, (I have nothing against Schneider, it just happened to be an orange truck in front of me this night) and it had to be a trainee in the drivers seat on his first trip. I've never seen a truck move through the paces so slowly, but I understand and putz around behind him. This patience came to an end, however, when we made our way out to the main two lane leading away from the plant and proceeded to drive 25mph in a 45mph zone and continued to do so for 15 miles. On top of that he insisted on driving with at least a 1/3 of his truck over the center line, therefore preventing anyone from passing (made for some close calls with oncoming traffic). Not that I was going to try to pass at 78,000#, but the 20 or so cars behind him by the time we made it to the turn off were probably in a much worst state of mind than I was.

I eventually made my escape from the Great Pumpkin when he headed off in the opposite direction at the main junction and made my way on down the road. I was once again looking at a late night because I was forced to sit until 11am while waiting for my 10hr break to conclude. By the time I had made it to Nashville I had decided to call it a night a bit early, but finding parking at that time of night wasn't going all that well and after pulling into a couple of truck stops with no luck I realized I would have to get a little further away from town to find a spot. No big deal really, I had the hours available and continued on. There is a truckstop on the top of Monteagle that has a huge dirt lot next to it, always plenty of parking up there.

Sure enough, I had just enough time on my log to arrive shortly after midnight and found an abundance of available parking and put in for the night after another fine 650mi day.

Thursday had me looking at a short 200mi hop down into the Atlanta area to drop my trailer, but I once again had a late start and wasn't able to arrive until 3pm. That's getting a little late in the day and I wasn't overly confident about my chances of getting a load out. I would also have to deal with rush hour traffic if I didn't get a load right away. Once I dropped my load I put in my MT call and waited for the all too familiar, "Slow freight, check back in X hours". Sure enough, I eventually got a message that there was no freight available for today and they were working on load offers for the following morning. So there I sat in McDonough, GA without knowing which way to go. I couldn't stay at the customer and there is no parking to speak of in the area. Just a couple of very small truckstops and a Waffle house, but I had no doubt that no parking would be available. I swung by just in case, but as suspected, no spaces available. That left me with the option of going 15 miles south to the nearest truck stop or 50 miles north to our terminal. It would be very helpful to know where my next P/U would be so that I wouldn't rack up unnecessary out of route miles. Well, I have a 50/50 chance that I will make the right choice, but not knowing what lay ahead I opted for the closer truckstop and hoped for the best.

Now, I had been lead to believe that I would not receive a load offer until the following morning. But oddly enough, 20mins after pulling into the truckstop I was sent an offer to P/U a load of beer the following morning and running it over to TN (335mi). What crap! It was now Thursday and this loaded was to be picked up Friday morning and wasn't scheduled to deliver until Saturday morning. That a whopping 335 miles after only 200 miles today for a grand total of 535 miles over 2½ days. NOT good!

There is a little bit of hope attached to this load however. First, it is a Bud load and they are always preloaded, but are usually not ready much before their PU time, and often are late. I have plenty of drive time left for today and decided to head on up and find out what I can about my load. Even if it's not ready I will be able to drop my empty trailer in their lot and spend the night in one of the two truckstops on the corner nearby. To bad I didn't go to our terminal after leaving my last drop, it would have saved me 30 OOR miles and a ½hr of my log.

Upon arriving at the Bud plant I checked in an let them know I was early for my PU scheduled for the following morning at 8am. Of course it wasn't ready, but I was encourage to hear that it was scheduled to be loaded at 4am. They gave me an automated phone number that I could call so that I would be able to pick it up as soon as it was ready to go. I was allowed to weigh in a get my info into the computer to speed up my checkin on the following morning, dropped my trailer and headed off to the truck stop for the rest of the night.

My next hurdle was dealing with the delivery time. As scheduled, it was set to be there Saturday morning. I was headed to a small beer distributor and had to assume that if they would take a delivery on Saturday morning, there is no reason they wouldn't be able to accept on a Friday. And since it was only 255 miles away, I would be able to have it there by mid-morning (if the load was ready by 4am as I had been lead to believe). I thought about calling the customer to request an earlier delivery, but doing that would give them the opportunity to say no and I would be dead in the water. If I just pulled into the gate this afternoon, they might just be willing to fit me in.

