Your weight and fortune here

Got home tonight. I wasn't quite sure I would.

My pickup yesterday was scheduled for late last night. By the time I found a safe place to park it was past midnight. So it was 10:30 this morning before I got started north.

When you're looking for a place to park in the middle of the night, truck stops are iffy. My company had a terminal in this city, so I spent the night there. They did have--one--space when I got there. What they didn't have was a scale. So the first stop I made this morning was at a truck stop, to weigh the load I picked up last night.

Uh-oh.

I've talked about the weight rules before This time I had no problem with gross weight. They hadn't overloaded me. But they had loaded most of their product in the nose of the trailer. Even with the fuel tanks 3/4 empty, I couldn't get enough weight off the drive wheels to pass a DOT scale with confidence. On a Freightliner Century Class--one of the lightest full-size semi-tractors out there.

Mind you, I was something like a hundred miles from the next DOT scale. By the time I got there, I would probably have burned off enough fuel to be legal. But I was supposed to drop this load off at my home terminal before I went home. And if I could barely get a Century Class to pass a weight test with near-empty tanks, how would the next guy get it across a state line?*

So I called my office. After some thought they said come on home. They knew who would be taking the load the rest of the way. They'd told him there was a problem. He'd said he'd handle it.

O-kayyy.

So I started north. Not fueling, lest I make myself irreversibly illegal.

There are three weigh stations on the Interstates between Jacksonville, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. The first two let me pass. But the third was too far ahead. And you can only trust the fuel gauges so far. After dithering for nearly a hundred miles, I finally stop and fueled up. Twenty whole gallons. More than that I was afraid to buy.

Then I drove on, wondering if I'd been too generous at the pumps. The last weigh station was about thirty miles ahead. This gave me entirely too much time to figure the weights and fuel-burn rates in my head, and get a different answer every time. (You may have deduced before now that I'm a second-guessing kind of guy.) But at last I saw it ahead of me. I held my speed, thinking light thoughts. Closer. Closer.

And the little box on the windshield beeped cheerfully and the green light blinked. I yet live.**

An hour or so later I pulled into the terminal and dropped the trailer. I'm only a day late for my home time. Oh, well. It could have been worse.
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*You've seen those weigh stations. And we know where they are--they're marked on the trucker editions of most road atlases. But the one place you can almost guarantee you'll find one is on an Interstate close to a welcome center...

**Many states have installed equipment in the road near their weigh stations that will weigh the truck as it approaches the station. You can subscribe to a service that lets you mount a transponder in your truck to talk to that equipment. If your truck is light enough, you'll get a signal that basically says, "You aren't the overweight truck we're looking for. You can go about your business. Move along."
If the weight is at all marginal you'll be signaled to pull into the station, where they'll check you out with the more accurate scales there.