Shippers take holidays? Who knew?

As small-town truck stops go, this isn't bad.

It's a "fuel and forget," but there's a fast food place (as many of them have) and a place to sit where you can plug in your laptop (as many of them don't). And the folks are friendly.

Just as well. I'm gonna be here a while.

After dropping off my last load, I sat for an hour or two, waiting for the next load's info. After all, it was a holiday weekend. No sense in nagging my dispatcher. This turned out to be a mistake. I got to the shipper 45 minutes past the end of my pickup window.

Embarrassing, but usually not a serious problem. This time, though...

The lumberyard was silent. Nothing moved. The parking lot was empty, except for one pickup, next to the office door. One vehicle right next to the office usually means a security guard. And sure enough, here he came. "They hung on 'til quittin' time," he said. "Couldn't make the guys work over on New Year's Eve, though, could they?"

Suppose not. So when would they be opening tomorrow?

"Tomorrow? It's a holiday weekend. They'll be opening back up Tuesday morning."

(In case you missed it, this is Friday night.)

Oh, well. At least I might get to church Sunday.

And I'll have some time to think.

Let nothing you dismay...

I knew I wouldn't be home for Christmas.

They offered to route me in, but I would've lost a day or two's pay. Last year I would have taken them up on it. But there isn't nearly as much reason to come home these days,* so I let it slide. Besides, they were having enough trouble getting people home who really needed to be.

So, on Christmas Eve I got up, had a hearty breakfast. I knew I had time for a hearty breakfast, since my next load could be picked up anytime in the next three or four days. And you never know when your next leisurely meal will be possible. so why not take the time?

Having enjoyed the food and the warmth, I trundled down the road to the next town and pulled into the appropriate factory.

It was closed for the holidays.

Now why did that surprise me?

No matter. This was a problem. You see, I wasn't going to be home for Christmas, but I was scheduled to be home sometime the day after. The irony of this aside, it really was important for me to get there. I've discussed the way this slip seat thing works before, so I'll just cover the relevant part now: If I don't get home on time, the next driver can't take the truck out on time. My extra time on the road cheats him out of his time on the road. Not acceptable, if I can avoid it.

So I gave my dispatcher the good news, and he set out to find me another load. No problem, right? After all, it was the holidays. And I doubt he had more than five or ten times the normal amount of trucks on his board. Piece of cake...

It only took him half a day. And I managed to get to the customer just in time to get loaded, get out, and get a safe and proper distance down the road** before I had to shut down for the night. That only left us with one problem for the morning: I couldn't take that load to its destination. It was going way past my home terminal, and not exactly in the right direction. So I took it to the nearest place where my dispatcher had a chance of finding someone else I could pass it on to.

On Christmas day. Right.

After some thought, my dispatcher asked me if I had any suggestions. I did a little math and said something like "Well, I can get it as far as Atlanta, if that's not too far out of route."

He said something like "On Christmas Day? If it gets where it's going on time, there is no such thing as 'out of route.' If you get it there sometime before midnight that's fine."

I said something like "Sounds good to me."

Then I ate.

I had been planning on that anyway. Due to one of those obscure hours things, I wasn't going to be able to drive for a couple of hours anyway. So I'd managed to borrow a company car to go to a restaurant. Then the guy in charge of the car said, "Where are you going? There won't be a restaurant open anywhere in town, you know. It's Christmas."

I felt so foolish.

Then he said, "You do know there's gonna be Christmas dinner here in an hour or so, don't you?"

What?

Turned out a driver who lived in the area was bringing dinner for any driver stranded at the terminal. And he'd be there before I could take the truck out again. So why was I looking for a Waffle House or something?

I really didn't have a good answer. So I gave him back the key and got out my Santa hat.*** Then I had some of the best turkey I've had in a good while, with fixin's to match. Thanked the kind folks, got in my truck, and started south.

And that's why I was home for Christmas after all. An hour or two of it, anyway.

The first white Christmas in Atlanta since the Nineteenth Century, I'm told.

I'll take it.

----

*Now that I don't have a wife waiting for me. That's just informational, in case there are any newcomers. We won't dwell on it...

**For reasons that take to long to explain, some loads have special rules--like how many miles you have to drive before you can stop.

**Long story. Short form: it was the only warm hat I could find when I was heading out the door this week. At least it was the right season for it...