A phone call to Bud first thing in the morning let me know that the loading of my trailer had not yet begun and I set the alarm 2hrs off and tried again at that time. This time around it was loaded and ready to go and I headed on over. I had hoped to get an earlier start, but it was not to be and by the time I pulled into Buds gate I found myself looking at a rather large line of trucks waiting to check in. Thanks to my arrival last night I already had all of my information entered into their system and was allowed to take the by pass lane to get my trailer. I was very thankful that I had stopped in the night before, it ended up saving me a fair amount of time this morning.

By 7am I was rolling down the road and 4hrs later I found myself pulling into the local Bud distributor's gates. Not a big place, for sure. They only had 3 dock doors for deliveries and they were all full. After a short self guided tour of the place I finally found the shipping office on the opposite end of the building and handed over my BOL. I didn't bother mentioning the fact that I was a day early, but as it turned out that wasn't necessary because she figured it out all on her own. "You're early, aren't you?" I quickly confessed my sin and told her I would be happy to come back in the morning if need be, but she said they would fit me in shortly. Sure enough, within the hour I was backed to a dock.

The unloading process seemed to take a little longer than reasonable and it was interrupted by a small accident. The fork lift driver managed to dislodge a case or two and the shattering of glass was followed by a fair amount of beer leaking through the floor of my trailer. Just great, that's one sure fire way of guaranteeing that my next load will either be a floor load or one of our loads that stipulates "no odor or trailer will be rejected".

Once I got the green light I pulled up to inspect the mess. If it had just been the small area in which the breakage had occurred it wouldn't have been all that bad, but after driving over it with the forklift a few dozen times it made for quite a mess. I grabbed some paper towels and went to work. It was a fairly hot day and once I mopped up the worst of it the remnants seemed to be drying at a fairly good pace. Upon returning to the truck I found that I had not yet received a load offer and decided to head on over to a nearby Wal-Mart to stock up. I also wanted to grab a bottle of Vanilla extract to tame down the smell of beer in the back of the trailer. Hot days mixed with beer splashed around in the back of a closed trailer make for a rather distinctive smell. I wasn't about to complain though, at least I was sitting empty a day early once again.


I returned to the truck to find a load offer. I hadn't been hopeful of such an event and was pleased to find one waiting for me. It was a PU about an hour away, and just as I had suspected, a floor load of paper rolls. The floor of my trailer would have to be 100% dry and thanks to the temp being close to 90° and my little 3hr layover it appeared that it would not be a concern by the time a arrived at the shipper.

The trip over was a back road jaunt and took a little longer than I care for, but this was by no means a hot load. Even though I had managed to unload a day early, it ended up netting me yet another load with a drawn out delivery schedule. This was Friday and, of course, it didn't deliver until Monday in Omaha (774mi). That's another 2 ½ days on a rather short run. These live loads and unloads are killing me. As always, I will try for the early unload, but I won't have this load to the consignee until Saturday, late afternoon, and am not at all confident that they will be open when I get there. As a worst case scenario, I will have enough time to put in an unneeded reset and in the process have enough time to rent a car and head on up into Iowa to visit my grandmother for the day. Not a bad idea in either case. It has been awhile since I was able to swing by and I was looking forward to seeing her.

By the time I made it to the shipper the floor of my trailer was completely dry and the vanilla had done its job and there was no hint of beer. The loading was amazingly quick, it took all of 10 minuets to load the 7 rolls of paper and I was on my way. The rest of Friday passed painfully slow as I was force to use back roads through Tennessee for most of what was left of my day.

I'm not sure what it is about these fine folks of TN, but they are in absolutely no hurry and seem to have an inordinate amount of free time on their hands. I have also discovered that as long as you are on a 55mph, 2 lane highway, they are more than content with driving somewhere between 45 and 50mph. Here is where it gets strangely interesting; every once in awhile there will be a passing lane so that slower traffic can pull over and allow the people behind them "ME" to proceed at a more reasonable speed. It is at this very moment that the slower traffic suddenly finds that their car will indeed go 63mph. Oddly enough, that is 1mph faster than my truck goes. But a strange freak of nature occurs at the very moment the passing lane comes to an end. The very vehicles that had momentarily found a burst of speed immediately revert to their preset speed of 50mph. Very strange indeed.

