Adventures in scheduling

I'm sitting in my cab looking into the autumn woods. Found another place where I dare park nose-first, facing away from the crowd. It isn't as purely scenic as the one I mentioned elsewhere, but it's still a nice change.

The colors are a bit subdued where I am. Whether it's the colors themselves or the gray-sky-filtered light I'm seeing them by, the effect is a bit like a pastel drawing. Even the remaining greens are quiet.

Probably a good thing. It's relaxing to look at. And I could use a little relaxing.

The last two days haven't been all that relaxing. Not terribly profitable, either. Portioning out the blame for it could be complicated, and it would come firmly under the "spilled milk" heading, so I won't bore you with finger-pointing. Especially since one finger would be pointed back at me. But it might amuse you to see how much fun you can have with the hours-of-service thing I told you about some time back.*

Yesterday I told my dispatcher I would pick up a load in a certain place** at 1:00pm (Central time) and carry it to another place** about 550 miles away. At the time neither of us knew when the customer wanted it there.

Shortly thereafter I found a mechanical problem that might be extremely inconvenient down the road, if not positively unsafe. My company had a terminal nearby, so I let our mechanics look at the problem. It took longer than I thought to get everything straightened out, and I was late getting to the shipper. That might not have been too bad, but while the mechanical problem was being taken care of I finally found out when the load was due at the consignee: 7:00 am (Eastern time) the next day.

That sounds tough but not impossible, right? And it might well be, except for the rules we truckers must live by. If you haven't looked at the entry I referred to earlier, you might want to look at it now. The rest of this will make a bit more sense then.

***

Back already? Okay, I'll try to make this quick.

Consider a 7:00 am delivery 550 miles away. If you don't want to embarrass yourself too much, you aren't going to be casually optimistic about your average speed on a run that long. This one was mostly on Interstates, so you'd probably assume about 50mph.*** So it's going to take you somewhere around eleven hours.

That's all the driving you can legally do in a day. And you did have to get here to pick the load up, right? If you're like me, you had to finish up the previous one, too. So you don't have eleven hours left.

So you'll have to take a rest break. Ten hours worth--that's the rule. Which means you need to plan on twenty-one hours for the trip. And twenty-one hours before 7:00 am is 10:00 o'clock--9:00 am Central--the previous morning. Which is four hours BEFORE you were supposed to pick the shipment up--never mind how long it'll take them to load the stuff in your trailer.

Now, let me add one more bit of background. I accepted this assignment at about 9:00am Central. I was about 80 or 90 miles from the shipper at the time.

Do you see a problem here? I, unfortunately, didn't.

And it gets cuter. Let's pretend you prefer to drive at night. You got loaded first thing when you got up. And you're sure you can average better than 50 mph. So you're going to just drive straight through--nine to eleven hours of hard driving and you're there. Not a problem now, right?

Wrong. Remember the rule that says "fourteen hours after you start your day you can't drive any more?" Well, fourteen hours before 7:00 am is 9:00 pm the night before. This time the time zone change helps you--it's only 8:00 pm where you're picking up the load.

Which means you're only SEVEN hours late. The people in the warehouse only went home three hours before you got there.

***

So by the time I was assigned the load, NOBODY could get it there on time. Not legally, anyway.

Now, if somebody had noticed the zinger in time, we might could have salvaged the situation. Maybe arranged for a repower.**** (They tried, but it's not always easy to do on short notice.) Or at least given the customer plenty of warning. As it was, there was embarrassment and annoyance all around.

My dispatcher or my load planner should have caught this. Neither did. But then, my dispatcher has at least thirty other trucks to worry about--and that's on a SLOW day. And the load planner is working with a BUNCH of dispatchers. Who has time?

And it's my responsibility to do my job safely and legally--which means refusing jobs I CAN'T do safely and legally. So I end up being the backstop in this process. This time I didn't catch the problem either. And a good stressful time was had all around.

So here I am, sitting in my cab, looking into the woods and forgetting all my troubles for a while. Or I would be if I weren't busy writing about them.

Maybe I should stop writing now.

Ahhhhhhhh. Pretty...

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*See the entry for 08/07/2008: "TYTFG* #3: Nine to Five (or the equivalent thereof)"

**I'm not supposed to talk about where I am or what I'm doing. You'd be surprised at how many people make a living stealing stuff from trucks, and how many companies try to find clever new phrases to replace "Loose lips sink ships."

***Yeah, the speed limit's higher most places--but your truck has a governor on it, and several states still insist big trucks mustn't do over 55. And you ARE going to take restroom breaks, right? Please?
And we won't discuss how long it would take you on NON-interstates...

****Trading loads with another driver partway there--as described elsewhere. Where on a blog can you put a glossary?