CRETE - A Year in Review

I got a call from the training department yesterday and they asked me I knew how to run refeer loads. At the time I assumed they were simply trying to get me to Lincoln to get my new truck and were thinking about putting me on a Shaffer load to get me there.

I'm not big on running refeer freight, but for something that short, what the heck. So I tell her "yea, I pulled refeer for a few years, no problem".

"Great, Shaffer is looking for finishing trainers.I'll let them know you are available, Thanks". Click!

No wait! Huh? What just happened? Did I just volunteer for something really stupid?

 

WEEK THIRTY ONE
Monday, August 2nd through Sunday, August 8th


This was just about as good of a week as one could expect as an OTR driver running a legal logbook.

It started waking up in my own bed on Monday morning and taking my time getting out of the house as opposed to getting up at 5am. The reason for this was that because I had picked up my load Friday morning and parked it in the yard for the weekend I didn’t have to worry about getting to the yard early enough to get an empty trailer and then wait around for dispatch to give me something to do. I knew that I only had to pickup my student from the hotel and head on over to the truck and start my 1800+ mile run to Atlanta. It was a drop delivery and three good days of driving would get me there in plenty of time to beat the midnight Wednesday delivery deadline. As a matter of fact, if I didn’t waist time along the way I would be there by 6pm with a few hours left on my logbook for the day to get started on my next load. I was dropping a General Mills load and would undoubtedly be pulling a loaded trailer out of the same place.

I dropped the load in the early evening as planed and was rewarded with a 783mi trip going to the middle of Illinois with another wonderful drop anytime delivery. Gotta love it!

I arrived with little time on the log book and planed on finding a place to parks after dropping my load, but dispatch had other plans. There was a live load that needed to be picked up nearby going to Nevada, MO(438mi loaded). It only took a little quick math to know I didn’t want anything to do with this load. It had a pickup window for the following morning of 6am to 10am and needed to be delivered by 2pm. Well it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if I arrive a 6am for a live load, there is no way I can go 438mi and make a 2pm delivery.

I’m sure that this load was suppose to be picked up the day before, which would have allowed for a timely delivery, but as it was now playing out I was being set up to be burned. The biggest problem that I faced was the day of the week for which this load was scheduled to deliver. That day would be Friday with a 6am-2pm delivery. What that told me was that I would be going to a first come, first unload facility and they wanted the last truck to pull in no later than 2pm so that everyone would be unloaded by their quitting time, at which time everyone would be going home. And as we all know, quitting time on Friday is always done with a bit more urgency than any other day.

The $64 question was, “What is their quitting time and how late can I arrive and still get unloaded?”

Once loaded I sent off a message to dispatch explaining that I was waiting at the gate when the shipper opened in the morning, was the first one loaded and out of the gate within the hour and even with that urgency there was absolutely no way this load could be delivered as scheduled, “Even if I drive straight through with a 10min stop for fuel, I would be hard pressed to arrive by 15:00 (one hour late)”. I followed that up with a request to contact the receiver to find out if I could pull in after the 2pm deadline and still get unloaded today, or if they would unload me on Saturday morning. Not that I wanted to wait till Saturday morning, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world because with the deadhead miles of this load I would be sitting at 500+ mi by the end of Friday, not terrible. If neither of these options were possible I asked to Tcal the load in Kansas City.

I knew they would resist the the Tcal due to out of route miles, but there was no way I was going to sit in the middle of nowhere in a parking lot all day Saturday and Sunday with no truckstop within 50 miles just because dispatch didn’t get this load covered in time. I was hoping that battle would never come to fruition.

A few minutes later I got a message that they were working on rescheduling the delivery appointment and shortly after that I got a message asking me “When can you be there?” That right there told me that the customer was closed on Saturday and today was still a possibility if I could get there sometime close to 2pm. I did some Jethro Clampett cipherin’ and came up with “15:15 if all goes well” and informed dispatch as such. That garnered me a “Go ahead and take it in today”.

Ok, now I know that the customer will be closed all weekend. I also know that I’m good with a 3:30pm delivery or so, but don’t know how much later I can get away with. But I do know if I arrive too late I will be spending the entire weekend waiting for a Monday delivery and my weekly mileage total will not be good (not to mention, two days in the back of a truck with a trainee is not my idea of a good time). If I get there too late a tcal will be impossible because there is no way I can backtrack once there. The only way I can swing a tcal is to demand one now, or avoid that whole confrontation and hope for the best and get to the customer ASAP.

Off to the customer we go with the trainee in the passengers’ seat. There is absolutely no way we make it with him in the drivers seat, this one was going to be all me. I apologize in advance for the long day with no stops. We would be making one 10min stop for fuel, Period. We couldn’t not afford to waist one second on this trip. It was going to be tight because the majority of the trip was on two lane roads and this trip also had me driving through the heart of the Ozarks smack dab in the middle of tourist season with a very long string of traffic lights along the way.

The endless stream of small towns and traffic lights took their toll and cut deeply into my built in time cushion on this trip and I was starting to get worried. We were getting close to our final destination, but the minutes were passing a tad bit faster than I wanted to see and the situation wasn’t helped out by my trainee’s sudden announcement that he couldn’t bear it any longer.