Oh what fun it is..

I'll be brief this time.

Plenty of things happened out there this past week or so, but most of them were variations on the same thing.

Driving in a winter wonderland.

That being the case, I thought I'd just toss out a few passing impressions.

Driving northward into a Kentucky that looked a lot like it did in the last entry.
The truck made three separate attempts to wander off and explore the snowy fields, but all of them were fairly halfhearted.

The third time was the only one that really stimulated the heart rate. I was trundling carefully through the night, headed for a truck stop and a good night's sleep (oh, please...), when I noticed a pickup parked halfway on the shoulder and halfway on the road. It's driver seemed to be thinking about some Good Samaritan work for the big black Chrysler that had just swapped ends and backed down a six- or eight-foot ditch. When I tried to slip around them, the truck decided that ditch looked like a nice place to spend the night.

Fortunately, as I said, it wasn't too insistent. But it made me quite glad I was taking my time and looking for trouble. I actually had time to discuss the matter.

I was also glad the warehouse where I'd just dropped a loaded trailer didn't have an empty. Straightening out in time might have been more complicated if I'd been driving a tractor-trailer...

Cold-weather fashion
I'm from far enough southward that the ladies don't put quite as much effort into nice outfits that keep them from freezing. From Indiana northward they seem to think about it more. I kept seeing neat, well-matched outfits--usually a miniskirt-length coat, a reasonably modest skirt, and tights. Most often, all three items were black, though there were variations. Warm and flattering at once.

Not very trucking-related, but it passes the time...

Washington, D. C. in the wintertime
Two hours to cover thirty miles on the Beltway. And it was a long way from rush hour.

'nuff said.

Modern conveniences
Got to a customer with twenty-odd tons of household cleaning products, and parked in an out-of-the way place while I found out which dock I'd be backing up to. Got back to my truck, put it in gear,

and listened to the wheels spin.

I had to borrow a snow shovel and a bag of salt to get out of the parking space. Most embarrassing. The truck has an anti-skid traction control system--which had apparently quit just before I got here.

There's something to be said about a gadget, made to keep you from slipping on the ice, deciding it won't work in cold weather. But I won't say it. Ladies may be reading...

* * *

Then I came home, the week a blur behind me. Two days in a place where water would't freeze if I leave it outside. Perhaps it's just as well I go back out tomorrow. I'm getting spoiled down here...

Kentucky was kind of white this week...

a LITTLE tight...

When I was a very small boy, I picked cotton a few times. Occasionally I'd ride to the cotton gin (Forget your hayride—sink into a trailer full of fresh cotton sometime. Now THAT's cushy!) and watch it being sold, and vacuumed out of the trailer, and run through the gin and baled. It was noisy and strange and lots of fun.

Today I took my truck to a cotton gin in the middle of nowhere. There I backed into a dock and walked past a row of strange noisy machines looking for the office. In the office I got my bills of lading and returned to the truck, walking past those noisy things again on the way.

The gin machinery looks more or less the way it did when I was far younger. I wasn't expecting that. Granted the technology is nearly 200 years old now, but I was still a bit surprised. It really hasn't changed much at all in the last 50.

They wrap the bales in plastic now. In my youth they used a sort of cloth covering, so coarse you couldn't tell whether it was more like a tow sack* or a net. That seems to be the biggest change in the last generation or so.

I recognized it all. And I'd forgotten it until today.

Especially I'd forgotten the smell. Freshly-picked cotton has a pleasant smell. Kind of like a bakery, in some ways. But not quite.

Getting there was an adventure. I've discussed the joys of GPS forever. I may have mentioned that the customer directions can be almost as much fun. Sometimes this is because they don't know what they're talking about. Other times they don't know how to get it across.

Then there are the times when they forget I'm not coming in a car.

It never occurs to most people that a road looks very different when you're in a vehicle that's 80 feet long, 8 ½ feet wide, 13 ½ feet tall, and weighs anywhere from 15 to 40 tons. Sometimes this leads them to lead you under 12-foot overpasses, or around hairpin turns, or through peaceful residential neighborhoods with watchful police officers.

In this case, it led me up a two-lane county road in which each lane was EXACTLY the width of my tractor-trailer. As in, my wheels were touching the painted stripes on both sides of the truck. And there wasn't a shoulder to speak of

And that was on the straightaways. A truck takes up more of the road on a curve.

