Technical difficulties

My friends have seen a fair bit of me this past week.

I didn't expect to spend Labor Day weekend at home. I was definitely scheduled to be on the truck. And I started that way. Really.

My first run was an extremely short one. I suspect it was mainly meant to get me an empty trailer for the next load. I moseyed over to the customer, parked the rig, got my instructions from the customer, and backed the trailer into the appropriate dock.

I had to stop three times. To take the truck out of gear and race the engine for three or four minutes.

I've discussed before how the brakes work on a tractor-trailer. And how they don't work if you don't have enough compressed air. And how you can't move the truck if the air pressure gets low enough. When the diesel has to be turning at highway speeds just to keep the air tanks full, it's time to get somebody to look at it.

I gave my dispatcher the bad news and headed for the terminal. There the mechanics looked it over for a while, fixed a few leaks—and then decided the leaks were just hiding the problem. The tractor was going to need a new air compressor.

This is not a minor repair.

Joy.

And then they sprang the zinger on me.

Modern trucks (and this was almost as modern a truck as I've been allowed to drive) labor under the burden of some pretty fancy anti-pollution gear. Some of the very newest ones require you to add nasty chemicals to the exhaust system every so often. This one wasn't that new. But it did have an expensive and annoying feature from the last round of environmental correctness.

One of the still-earlier pollution-control “improvements” involved running exhaust gas into the engine again, to reduce some emission or other. One of the “minor” side effects of this is to increase the amount of soot generated by the engine. So, having caused a problem, the government cheerfully made it the engine manufacturers' problem to fix it. The most common “solution” (like most “solutions,” it creates a bunch of problems itself) is a “Diesel Particulate Filter,” that traps the soot before it gets out the exhaust pipe. A filter that starts clogging up after a while.

To deal with the “clogging up” part of the problem, they add an “afterburner” of sorts, to burn up the soot and clean the filter every so often. But eventually you have to take the filter off the truck and either clean it properly or replace it.

The truck I was driving was way overdue for a filter checkup.

And the company's shop didn't have the equipment to do it.

Not their fault. I gather the manufacturers and their dealerships are almost the only places that do. But it meant that the air compressor was not the biggest problem. One way or another, my truck was going to the dealer.

On the second day of my work week.

It was still there when the next driver was due to take over.

I'm lucky. As I've mentioned a few times before, I'm on a program that includes a sort of weekly “retainer.” An ordinary over-the-road driver in my position wouldn't have gotten paid for this week at all (well, a few bucks for the local run, but that's all...). It did happen to me a couple of years ago, when I was still OTR myself—and I was badly worried about my next rent check. Not this time.

Instead, I was able to attend an event I'd already written off, and meet some people I hadn't seen in years.

What I didn't do was get this entry onto the blog before I started out. Thus the post-dated entry.

I won't say it won't happen again. But I am embarrassed.