My Day By Day Experience At Eastern Freightways Flatbed Division

Day 35

Start the day off at 80* and humid. Arrived at the receiver in Valley Cottage, NY at 7:07. Made really good time down 95s. Park off to the side of the road and go check in. They said it will be a little while because they like to get their trucks loaded and sent out first, which is typical for most of these smaller receivers. Their was 1 driver in front of me with a load of shingles. I do the ole' Fold the tarps on top of the load trick. (I actually think it is easier to fold them this way.) I'm already drenched from the extreme humidity but have a goal to get home at a decent time. My AC in the truck has been cranking and it was ice cold.

I've learned that sometimes you may do all that you can but others tend to have different plans. I finally get into the tight unloading area 2 hours later. As the forklift driver is casually eating a donutt and drinking coffee he takes my paperwork and heads inside. 15 minutes later he appears and slowly begins to unload. An hour later I am unloaded. Yea of course today is the day I get a slow receiver.. LOL

I get headed out of there and head down 87s to 95s. #### GW Bridge. They're working on the exit 7s7n which brings you up and around to the entrance of the GW. I've been through there a few times and it is usually a cluster. Today was no different minus it moved a little quicker. I still wonder to this day why they have trucks coming up the on ramp do an extreme merge to the left side across traffic. This is what I believe creates the jam. I really need to study the NYC,NJ interstate system to find better routes.

Hammered down to Avenel and only 1 of our trailers was loaded.. (please be mine, Please) i'm saying to myself. I go inside and it's not but they are just strapping mine and it was ready in 10 minutes. Do a quick fix of the tarping job and head for home. Hit another jam on the GW heading North about a 30 minute delay but once I hit the CT line it was smooth sailing until the 495n RT 3 interchange. Stop and go. I had 11 minutes to spare on my clock. I'm watching my clock and GPS eta the whole time. Lost 12 minutes in that area. I'm now down a minute. I make up 2 minutes through Nashua then the toll booth merges I end up breaking even. I'll leave some stuff out here but lets just say I safely made it to my terminal with 0 time left.

Made it home in time to change and play in my old teams softball game. 1st hit of the year for me and I was about 5 feet short of putting it over. Now I can retire. LOL

Heading out Thursday to Boston (ehhh) for a delivery Enjoy you 4th everyone!!

 

Yea most of our loads are easy enough to do on the load. I may try timing it compared to pulling them off and doing it on the ground.

 

Thanks @SOAthor I'm glad you are enjoying it. Yes I am growing fond of this truck definitely an upgrade from the 2003. HaHa.

We do a lot of sheet rock loads and those companies will, well most of the time pre-load and tarp the load in an enclosed building to keep the sheet rock free from rain. A couple of them will also do live loads, which by the way takes forever. So when we do a drop and hook we will drop and empty and find our pre-loaded trailer and fix the tarp job and be on our way. The tarps have attached bungees on them and the loads are strapped with the ones attached to the trailer.

Once your clock starts for the day you are given 11 hours to drive within a 14 hour time period. Unfortunately nothing stops the 14 hour clock from ticking down. If you had an unload that took 1 hour and a live load that took 3 hours you now have 10 hours of available drive time. Your 14 hour clock has now taken over and once that runs out you can no longer drive until you have taken a 10 hour reset(break) It seems a little confusing at first but once you experience it it makes a lot more sense.

I have learned a lot from this forum. We've all got to learn somewhere at some point so ask away.

 

I've been in management most of my life and that tends to carry over. My latest career involved a lot of learning Lean. ---> Lean Six Sigma is a methodology that relies on a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation. It combines lean manufacturing/lean enterprise and Six Sigma to eliminate the eight kinds of waste

In a very simplistic way It's kinda like micromanaging seconds. When we used to design new production lines every step was evaluated and wasted steps were eliminated or improved upon to shorten the time. I could spend hours and bore you all explaining each part of the lean culture but..... Nah

So throughout my day I look at each step or action I take as I'm doing it and looking for ways to eliminate seconds of any action that I can. Variables arise in any industry but the objective is to lessen the impact of such variables or eliminate them before they happen.

Alright enough with that. It was hot today and I'm beat.