Day From Hell

This is how my day ended after dealing with road construction and a bunch of idiot stupid tourists who don't know how to pull a camper!

 

Tourists pulling campers scare me more then a newbie in a swift truck! So often it looks like a family just out on vacation with no idea on what could happen in certain situations while pulling a camper.

 

Not that bad. Just another day truckin. Hey, you could have arrived at your receiver, construction site, with product that was for phase 2 of the project, that starts ground work in 3 months.

 

I spent all day today rebuilding my 10 speed road ranger and I spent yesterday in 88 degree heat laying on my back on a piece of plywood pulling it out of the truck.
I can hardly sleep tonight with the excitement of thinking about getting up in the morning and changing the rear motor mounts all while on my knees and then spending the rest of the day wrestling in a 140 lb clutch and a 650 lb transmission all again on my back at 56 years old with no help.
I just love being an owner operator sometimes lol.

 

My entire week has been rough. A few things went unusually wrong and then the heat in LA and lost wallet made everything worse. But now I’m almost all sorted out. Wallet drama is almost fixed. And I’m in NM where it’s breezy, pleasant and cool for some reason. Temps dropped 40 degrees and got hard rain with hail. Love it.

 

Do you have duals? WHICH tire blew? If you have duals, and still have a good tire left on the set, WHY are you sitting there hoping not to get killed? If an outside tire blew, single it out and ease on up the road to the next exit. If it's an inside tire, is it flapping or throwing rubber if you try to move? If not, ease your way up to the next exit.

The regs (§396.7(b)) allow you to move a CMV with a defect that happened en route to the next safe place to have repairs made, provided it is safe to do so. If it isn't flinging crap in every direction, and there is no risk of it coming off the rim and rolling away, then it is perfectly safe to continue to the next exit to find a safer place to sit and wait.

 

Came in at 7:30. Driving a relay truck with so much freeplay in the shifter you can probably hit both doors with it. And AC not working, awesome!

Get to the terminal at 8:50, no door available and someone is out with my route truck. He comes in late but I get it loaded up with my personal belongings, get fueled, hooked to my trailer, and when I go to dolly it up, I noticed it’s extremely difficult to crank up. I look at the manifest and see they loaded a bunch of heavy crap right in the nose. I slide the tandems all the way forward, scale it, and sure enough, 35,680 on the drives and 21,000 on the trailer. Morons...

Go back to get it reworked, major thunderstorm moves in and knocks out the power to the terminal. There goes another hour. Total darkness...

Finally get out, get to the other terminal to drop n hook, I’m loaded and ready to go. Yay! Nope, flat tire on the trailer dangling off the rim. Had to get the load swung to another trailer, there goes another 45 minutes between that and computer issues getting me tripped back to the home terminal.

Ended up being a 12.5 hour day with some bs at every turn. Hopefully my one bad day for the month...