Good Night From II

At the Petro in Rochelle, IL. It's out in the middle of nowhere, but it sure gets busy.

I was rocked to sleep last night by the wind, with the reefer next to me singing me a lullaby. At least the driver had it on continuous run, so it was easy to ignore.

Live load at noon an hour from here, and taking it to North Carolina for a live unload Sunday night. Hopefully, I can get parked by 1 AM (midnight unload) for a 34, then grab another load to take to Texas.

 

OR LEAVE! As in hold you against your will? I don't think so.
However, I'm sure someone at the DC told you this and counted on you to comply. I would have nodded my head and if I wanted to would have bobtailed out.

 

I'm not going to risk a service failure over something so trivial.

 

p/u load in mira loma oging to hermiston or for sunday del. no appt time yet, but dl said i have untill 1400. hopefully weather not toooo bad. got the load of batteries off in moreno valley pretty quick. wish all dc's were that fast lol

 

Understood. Just to be clear, I don't think you're doing anything wrong.
I was pointing out that much like hospitals we give customers FAR too much power when in reality they have almost none.

 

I can't disagree with your last statement strongly enough. When I first started in sales 30 years ago an old and wise salesman told me something that stuck with me, "Customers are hard to get and easy to lose". In other words, don't screw it up after you get the customer. One bad production run from the factory and your years of effort are down the drain.

If service failures start stacking up for Swift at a customer, do you think they are going to give us a shot the next time their contract comes up? Typically large customers like this will award contracts for a period of 1-3 years. There is compliance requirements in the contract. The contract can be terminated early if compliance reaches a certain point, and service failures ARE charged to the company.

It's a misnomer to think that customers don't have any control. Sure, once you've got the freight on your truck, then you are in control of that load. But getting the opportunity to get that load on your truck means that a salesperson somewhere won the bid and has the trust of the customer, and that other drivers before you have done their job to the customer's satisfaction. Don't screw it up for everyone else by ringing up service failures because "the trucker is in control".

 

When I brought my truck in to the shop this morning I was told it would probably be Monday because there were 5 trucks in front of me.
They got it fixed before closing time today.
It was a hole in the bunk heater core, after all. They had to order one, but it was here less than an hour later.
I'm really glad I came here instead of stopping in Denver or Mira Loma.

 

flying j lodi ca. stopped here for fuel. have hour and ten min left on 14. was gonna try and get to pilot in dunnigan but its 60 miles from here and have to get thru sacramento traffic. so decided to stop here.

 

Peelot in Daleville, IN. Fun morning with 35mph crosswinds and mt trailer. Now try and find a better route than what swift wants to send me to Nogales. Across 70 to KC and then down to Wichita and over US54. Think that I might just go 70-44-40 and then down sw out of Amarillo to 10

 

Gotta love it when you make a tight right turn onto a country road, cross the RR tracks, and THEN there's the sign that says "No trucks over 55 feet". Fortunately there were no cops around, since there was no way in heck that I was going to be able to back up around that turn.

600 miles to my next fuel stop, then an hour to my unload on Sunday.