Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

Deadhead to Walmart in Colton from Fife to drop reefer. No freight here according to planner for couple days. Hopefully weather holds up with empty trailer going down I5.

 

I wanted to ask you about the new gps from Rand McNally that you bought. I’m thinking of getting one.
That was the 580?
Is it very hard to see? Letters to small? What’s in your opinion the pro and cons.

 

Yeah, I have the TND 540, smallest one. So far no problem except it not finding some addresses in which case I gotta use detail input with zip codes and stuff or use addresses nearby. I have bad eye sight wearing contacts and glasses and no problem seeing numbers and stuff on it. Tablets are nice but take up windshield space so I opted for smaller one which gets job done better than apps Ive been using.

 

Well by tomorrow hopefully we shall have a new year....

 

Sunday, while hooking to my loaded trailer at the yard, a USX driver came up to me and asked if I could help him. He was having trouble getting his kingpin to lock into his 5th wheel. I’m glad I took the time to help him because in his attempts and resulting frustration, he had inadvertently released his 5th wheel as well, which I didn’t see until he actually got the kingpin to latch into place. Imagine going down the road with that released!?!? He was a new driver. I explained what he had done and showed him how to fix it. He was driving a freightliner and both the kingpin and 5th wheel release buttons were right beside each other. Design flaw IMO.
Now back to the trailer I picked up. It came out of OH with a heavy load of fertilizer on it. Guess where the tandems were? All. The. Way. To. The. Rear. Yep. Who does that? And all the way from OH, no less. Slid them forward and scaled it. Had to move up 2 more holes to get under 34k on the drives, so weight distribution wasn’t the issue. Just pure laziness.

 

2- Question’s
I got this morning an email about the construction/ repairs being done at the Richmond terminal parking lot.
Who is ...
Phillip A. Williford
IT manager & EDI Coordinator
1- Is this “Phillip” the DM that’s usually on some weekends is at the front window?
2- “IT” Manager & “EDI” Coordinator... What does “IT” & “EDI” mean?

 

1) He isn't Window Phillip.
2) "Information Technology" and (usually) "Electronic Data Interchange". In hatefully simplistic terms it's the hip new horseplops in IT for a guy who helps a business stop doing things on paper and convert those processes to totally digital means with a standardized format.

 

I must not be special enough because I didn’t get an email.

I take it back. I just hadn’t seen it yet.

 

Got it. Thank for the info.