Late morning Saturday found me in our Kansas City yard and I considered working out a Tcall. There was enough down time on the load to justify it, but I was starting to look forward to my visit with my grandmother. I decided to eat the short week and start with a fresh 70hrs next week. I pulled into the customer's lot Saturday at 5pm on the off chance that someone would be there, but as I had figured, the place was locked up tight. Our terminal was only 4 miles away, so I headed on over and dropped my trailer in the yard. By the time I was situated it was too late to rent a car and drive up to Iowa tonight. I went ahead and made reservation for a car for Sunday and spent the evening in the Casino across the street and started by reset.

Sunday would not have been anything to write about other than my very enjoyable visit with Grandma, but I figured I'd make it interesting by locking my keys in the truck. Wow, I haven't done that in years. I ALWAYS keep a spare key in my pocket that I never use, well almost never just incase I'm dumb enough to slam a locked door with the keys in the ignition. It happens occasionally.

Well today I had decided to put on a fancy pair of pants so that I would look nice during my visit. In doing so I left my spare key in the pocket of my jeans. I then absent mindedly walked across the casino parking lot to see if there were any cabs in the area and somehow left my other set of keys in the ignition. Fortunately I always keep a small supply of bailing wire wrapped around the frame on my tractor for what ever quick fix is necessary and was able to form it into a hook. It took me 45mins, but I was finally able to latch onto the door handle through the ¼ window and pop it open. It's a good thing I'm driving a Freightliner, they are probably the easiest truck on the road to break into.

The casino had great security too. He drove by me twice and never asked a single question. I suppose he figured if I was going to be that blatant about it, it must be my truck.


WEEK FOURTYONE
Monday, October 6th through Sunday, October 12th
Miles include deadhead

Oaks, PA to Hopkinsville, KY........................................................899mi
Owensboro, KY to McDonough, GA.............................................514mi
Cartersville, GA to Clarksville, TN................................................335mi
New Johnsonville, TN to Omaha, NE...........................................774mi

Total Paid Miles..........................................2512 Miles

Actual Miles.........................2623 Miles

2512mi x 2512 = $1080.16

Definitely one of my worst weeks with Crete. Freight has been slowing down for some time and it finally hit me. I am finding that the wait between loads is increasing and when I do get a load it often has an excessive amount of down time associated with it. I have been able to lessen the sting somewhat by making early pickups and deliveries whenever possible and have been fairly successful up to this point. Even with a reset at the beginning of the week and a layover thrown in shortly there after and topped off with yet another unneeded reset at the end of the week I turned it into a reasonable week. 2512 miles in a little over 4 days of work. I could have Tcalled my last load also to increase my miles for this week, but the idea of visiting my grandma was much more appealing.

There's always next week.

 

Well, it appears that I have discovered yet another dead spot within our freight lines.

I'm sitting in South Central Louisiana and have been here since 2:30pm yesterday. I've just hit the 24hr mark without another load offer, just messages about low freight and "we're looking". They told me I was 6th in line at 5am, but I'm still waiting.

All this after being allowed to Tcall a load in Houston Sunday night. That load didn't deliver until 8am today in Houston. I thought I was sitting good, but they put me on a 240mi load that delivered over here in LA yesterday. It was a Drop/hook delivery, so I figured I would be on my way. No such luck!

Grr!

 

Well, 25hrs in and I got the offers, yup 2 of them. One going 1350mi, 3 drops ending in Wintersville, OH on Sat with an open delivery widow, a bit odd. I thought about it, but it's a 6pm P/U tomorrow, here in town (making it a 51hr layover, not) No idea where or when the first two stops are. I'm very leery of this run because the final stop is just west of Pittsburgh, across state lines. I've had enough of PA for a while (not that LA did me any favors) and think I'll go with the 2nd load.

590mi, two stop run going to Cullman, AL. Doesn't P/U until 11am tomorrow, but I have about 100mi dead head with that and will show up a couple of hours early. Probibly going to the Wal-Mart DC up there in AL. I'm going to assume this two stop run is actually one of those oddball single stop drop/hook loads we get every once in a while that has two PO# attached to it. Not really two stops at all, but I'll get an extra $30 for the drop. YUP, info just came through, one stop drop/hook. Made a good choice. Will have it there tomorrow night and hopefully get a load out first thing Thursday morn.

The longest run isn't always the best one. Although I may have a differant opinion if I get hung up again tomorrow after droping my load. Time will tell.