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

He made the right choice!! Congratulations to him.

 

Didn't leave the Pepsi plant until after 4:00pm. Took 'em 34 minutes to figure out how to print out my paperwork. They were literally in there reading manuals for the new system. Oy.

 

Behold, my wake-up call, circa 4:20am this morning:

 

You need to change your luck. Better start paying the preacher a little more. Now tell us what company did this? Could the driver speak English?

 

Happened at the TA in Jackson, GA. Dude in the spot next to mine was facing the opposite direction from me. And when he woke up this morning, there were two trucks parked right in front of him. Rather than getting out of his truck and waking them up to get them to move, he decided to try and back out of his spot. The pictures above were the result.

I'm not sure what he was even trying to do. Even if he'd cleared my truck, he woulda hit one of the trucks in the opposite row with the end of his trailer.

Called Breakdown, told 'em I had a busted side mirror that needed fixing because my truck was no longer legal to drive. "Do you still have your hood mirror?" they asked. I foolishly said "Yes". "Oh, well you're still legal then!"

Whereupon I explained that, legal or not, I wasn't going to drive any further than absolutely necessary with only a foggy hood mirror on my blind side to guide me for merging into traffic and backing into a dock or a parking space.

Even with that, I still had to drive an hour back to the Knight yard in Atlanta. One of the more harrowing experiences of my truck-driving career. It was dark and rainy, and I did my absolute best to avoid putting myself in a position where I had to merge over to the right. And when I had to do so anyways, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Made it here without running anybody off the road, but it was mostly by instinct. And now we wait for the appropriate parts to arrive.

 

Valiant, which is owned by US Express. Which is owned by Knight-Swift.

Knight-on-Knight violence! At least it'll make the insurance easy to figure out. We just pay ourselves and we're good to go!

 

Some of these people behind a desk are the most clueless bunch of clowns on the face of this planet…

 

I ain't gonna blame some minimum-wage phone monkey working off a script. I'm gonna blame whoever it was above them in the org chart who set the policy that these kinds of issues can't be fixed at a truck stop unless both hood and door mirrors on one side are gone.

Lesson learned, though. If this ever happens again and they ask "Do you still have a hood mirror?", I'm going to say "No".

 

Kinda funny how the new safety director is going crazy on safety, but dispatch wants you to drive with no side mirror. Nope, wouldn’t have done it. If you gotten in a wreck, they would throw you under the bus so fast t would make your head spin: