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

Well I'll be finishing up the last of the "rinse and repeat" runs I've been doing today... it was fun trying it for a little over a week and I was home a LOT but it just doesn't pay well enough to continue doing it. Had a pretty large deadhead in between the loads that allowed me to run through home, but the deadhead just doesn't make it pay well enough. Got my eye on a new set of loads that I'm hoping I can string together on a regular basis,but I'm watching the load board to make sure they actually show up with the expected pickup windows before I start assigning the first load.

 

Well I think my mistake was veering off the path from my usual customers... lol. Grabbed this load yesterday that headed out of VA down to GA, not far at all from my previous delivery in NC. Ran all through the storms last night and got to the pickup, dropped the nice TA147 trailer I took in and... yep rolled out of there with a TA942. Beat to crap. DVIR'd by the previous driver as "NO DEFECTS"... LOL yeah right. Go to slide the tandems to a normal position (he didn't even take the time to lock them back in as the customer required, the handle was locked outwards when I checked it before coupling) and slide them just fine, but the pins won't lock. Screw around with it for 20 minutes and get it to where I'm comfortable enough to go down the road with it. Checked it again this morning during my pretrip and all but one of the pins had retracted to a position where I just wasn't comfortable going any further with it. Looks like something in the mechanism that extends/retracts the pins is worn out and settles out after bouncing down the road in a position where I'm not about to take it all the way down to GA in. I could redneck repair it to make it just fine but I don't think the DOT man would be too happy with my vicegrips. After spending an hour and a half back and fourth with SEM I brought it a mile up the road to a Petro shop that wouldn't touch it. They can't find me anything else reasonable to get it repaired so I'm trying to get support shift to let me relay it in the Wilson yard so I can just go find some other loads. Sucks, because this run and the next load I had planned were really good loads. But, I'm sure as hell not going to spend 2 days waiting to get SNI's equipment fixed, especially when as an IC I don't get paid breakdown pay. I wonder if SNI will be willing to pay me the 130 or so miles of the trip I did.