THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE - DFO gets a truck and hops on Schneider's IC Choice Program

Pine trees never let you forget them, they are sure to leave plenty of sap behind on every vehicle you park even remotely near one, lol.

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Thanks man! Will keep that in mind. They sent me up to South Boston, VA to pick up an empty LOL. I mean its not TOO far, and I did get some pay since it was over 50 miles. Still, that sucked though. Hopefully I can work something out with that little towing company to park a trailer, forgot to call them this weekend...

Getting empties is like pulling teeth with Schneiden. When I dropped on Saturday, I told them "I'm going home to Chapel Hill, NC, I'm leaving out on Monday, can you update my location and the box planners so they'll find a trailer and add a task to my workflow". "Sure no problem" they tell me.

Sunday rolls around and I now have a dummy work assignment (arrive, update NAT, depart) at the Charlotte OC. WTF? Call in, speak to another person, explain I am at HOME in Chapel Hill, NOT THE CHARLOTTE OC, here is my address, he verifies my address has a customer code, he updates everything and says I'm good to go.

0530 rolls around - check workflow, still shows Charlotte dummy task. Send in macro for empty trailer.

0630 - still no empty, no change in assignment. Call support shift, finally get through, say the box planners are on it.

0700 - finally I get the empty task in VA.

At this point I was a little worried about making on time pickup, thankfully they had empties and I was in and out quick and got to the pickup 2 minutes after the "at" appointment time. No problems, trailers bouncing now so I should be on my way to Savannah soon.

 

Been an interesting start to the week but all told I can't complain.

I delivered my load from NC to Dollar Tree/General/whatever DC it is down there in Savannah and then went to my super secret parking spot and slept like a baby through the night. Got up in the morning, swept my trailer and drove down to the Home Depot DC for my pickup, get there and am told my load isn't ready. Great. So, they tell me to go ahead in and drop empty which I do, then am told I have to leave and call a phone number to see when its ready.

So, I go just outside the DC and park alongside the front of it with about 10 other bobtails and call and sit on hold for 30 minutes till I finally get through. My load? Oh its rescheduled for tomorrow. GREAT.

So, simultaneously hop on the load board and get on the phone with my IC rep and get that Home Depot load pulled. Screw that. She asks if I want my next preassignment pulled as well, but I managed to find a very very good paying load that was running up to NC near my next preassignment pickup from SC. Although the deadhead was 130 miles, the load was paying 2.90 a mile from SC to NC, so shoot, I'll take it. I tell her to keep the preassignment on me and just drop the HD load and we'll go from there. As I'm sitting on the phone the golf cart pulls up as they finally got fed up with the entire front of their entrance literally filled with bobtails. I ask if I can just come back in and get my empty trailer and go.

After sitting in line for 30 minutes as all the other bobtails were going back in too to get their trailers (what a cluster**** that was) I grab my trailer and headed towards a rest area a little ways up 95. After checking over the load once more making sure everything looked good, I try to book it. It spits out some error saying it can't work. Ok, on the phone again, explain the problem and we get that worked out real quick. Then I head on up to SC.

I was a little worried about this load, it was a little over 44000+ according to the load board and as we know my tractor isn't exactly light. But, I kinda did the math in my head and decided to give it a shot. I have 120 gallon tanks and I was between 3/4 and 1/2 full. So, I get to this massive paper mill here in SC and the Qualcomm just dumps me at this junction of about 15 other lanes going to God knows where. I end up at the wrong gate the first time, then the gate guard tells me how to get to the right gate (directions - take the first left, 18th right, align the stop sign with the north star, spin around in a circle, check time on sun dial and when it points west take a left turn) and I finally find it. Check in, get directions to my trailer, after a bit more confusion here and there finally have my load and head out. Of course they don't let you scale there, no scale within 70 miles, ask the gate guard and she tells me about one right next to the mill just down the road.

After taking a chance on finding this place I finally do, and its literally a tire shop with a single axle scale placed sideways in front of their bay doors that you have to wiggle yourself on to sideways to get lined up for it. LOL. Get weighed and I'm all good except over by quite a bit on the steers. I didn't want to block these bay doors for too long while I tried to figure out how to slide this new 5th wheel, so I got my ticket and headed north. Thankfully I still had about 2k headroom on gross but honestly I don't think I'll be pushing it any further than that.

I head off for NC, stop along the way in a nice open area where I could screw around with my 5th wheel. I found being able to dump my suspension makes it SO MUCH easier to slide the 5th wheel, because all I have to do is touch the ground with the landing gear, then dump the suspension and it takes all the pressure off the 5th wheel. After getting it where I wanted it and checking and double checking to make sure all the pins and locks were in place on this new 5th wheel I was satisfied and took off.

So, I'll make my delivery in the morning, then grab my next load headed down to Albany, GA. The truck did really well with the heavy load, the Cummins pulls really good and the 13 speed is a fricking godsend. Especially with those little hills where you can just bump it up from overdrive to direct without losing any momentum making a shift.

I was happy with how quickly I was able to work out the load issues with IC rep, no complaints there.

Does anyone know how the Charlotte OC's fuel prices are compared to the average truckstop in SC? I'd like to stop through the OC cause its right on my route, but if fuel is cheaper in SC I'll hold off.

I saw another load on the board headed from Albany GA up to SC, but I was too slow and didn't grab it earlier like I should have! ######!! Oh well, it is what it is.

 

Thanks man, will check them tomorrow on the way down.

As far as I know we wouldn't get paid any extra. We have a little more info than the Qualcomm shows on the load board, on most of them it lists the product type so you have somewhat of an idea of what you are picking up, and if it doesn't look right I could probably make a phone call to get some more information before booking the load. Also sometimes the remarks on the load board are filled out and have instructions, etc., on them and you can recognize who the customer is depending on the weight/area/remarks. Home Depot loads are extremely easy to identify this way. The customer names are not displayed until after we accept the load.

Good info, thanks for sharing!