B. J. and the Secretary

B. J. and I were picking up at the same location tonight. Our appointments were set for about four hours before their shipping department opened, so we had plenty of time to talk.

“Second time this week,” he said.

I stared thoughtfully at a tiny light in the sky. Evening star, obviously. Jupiter or Venus? “Waiting for somebody to show up, you mean? I hope you had somebody to talk to.”

“Oh, yeah. And she was a lot better lookin' than you. Long tall blonde. Skinnier than I usually go for, but we was just talking anyhow.”

If I were a woman I'd be miffed. As it was I was just mildly envious. “Anything interesting?”

“Just the usual. How's the freight, what're your bosses doin' to you, you know. She didn't show me pictures of her kid, but she let me pet her dog.”

“Friendly one, eh?”

“Oh, yeah. Noisy, though. And it's a pit bull, so it still keeps the riffraff away.”

“Friendly pit bull? Well, I've heard most of them are, if you don't train them the other way.”

“Yep.” He grinned. “Her bosses don't know that, though. The critter's a purebred, but her vet put 'mixed' on the papers so she could keep it on the truck. 'No aggressive breeds,' the rule says.”

I shook my head. Further comment seemed unnecessary.

“She was a little surprised I wasn't doing any better than I was,” he said. “Thought my dispatcher must not be doin' his job. Then she found out I was driving legal. That explained it, far as she was concerned.”

“She doctors her logs?” I tried to sound surprised. It wasn't easy.

“More than some, less than others,” he said. “If you drove one mile under the speed limit eleven hours a day, you could drive the miles she logs. She don't keep extra logbooks tucked away in corners, but she don't write her hours up 'til after she's done for the day, either. Sometimes for two or three.”

“Do you ever feel like a freak, talking to people at the truck stops, B. J.?”

“All the time. When I hired on with Truckbert* they put us through a week of orientation. And they spent half a day explainin' exactly how to fill out a logbook. And how the only good way to fill 'em out was honest and legal and above-board, and how they wouldn't stand for any fudging at all.

“Then I got on the truck with my trainer, and the first thing he showed me was how to fudge my logbook. Figured that was more important than if I could back into a dock. Said I'd figure that out, but if I couldn't take a load because I didn't have the hours, I wouldn't get enough miles to live on.”

“I never learned that.” I said blandly.

“Sure you didn't. To do him credit, he didn't teach me to out-and-out cheat. He wouldn't run more than the legal hours in a day. But he wouldn't log any hours he didn't have to, either. What he was doin' was getting as much driving in between restarts** as he could.

“So I did my logs the way he told me to. It was his truck, after all. And when I got back to the terminal, the safety guy looked 'em over and give me the evil eye. Said, 'You do know, don't you, that to get this many miles in this many hours you'd have to average better than sixty? Including two-lanes, side streets, and parking lots?' And I said, 'Yessir.'

“And then he looked at my trainer and asked him about some little details where I didn't have the carbon paper in the right place when I signed 'em.”

I grunted. “As always, should you or any of your I. M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions,” I quoted.

“You got it. And then the tape self-destructed. Good luck, Jim.” One of the reasons I like talking to B. J.-- he actually catches some of those obscure references I toss around.

“But you don't cheat yourself, now that you're on you own, right?”

“Pretty much, no. Might be why I'm always close to broke, I don't know. Got to admire Truckbert, though. They pretty much got their behinds covered, no matter what I do.”

“Mm-hmm. If you try to stretch things and you get caught, it's all your fault. They told you not to.”

“Yep. Even made me sign a paper saying they'd told me not to. And if my dispatcher gets ill with me for bein' honest, he does it on the phone. No paper trail.”

“Nice.”

“Ain't it? Anyway, the blonde I was talking to? She said she was on a dedicated run, making fair money. But the way her route's laid out, she can't make the miles they expect her to on the hours she's got. Looks good on paper, but you just can't drive that fast. Sixty-plus in the parking lots and through the red lights. So if she didn't doctor her logs she couldn't get the loads delivered. And her dispatchers and her load planners, they've got to know that. Makes you wonder.”

“Does it?” I still couldn't figure out if that star was Venus or Jupiter. Silly thing to be wondering about anyhow.

“Not really. But it makes me sound a little less cynical.”

About that time the shipping department opened, and we went back to work.
- - - - -
*Truckbert Logistics is not the real name of the company B. J. works for. But you figured that out already, didn't you?

**To oversimplify things a bit, the driving rules limit three things: the time you spend behind the wheel, the length of your total “workday,” and the number of hours you work in a “work week.” Once you've hit your limit on any of these, you have to shut down until you're legal again.
A “restart” involves shutting down for 34 hours. At the end of those 34 hours, your weekly “clock” is reset to zero.
If you're out for more than a couple of weeks, and you're getting enough work to make it worth the trip, you can be sure you'll have to do a restart at least once. But the less often you have to, the more driving you'll do...