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

Spent most of the morning talking trucks and BSing with chickinwing at the Atlanta OC, glad we finally got to meet. Then picked up my load about 3 miles away from the OC, and headed off for Texas. I saw a trooper on the end of an on-ramp just as I crossed into Alabama. I thought to myself "LOL this is gonna be good watching one of these 4 wheelers blasting by me at 80MPH get busted".

So I continue a little ways and a flash catches my eye in my mirror and I look over and then he straddles the lanes to let me know its ME he is after.

GOD **** IT WHAT THE **** NOW.

So I hit the 4 ways and start slowing down and pull over off to the side of the next ramp and he comes up and tells me he is going to do a level 2 inspection on me. THANKS, SIR, I'VE ALWAYS WANTED ONE!

So he looks at my bills and CDL and medical card (oddly enough not logs), low air buzzer, has me work all the lights so he can check them, and kicks the tires and looks at the tread and 25 minutes later has me sign the paperwork and I passed no problems. Which, I of course knew I would, since chickinwing saw me do a thorough 30 minute pretrip before I drove off today. Right CW? RIGHT?

Anyway, lol, the trooper was a cool guy, asked me how long I had been driving for and said I was the youngest truck driver he had done an inspection on, and said he was going to give me a hard time for that, but that people give HIM a hard time for being a younger guy in law enforcement and decided not to. Had a good laugh over that. I see a lot of people on here give anyone in law enforcement a hard time, but I honestly have a ton of respect for these guys and the majority of them are out there to just do a good job and keep people safe. Sure there are plenty of bad ones, but there are plenty of terrible truck drivers out there too, you see it every day.

Taking my 30 in southern Alabama now, then I'm going to try out hit Louisiana tonight.

 

Exactly. The first time he came up to my door he was friendly but obviously very cautious. I made sure not to jerk around at all and told him when I was reaching down by my seat to grab my med card out of my clipboard I keep my bills and stuff in. After he checked over my truck and the trailer and did the paperwork and came back up the second time he was much more relaxed and had a quick chat and then was on his way. I have a feeling if I treated him like **** and dug around everywhere making him uncomfortable, he could have easily bumped that inspection up another notch.

Anyway, long but productive day today. I was planning to originally take 3 days to run this load but then I remembered how badly SNI screwed me over with all that sitting at the OC and that tomorrow was Monday. So getting this load delivered tomorrow is the difference between a -$200 paycheck and a $1250 paycheck. So that meant running a bit harder, in a new area far from my comfort zone, which I don't like lol. I was going to stop at a Pilot near Baton Rogue but after stopping at the first truck stop I had in my list of planned places to start checking, it was obvious parking anywhere near that area was going to be impossible to find, so I continued on for a bit and got lucky with a rest area a ways on down the interstate. Good news is, much closer to the destination than originally planned, so I'll have plenty of time to deliver and either park or head towards my next pickup, which its time to hit the load board and start searching for now, then get some sleep.