Then, just about the time I had gotten used to watching the mailboxes skim by in mute terror, and the cars and farm tractors trying to find enough shoulder to give me a wide berth, I saw the bridge.

Ordinary looking little thing. The interesting part was the sign that said “WEIGHT LIMIT: Tractor-trailers, 27 tons.”

Empty, I weigh between fifteen and twenty tons.** No problem. But when I came out, I was going to be closer to forty.

It bore thinking on.

Fortunately, the nice lady in the gin office knew a more sensible way out. She said she didn't even give the route I'd followed to cars—at certain times of the day you spend all your time stuck behind John Deere's.

So who had given it to us? I wondered. But since it obviously hadn't been her, I didn't ask.

I thanked her politely and went back to the truck. Walking slowly. Breathing in fresh cotton.
-
*Tow is a material made from what's left over after you've turned flax into linen. It's strong, rough, and scratchy. Nobody wants to wear the stuff, but it makes a pretty good material for heavy-duty bags. Old-fashioned potato sacks or feed bags, for instance...

**I mean, the tractor, the trailer, and I. Honest, that's what I mean...

I-I-I-I'm dre-e-e-ami-i-n-n-g of a whi-i-i-te--wait a minute.

And under the "scenic truck stops" heading, here's my Thanksgiving. Pennsylvania gives it a new spin.

I'd have prettier, but for some reason I didn't want to wave a camera around while driving over mountains on a two-lane road. I'm such a wimp...

Miami versa

A city bus is a bad thing to have on a crowded street. But an eighteen wheeler stuck behind a city bus is worse.

Another item for my list of Less Than Profound Morning Thoughts.

It turns out I really did find the right place last night. Delivered the load this morning as soon as I could legally get out of the truck. And now I am leaving, going out the way I came in. It's much more pleasant in daylight.

Miami is not a place I like to come. As a trucker, anyway.

No offense to those who live there. (I don't want Michael Weston hunting me up to defend his family's honor.) I'm sure I'd enjoy visiting. But this isn't a visit. And for someone from my company, at least, a trip to Miami is not a fun thing.

For one thing, it's a black hole. Freight goes in, but not a lot of freight comes out. The first time I took a load to Miami, it took the load planners two days to find something for me to haul back. And, as I have said several times, if a trucker isn't moving, he isn't making money.

Then there's parking

If you're on the tollway, it might or might not be bad. I've never come into Miami on the tollway. What I can tell you is that on I-95, there are no truck stops for the first 129 miles. No rest areas for the first hundred or so.

There IS one place to park, only about 90 miles up or so. But you can get nervous, sharing a parking lot with a scale house. What if they decide to start the morning with a surprise inspection, you fall asleep thinking...

Ah, memories...
After delivering that first load in Miami I spent hours looking for a truck stop. I finally found one far to the west. Hours later my dispatcher called to ask where I was.

And how I'd gotten there. That truck didn't have propellers, did it?

Seems his tracking software used a graphic display, on a scale that usually had no trouble showing him (for instance) the town nearest where I was parked. Not this time. On his screen, I was sitting in the middle of nowhere.

Surrounded by water.

The truck stop I'd found was thirty or forty miles west of Miami. On a tiny island in the middle of the Everglades.

This time--well, I talked about that yesterday. But that's in the past.

They had a load to get me out of Florida when I came in. It's waiting for me to pick up in the morning. And it's less than ten miles from the first batch of truck stops on I-95.

I will sleep soundly tonight.

Long day

Looks like a warm night. I wasn't expecting that.

I should have, I suppose. Yes, it's November. But it's also Florida. Miami, no less. And how long have I been kvetching about the cold?

(“Kvetching?” Now there's a proper Southern word. You've been in the city too long, boy...)

(Well, “complaining” quite cover it—it's more attitude than speeches. And the other common word for it (these days) isn't usable in polite company. Even my wife would have looked at me funny. And she loved dogs.)

(Cut it out, you two. These folks aren't here for a language lesson.)

Don't mind me—or myself. We talk to each other like that all the time. And about half the time it has nothing to do with what I'm thinking about.

Like right now. I'm not complaining about the weather. It's kind of nice. It's the rest of the day that has me in a little bit of a mood.

When I started out this morning, I planned to stop a little after sundown. Up in the wee hours of morning, another quick 200 miles, and then see what my employers had for me to do the rest of the weekend. Nice and simple.

