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

Slim pickings out of Groveport was told when they put the Roanoke BH on me this morning. 336 miles not due til Sunday morning.

 

Speaking of circus:

Got a load assignment yesterday at 2:00pm: Take empty trailer to WalMart DC in Ridgeville, SC, pick up loaded trailer due today sometime in Mount Crawford, VA.

Spent the night at the Columbia Petro. Got up this morning, drove an hour and change to Ridgeville.

Trailer isn't ready.

Trailer was ready yesterday, but someone else picked it up.

And then they brought it back to be reworked because it's a reefer hauling a dry load and they front-loaded it and it's 1500 lbs over on the drives.

They brought it back last night around 8:00pm.

The closest scale is 10 minutes away. So they picked it up last night sometime well after I got the load assignment.

I asked the shipping clerk when they thought it would be ready. They said "probably not until tomorrow".

Phone calls were made to HQ. They don't have anything else they can give me down here, so would I mind terribly waiting until tomorrow and then picking up the trailer then? Sure, I'll take all the layover pay you want to give me.

Wonder if the other driver is also still in the area waiting for the trailer...

 

Please let us know....had this happen to me a few times when I was with Creep.....er...Crete.

 

I will say this about you and the rest of the Abilene drivers who post here, y'all must have the patience of Job. Personally, I never had it, never could tolerate being on the "receiving end of someone else's screw up" . I know it happens from time to time, but from reading behind y'all, it is an ongoing issue at Abilene.

 

The days when everything goes smoothly don't make for good copy. If I have an absolutely uneventful day hauling Gatorade to Indianapolis, I'm unlikely to post about it here. And most of my days are uneventful.

Don't know that I can rightly lay the blame for this one at the feet of Abilene, either, as Abilene didn't load the trailer. I am kinda curious about how the load seems to have been double-assigned, but if it hadn't, I would've been the one hooking the trailer, scaling it out, and bringing it back for a rework. Which would've left me in exactly the same situation I'm in now, but would've been a heck of a lot more hassle. So all-in-all I'm glad someone else got to deal with that aspect of it.

 

You probably will never know. Dispatchers have a way to cover their "many" mistakes up, especially when it doesn't cost the company.

 

Made it to Roanoke BH and parked in the dock for the night. Thankfully the hardees lot was empty so I could pull up straight and back straight into the dock. With all the time on this load I got all my tools organized and straightened and put a new metal cutting blade on my cordless grinder in case I gotta cut a lock off a trailer and changed the cartridge in my grease gun.

 

The Marine Corp 6 Ps. Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

 

That and the scout motto of always be prepared since Im also an eagle scout. I carry a full mechanics set of tools plus cordless impact drill with a full bit and driver kit, cordless grinder, bolt cutters, rivet gun kit and a full electrical repair kit for minor electrical stuff. Sometimes it is faster to fix stuff myself that I can to minimize down time.