Despite my repeated suggestions that he not drink too much soda, he was now in desperate need of relief and waited until a very unfortunate time to tell me so for there wasn’t a single truckstop for the remaining 100 miles of the trip and it took almost an hour to find a parking area large enough to accommodate a tractor trailer. It didn’t help matters that this particular trainee doesn’t exactly move with purpose and by the time he was back in the truck six precious minutes had elapsed.

Another 45mins passed before arriving at the customer at 3:32pm and another 15mins was eaten up before I was able to get parked and find the shipping office. It didn’t help that this was a chemical plant and every door was locked and no one wanted to answer the intercom, but I finally found the man with the power and announce my arrival and desire to deliver my load.

The first thing he did was look at the clock and give a hushed whistle and a slight shake of the head that wasn’t so much directed at me, but more of a body language thing that conveyed a serious lack of confidence in a positive response to my request. He then picked up the phone and had a short conversation which ended with an “I didn’t think so”.

My heart sunk and I feared the absolute worst but was given a reprieve when I was told that they didn’t have an empty trailer available and I would have to be live unloaded, “Don’t waist any time and get back to the dock immediately, the unloader was on his way out of the door when I called”.

“By the skin of my teeth!”

It was the perfect lesson for the trainee. All week long I had been stressing the importance of 15mins . He just couldn’t understand why I insist on 15min breaks during a work day as opposed to 30-45min breaks when the load has an anytime delivery. My answer is always, “It may not matter today, but you never know what will happen tomorrow or next week.” This particular load made my point crystal clear; just one single extra 15mins anytime during the previous week would have resulted in 2½ days of sitting in the back of the truck in the middle of a dirt lot waiting to deliver a load.

Instead of that fate, I put in an MT call minutes later (the forklift driver was highly motivated and unloaded the trailer in 20mins flat), and shortly there after we were on our way to pickup a preloaded trailer one hour up the road headed to York, PA. OK, that’s not a storybook ending, but an 1132mi trip to PA is better than endless days in a parking lot.

I was able to get out of the PA load anyways because I ran out of hours along the way in Columbus and didn’t want to work the trainee too hard. I though about having the trainee drive the final stretch of the trip while I logged On-Duty in the passengers’ seat which would have given me a 4400mi week, but I decided to give us the day off and tcalled the load in Columbus. I needed to put the truck in the shop for some transmission work anyway, not that it did any good though. None of the mechanics in the Columbus terminal seem to think they have to show up for work and a chronically short staffed shop resulted in no repairs for my truck. What’s new!

The week almost ended disastrously, but good fortune was on my side to the tune of minutes and I closed out the week with a very healthy 3898 miles. Yea me!

Another rough week on the road as far as traffic accidents go though. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been stuck in a ridiculous number of traffic jams due to accidents. Here are just a few that I had time to take a pic of this week.










WEEK THIRTY ONE
Monday, August 2nd through Sunday, August 8th
Miles include deadhead

Superior, AZ to Covington, GA…………………………………………1868mi
Covington, GA to Galesburg, IL………………………………………….783mi
Henry, IL to Nevada, MO…………………………………………………..517mi
Harrisonville, MO to Columbus, OH(tcal)……………………………730mi

Total Paid Miles………………………………..3898 Miles
Actual Miles……………………3967 Miles

3898mi x .44 = $1715.12 + Training Pay $150 = $1865.12

 

It kind of gives me visions of Supersnacks chiledhood!

 

Yup, from what I understand, trainers are being put in Freightliners, but it's not the Freightliner I'm going to miss. It's my beloved APU. Oh well. I knew it would happen eventually. But I guess I'll be better off with a new Freightshaker than an International, after crawling around in a new International last week I don't want anything to do with them. Wow, talk about no storage area. There is no way I would be able to deal with a trainee in a truck like that.

I did stop off at the Lincoln shop last month, maybe six weeks ago to address the misfire issue and they told me I had a slight manifold leak and something to do with the turbo (sensor or the like) needed to be repaired. This was on a Sunday and I had a Monday morning delivery in town and I was suppose to go back to the shop when empty.

They told me it wasn't a big issue, but the truck would have to go to Detroit and it would take a day or two to get it fixed. Well, you can just about guess what I thought about that idea. Not to mention the fact that my Mileage has been steadily increasing as the sputtering has been increasing.

My assumption is that too much air is being allowed into the system and affecting the emissions system. Basically running like it should before all the emission crap was bolted onto it. What ever the cause, I'm getting great fuel mileage, 7-7.2mpg and I've never gotten anything close to that in this truck. As a matter of fact, it had deteriorated to the 6mpg range in the not too distant past. Every time I put it in the shop I would let the diesel doc know and it would improve short term, but it eventually went to pot again.

Now I'm getting great fuel mileage, have more horse power than I've ever had and all I have to do is put up with an occasional puff of smoke and a bad case of the hiccups.

So I didn't go back to the shop.