My first hint
that that wasn't gonna happen showed up a little ways north of the Florida border. That was when I finally figured out that “Florida State Route 91” was “Florida's Turnpike.”

I've been spoiled, when it comes to toll roads. My company's good about paying tolls. Every truck I drive has little plastic boxes glued all over the windshield, all ready and eager to talk to tollbooths for me. There's New York's EZ-Pass (which also works in a bunch of other states). And here's Oklahoma's PikePass. And Florida's SunPass, right over--.

Over where?

Oops.

MOST of the trucks I've driven had a SunPass box glued on the windshield. This is one of the exceptions.

Until tonight, I hadn't realized just how much the company was paying when they sent me down a toll road. There goes my pocket money for the week. Granted, they'll reimburse me. Granted again, they actually did it tonight—my dispatcher advanced the money and put it on my fuel card. But I can't get it until the next time I fuel.*

No great hardship. But it led to another odd thing.

Fine print
As I said, I'd planned to stop fairly early. Just as it was getting dark, was the original plan. Which, given where I was, meant spending the night at one of the service plazas on the turnpike. Again, no big deal—I've done that before. But this time, I had already paid cash at the first tollbooth and taken a “we'll skin you when you get off” ticket at the second. When I pulled into the service plaza, I decided to take a look at that ticket.

It included a table of tolls, organized by vehicle size and which exit you cashed out at. That was (as I said above) enlightening enough. But then I looked at the fine print. Especially the part that said that a lost or expired ticket would result in the maximum charge being levied.

Translation (I think): If I stayed on the toll road more than twelve hours, they'd charge me as if I'd gone the whole length of the turnpike. An extra hundred and thirty miles or so.

A legal rest break is ten hours. Doesn't leave a lot of leeway.

Now I don't know for sure how they interpret that little zinger. Could be there are exceptions that would allow breaks. In fact, I think there must be. Enough of us do it, after all. And it might be something that gets taken care of automatically—if you're using a SunPass.

Better safe than sorry, I decided. So I didn't stop at a service plaza for the night. And I'll talk tomorrow about truck stops on I-95. To make a long story short, the place where I got off the Turnpike and onto I-95 was about 50 miles south of the last parking place on the Interstate.

So I kept going. All the way to the customer

Walking. It's not just for exercise anymore.
I've talked about GPS and truckers before. I've heard enough truck-stop gossip to believe my opinion is not unusual, even among those who bought their own. But my route came in from the opposite side of the city from where my directions assumed I would be. Which meant the directions the company had given me were pretty much useless.

So I followed my GPS. With GREAT caution.

About 1/4 mile from the customer, I got too nervous. I'm still not quite sure why. No matter—I was. So I parked, got out, and walked toward where the machine said to turn.

Nerves are sometimes useful. If I'd followed my GPS, I would have ended up driving in circles through the parking lots of a commuter rail station. With a 53-foot trailer. But I could see a building right where the gadget wanted me to go. All I'd have to do was shift into 18-wheel drive, barrel through that fence, and cross two hundred yards of freshly bulldozed earth.

It took me another hour, on foot, to find the actual way into the customer's parking lot—and then go back and get the truck. But I made it. With zero time to spare in driving hours OR on-duty hours.

So why would I complain about the night being comfortably warm? No reason. Better to just sleep.

And I will. So there. G'nite.
-----
*Well, I could. In theory. My fuel card can double as a Major Credit Card, so I could hit an ATM. But the typical truck stop ATM charges a transaction fee. And when the amount on the card is Just Enough...

Give me LOTS of room...

It was raining this morning. Temperatures in the mid-40's. Wandering across large parking lots, in search of a bathroom, under an umbrella that was entirely too small.

But I did get awake and washed and ready to drive, eventually. Shortly afterward I was driving city streets south of Memphis, on my way to a customer that wasn't reachable by Interstate.

I don't like driving city streets. Today was an excellent, if low key, example of why.

Several blocks ahead I saw a traffic light go yellow, then red. Plenty of time. I took my foot off the accelerator, moved it to the brake pedal, and pressed gently. The truck began to slow as I felt the brakes catch.

And release.

And catch.

And release.

Less than 30 mph. Gentle braking. And still the trailer wheels were locking up on the barely-wet paving, forcing the ABS* to intervene.

