BD69: The Owner Operator Chronicles

Actually the TV theme song I'm hearing in my head is from Gilligan's Island LOL

 

I was thinking a bad version of mission impossible! Hang in there BD may the force be with you!

 

Today I delivered late morning in Auburn, WA. I had a booked load going back to Eugene paying decent out of Tacoma.

RateCon showed FCFS between 8 and 3:30 CALL ONE HOUR BEFORE YOUR ARRIVAL TIME.

Okay, no biggie...

Showed up right when I told the floor supervisor I'd be there. Left me in the waiting office with the Mexican flag on tge wall for 40 minutes. Amber the female forklift driver with a beard informs me she's starving and going for lunch. So off they go.

Jose the yard goat driver instructs me to "back up over there in that office building parking lot".

I say, "don't you want me to dock in one of those 2 loading docks you guys use?" He tells me no.

About 20 minutes later 2 guys pull in and go right to those docks. So, I get out of my truck and walk over to Jose. "Do you all intend to load those 2 trucks before me?" He nods his head up and down.

I head back to my truck and ring the nice broker, explain to her what's going on and tell her I'm cancelling the contract for failure of the shipper to keep their end of the bargain. She apologized and I rolled out.

5 minutes later RING RING RING, "The shipper wants to know what it will take to get you to go back?"

$450 MORE, I say. "Okay, Please go back." Revised RateCon hits my email in minutes. 10 minutes later Amber is waiting for me and pointing me into the dock. Slam, bam, thank you ma'am!

30 minutes later I'm rolling...again.

Let me tell you, in today's climate and demand for trucks, I don't have time for these fools. Just one more good reason I love being my own boss

 

This is delicate so I'm wording this best I can .
Buttttt.....if the people in Chicago put 26 degree product on the trailer and the unit was set at 0 it would have run wide open the whole trip trying to pull it down and that's a tip on hot product and time for a call to dispatch .
Units are designed to maintain the temp of product loaded and are not for getting product to proper temp .
Anything more than a couple hours at high speed without it settling at low speed indicates a problem .

 

I know nothing about refer operations, but I do understand temperatures. So my question is this, they reject the load for being frozen, would not 26 degrees be frozen as well?

 

I asked this same question back when I first started reefer. I was loading ice cream and my ThermoKing wouldn’t pull below -5 and the shipper wouldn’t load anything above -10. I asked the same thing, “isn’t frozen, frozen wtf?” It has something to do with how the molecules react or something. Or so I was told. So like 26 would devastate a load of strawberries or lettuce or something, but for meats it seems especially, this is the go to shipping temp to keep it well chilled but still able to be called the ever lucrative phrase “fresh never frozen”.

 

Okay, my attitude just shifted in a positive way towards Amber the forklift driver.

She just called me to tell me she was driving home and remembered the BOL copy they gave me didn't include the seal # written on it.

Without it, she said the receiver would have rejected the load! She gave me the # and sent me a pic of it when they sealed it.

I'm still keeping the extra $450 though

 

Ice cream can actually start to melt at 0.