Day by day adventures of a new solo OTR driver

They got me home yesterday (Saturday), they had me drop the relay in Wilson and bobtail the 90 miles home as abn75 said they might. I did have to call in and ask if I was OK to go home, the head DBL I talked do was a little surprised about my taking 5 days off, but when I explained I had been out for 5 weeks and ok'd it with my DBL he said that was fair enough. Just the usual Schneider deal where everyone is on a different page... lol. No problem though, they got me back, and I'm happily enjoying my break! See ya'll in a few days!

 

Off to a rough freakin start today... Always is coming off my home time. Got a preassignment last night, they had already picked out an empty for me to go pick up. Get there this morning and of course the empty isn't there. I'm going to start calling Schneider every time they try to send me somewhere to pick up an empty trailer. I'm sick of wasting hours driving around looking for ghost trailers.

I sent in the exception and got sent to the Greensboro drop yard which had several empty trailers. Picked one up and headed to my first stop in Siler City, NC. Just a small load there, took them all of 30 minutes to load up and I was in and out within an hour.

Next I headed to Winston-Salem for part two, took a lot longer here. They wouldn't allow drivers to wait in the truck while they were loading so I had to shut it off and wait inside. When I came back out my Qualcomm screen was blank, no lights/buttons/etc. worked either. Great. Figured maybe it just went into sleep mode, so I tried my usual tricks to get it to wake up, but of course nothing. Called in and SEM set up a work order for me and told me to take it through an OC. There wasn't really an OC on the route, so I called in to the DBLs and got brought into Charlotte. Filled out a paper log the best I could and headed for Charlotte. Took about 2 hours to get the issue sorted out here, ended up being the black box that is installed in the side box was malfunctioning.

Definitely gonna be late on this load, its supposed to be there by tomorrow. But the schedule was tight to begin with so the delays with the trailer search and Qualcomm going out set me back. I just messaged support shift to resend my workflow since its not showing up on the Qualcomm at all.

No point in moving any further tonight, so I'll spend the night in Charlotte and get an early start tomorrow assuming my workflow actually shows up.

Not a great way to start off this run, but hey, that's how it goes. Hopefully everything will be back to normal by tomorrow and I'll be able to get in a good days worth of driving.