Virtue is its own punishment

I'm adjusting to the concept of warmth again.

This is the truck without a bunk heater. And for two nights running, I didn't have to get up in the wee hours to start the truck so I could stop shivering and go back to sleep. Pleasant, but disconcerting.

This comes under the heading of counting my blessings. I might be ranting a bit otherwise.

I started driving at 9:00 this morning. This was a carefully considered decision. Any later and I might not be on time to deliver the load I picked up yesterday. Any earlier and I might not be able to deliver the load they assigned me for today. I was supposed to deliver that second load at 10:00 pm. By starting at 9:00 am, I could get there with an hour to get unloaded and find a parking space before I was in trouble with the law. Not enough, but better than nothing.

Yes, I'm going somewhere with this...

I got to my first delivery point before noon. A couple of hours later the forklifts stopped bouncing the trailer around and I got my paperwork. Whereupon I got the information for the next load.

They'd changed the delivery time. I had to have it there at 11:00 pm. Which, of course, meant that once they'd unloaded me, I'd be in violation of federal law from the moment the truck moved away from the dock door.

A mildly frantic phone call reassured me. It turned out that 11:00 pm was the LATEST time I could deliver it. Usually, they'll give you a “window” if that's true—2:00 to 11:00, for instance. But I wasn't going to argue. If they didn't mind an early delivery, I didn't mind having time to park and sleep. So I did my paperwork for the new job and drove the two or three miles to the shipper.

They didn't have my load ready, of course. So I sat around for an hour or so, after having dropped my empty in the back lot. At length they had finished shuffling things around in the trailer I was supposed to pick up.* So I hooked up, and scaled it (they have their own scale, which is handy), and did my paperwork.

In the process, I noticed that one of the tires on the trailer was messed up.

As in, it might blow out anytime.

So I sent a message to the Breakdown Department. After all, I had seven hours to go less than two hundred miles. Getting a tire replaced? No problem, right?

Two hours later I got a message back, asking me a quick procedural question. I answered it. And told my dispatcher I might be in trouble.

Two hours after that I called. On the phone. Waited about thirty minutes on hold. And learned that the fellow I'd sent the message to had gone home, and nobody else knew to follow up. The guy on the phone listened to my story, and said he'd call a service truck and send it my way. It would be there in about an hour, he said.

By this time I had exactly enough time to get the load to the customer if I started driving right now. Which, of course, I couldn't do—I had gone on record saying I had a trailer that wasn't safe. Not a good career move, driving happily through the night with a trailer you've SAID that you KNEW was potentially dangerous. So I called my dispatcher and told her I couldn't deliver the load before morning. She checked with the Customer Service people and said we weren't in trouble this time.

They were good sports about it. At least I'd warned them.

Some time into this, it occurred to me that if I'd just kept my mouth shut, I could have spent a (more or less) pleasant afternoon driving through the countryside, dropped this trailer at the customer, picked up another trailer, and gotten my next load. And that potentially dangerous tire would have been the next guy's problem.

And it occurred to me that a lot of drivers would have done precisely that.

I wonder if anybody considers me a troublemaker. Hope not.

No matter, tonight. I'll get some sleep, get up early in the morning and deliver this load as soon as I can. That's all I can do.

And at least it's warm.

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*At least, I presume that's what they were doing. This place has a rep for loading their trailers as heavy as they can get away with. Sometimes they get carried away, and have to take stuff out and redo it...