It's not the first time I've had traction problems at a red light. At least twice I've ended six or eight feet into an intersection, breathing a small prayer of gratitude that nobody was coming across. A few other times I wondered if I was going to stop before I reached that tiny bumper ahead. And once I looked back and saw the back end of my trailer drifting into the next lane.**

But those times involved slush, or really heavy rain, sometimes with a nice downhill slope to make things more interesting. This time the pavement was barely wet! Granted, the trailer was empty, so the back wheels had almost no weight on them, but still.

I hate to draw a moral, but this actually scared me a tiny bit. Having a hundred yards of no traffic in front of me was a great comfort today. I'd really like that to be a routine thing.

I don't suppose you've got some space you could loan me? Or whoever's in that tractor-trailer behind you?

----

*Antiskid Braking System, of course. Just letting you know it doesn't mean something different when we way it...

**It didn't quite get there, thank goodness. Traffic started moving ahead of me again, and I could let off the brakes and pull the trailer straight in time. Scary, though...

something old

Found an old post that I hadn't posted. And I posted it. Just thought you'd want to know...

Yet more odds...

At a Kentucky rest stop, I found a vending machine that took credit cards.

Time passes.

*

Was passed by a car pulling a tiny little camping trailer. On the back of it, a brand name or a dealership, I'm not sure which. What I caught was the motto beneath it.

I go where I'm towed to.

When you've been driving for six hours, you are easily amused.

If you don't like the weather...

I really need to watch my dashboard more.

When I got up this morning in Kentucky, it was about 50 degrees outside. An hour later, the OAT* gauge read about 45. Granted I was going north, but that seemed a little extreme.

Two hours later, I looked down again. The screen said I should watch out for ice.

Blue sky, bright sun, dry roads. Not a problem. But when did the temp get down to 34 or less? Don't know. But it was dipping below 32 as I looked at it.

Now it's bouncing around between 30 and 25. Indiana has discovered winter.

I might have to change out of my sandals.

-----
*OAT: Outside Air Temperature. Mostly an airplane-pilot term, but hey...

Quick distractions

Crossing Louisiana on I-10, toward a grand bank of clouds.

And a rainbow.

Huge thing, stretching from horizon to horizon. Part of it arcing across the clear blue sky, where you can see it properly.

Other people's money?

Pulled up to the fuel pumps this afternoon. Pulled out the company fuel card and started the ritual. The pump told me to see the cashier. So I did. Gave her my card and she ran it through. Then she asked me how much I wanted to put on it.

That hasn't happened before.

But hey, if there wasn't something odd I wouldn't have had to come in. So...

”$400, I guess,” I said. “It won't take that.”

She bustled around the register, while I--

Looked at the card.

It wasn't the fleet fuel card.

It was my bank card.

My bank just got assimilated (resistance is futile—STOP THAT!), and the new management had to change everything. Including, of course, a new bank card.

Which I had in my wallet for the first time today.

It didn't look anything like MY card. Granted, it didn't look like my fleet card, either. But it did NOT-look like my bank card.

Which was almost enough to make me buy three or four hundred dollars worth of diesel fuel out of my own pocket. The company wouldn't have minded, I suspect, but...

I hurriedly explained matters to the lady, and she was nice enough to cancel the transaction, and the company ended up footing the bill. But it could have been embarrassing.

Not to mention expensive.

Odds and ends, redux. (No pun intended, see below...)

Beyond blind spots
Pulled out into an intersection this morning, and nearly got t-boned.

I don't understand it. I LOOKED to my right. How did I miss a RED pickup?!

Puzzling and scary...

The hazards aren't all obvious
Sad sight in a rest area. As I pulled into a parking space and shut down, I looked to my left. And in the empty space beside me I saw a pair of pants and a pair of skivvies.

Lying in the parking lot

Stained brown

Sometimes you don't get parked in time, and that's all there is to it.. I shook my head sadly, and walked a little faster.

But where was Gina Lolabrigida?

This morning I started my work week on foot.

This is not unusual.

Oh, the truck was there. And in reasonably good shape. But there wasn't a trailer attached. The people running the yard frown on leaving the tractor and the trailer hooked up unless you brought it in and you're taking it out. “How we gonna move that thing if you don't show up?” they say, or words to that effect. And I can't say I blame them.

So I gave the truck a quick once-over, checked my load assignment, and set out to find my trailer.

On foot.

This turned out to be a good thing.

When I found it, I found five others. Each with trucks attached. All trying to pull out of nearby parking spaces, at the same time. In different directions.

It looked like one of those Fifties comedies with an intersection full of Italian taxi drivers—none of whom will back up to let the others move. With lots of yelling in a foreign language.

Except our guys weren't yelling—even in English. They were professionals.

And they were actually making progress in getting past each other. Slowly.

I watched this for a minute or two. Then I went back to my truck and spent a few more minutes on my pre-trip inspection.

What the heck? I had the time...

He won't bite...

The plains of southern Texas aren't as flat as western Kansas.

I don't think.

It's been a while since I was in that part of Kansas. Over forty years. But I the sheer flatness got to me way back then, and this hasn't pushed it out of my mind.

It's flat enough, though. I'm still not really used to looking out there and seeing clear to a horizon. And there are a fair number of places here where I can do it. Not new, but still a little attention-getting.

Having a dog sniff my trailer, now. That was new.

The Border officer was polite and cursory. What was I carrying, was I driving solo, was I a U. S. citizen. Willing to take my word for it. I suspect he would have perked up a bit if the dog had, though...

Which made me think of the extra security precautions I had to put up with, leaving the terminal this morning. Including the small but vital part that had been removed from my trailer. Which I could only get by proving I was supposed to take that trailer out.

Took me a while to figure out what I supposed to do. But I did, eventually. And I got the Bills of Lading and the part at the same time, from Security.

Told my mother-in-law last night I wasn't in any real danger down here. Starting to wonder.

uh, hello?

I'm in Texas, and Mexico is just down the road a piece. I hope to have a load headed back east tomorrow.

My mother-in-law was distressed when he learned where I was. She'd been watching news stories about someone who'd decided to jet-ski on the wrong body of water, and been mistaken for law enforcement by some drug lord's overly-watchful minion.

I told her not to worry. I wouldn't be likely to die in quite so embarrassing a fashion.

Losing the terminal was embarrassing enough.

After two days of hard driving, I arrived at the customer's warehouse and parked. I'd just started to relax and maybe nap a bit (always a good idea) when I got a message from my dispatcher, asking if I'd had my trailer inspected.

Huh?

Oh, yeah.

I'm on the Mexican border, and judging by where I'm delivering this trailer, it'll be going on south without me. Which means it has to be inspected, so any questions of its safety and/or condition are settled beforehand. I should have taken the trailer to our terminal to be checked out before I came here.

So I look up the address of the local terminal on my satcom. And sure enough, there it is. Not terribly far off. I can even get the GPS to guide me there.

Which means I only missed the turnoff twice. Well we've discussed this GPS before...

Finally, though, I pulled into a sort-of familiar lot. I've been down here a couple of times, and I recognized the dusty gravel lot and the old trailer that passes for an office/lounge.

No Company sign.

There hadn't been one at the street, either. One reason I'd missed the turn.

And none of the trucks had a paint job to match mine.

Uh-oh.

The two Hispanic gentlemen in the office trailer were gentlemen indeed. One of them politely informed me that their company had bought this lot some time back. He didn't know where I was supposed to go now, but I was welcome to use their phone...

The other gentleman looked things up on the computer. This address was still in the phone directory, he said. But he himself knew where our new terminal was, and gave me careful directions.

Half an hour later, my trailer was being given a once-over at a terminal much larger and better set-up than our old one. An approving piece of paper to take back to the customer, and I was off. An hour or two later I was back to sample the pleasures of the new digs.

Nicely enough appointed. Not new. I suppose the Company found a place the economy had cast adrift. No complaints—I'll probably have to overnight here, and the facilities are certainly an improvement on the gravel lot and the trailer.

Be nice if they had a working coke machine, though...

Vanity

Passed a huge RV with a small SUV wagging its tail behind. Nothing unusual. Except the dinghy's license plate:

IN TOW

Smiled a bit. Then pulled up even with the land yacht's back bumper. Looked down.

LVN TWN

I like it.

D-r-u-u-u-g-s

I've starting packing sweatshirts.

The time of year has become obvious now. I wore long sleeves most of the day. I expect no difficulty sleeping in the truck cab tonight.

Once the truck was fixed, the bosses apparently decided to make up for lost time. I've done 500 miles today, up through the Carolina's and across Virginia. Not a problem—that's what they pay me for. The problem came from a slightly unexpected direction.

Late this morning (or was it early afternoon?) I started to lose focus. As if I hadn't had enough sleep. And the way that works for me it's scary. With half a day's driving still ahead of me, it was scarier still. So I decided on a drastic measure.

I've been carrying a few of those “five-hour energy”-type shooters* around with me, just in case. I've never used one before—rest has always seemed a much more useful way of not feeling tired. But today a test run seemed called for.

Hmm. Secret Mixture of Beneficial Herbs, uh-huh. Caffeine, yeah. Vitamins, mm-hm.

Vitamin B12. FIFTY TIMES the RDA.

O-kayyy.**

Well, watching the road signs fuzz out would be a lot scarier. I haven't gotten there yet, but it's coming. I can tell. So...

It tastes like cough syrup. No surprise—it's about that consistency. At least it doesn't have the kind of aftertaste you get from cough syrup that works. A few sips of water took care of what little problem I had with it.

I took the stuff at a rest area, after taking care of...other business. Getting out of the truck and walking around usually wakes me up for a little while, so it's kind of hard to tell if it's working. As much Mountain Dew(tm) as I often toss off in a day, the caffeine rush won't be noticeable. So it's kind of hard to tell if it's working.

Half an hour down the road I haven't started to worry about fuzzy traffic. Even a little. Given the usual pattern,that's a good sign.

Two hours, and I feel a little sleepy. Only a little, though. About the consistency of a soft-drink's worth of caffeine wearing off. Still not getting vague or out of focus. A few minutes more and it's gone. Or I don't notice it, anyway.

An hour or two later, it's back, but still mild. If I'd been depending on Dew's(tm) I'd have had to stop at least once for a refill, by now. Maybe more.

An hour or two after that, I was parked, and still more or less alert. At no point did I fear for my life, or for all the innocent people surrounding my semi. That's a good bit better than I'd been expecting around lunchtime. I can't say too much based on just one try, but apparently the stuff worked, more or less. I stayed awake and quite functional. And as of this writing, I haven't “crashed.” Nor am I particularly wired.

Which is a good thing. I still prefer the old-fashioned way.

G'nite.

- - - - -
*Not the brand-name you see on TV. I'm cheap—Big Lots(tm) specials look very effective to me...

**Turns out this brand's conservative. 5-Hour Energy(tm) has over eighty...

Hurry up and...

Well, I was SUPPOSED to drive all day today...

They told me last night which truck I'd have this morning. And that I already had a load. And that it was hot.

Oh yeah, and that it was already late.

No pressure, right?

So I packed for the week and got as much sleep as the remaining night would allow. Then I got up, dressed hurriedly, waved goodbye to my landlady (schoolteacher hours are much like truck-driver hours), and blinked and yawned my way through the thirty rapid miles to the terminal. There I made a tour of the yard, looking for the tractor assigned to me for the week.

At length I found it. And the sticker on the driver's-side mirror.

“DRIVING THIS TRUCK BEFORE IT IS REPAIRED IS A VIOLATION OF DOT REGULATIONS,” it said. More or less. There was a lot more legalese in the actual text.

A visit to the shop seemed called for.
When I entered, the guy at the counter looked up and laughed. Maybe I was wrong, but I thought I caught an edge of hysteria.

Every bay in his garage was full. The fellow talking to him was explaining in great detail about how inconvenient the sticker on his truck was. Another fellow was haranguing the lady next to him about the sticker on his trailer. A third driver was waiting his turn. He saw me and said, “You, too?”

I decided to make my inquiry as brief and painless as possible. There wasn't a lot the shop guy could say just yet, anyhow.

Having gotten my “I don't know how long” from the man at the desk, I strolled back out onto the yard and pulled out the cell. As I worked my way through the voicemail jungle to my dispatcher, I counted six other trucks in the parking lot with the same sticker. And more than a dozen trailers. Besides the (six? eight? ten?) trucks already in the shop's repair bays.

Looked like I was gonna be here a while.

The rumor mill's explanation
was that we'd just gotten a new shop manager. According to one of the more experienced drivers, every new manager feels he has to prove he's on the ball. So he orders a sweep of the yard, red-tagging every truck and trailer that isn't up to DOT spec. This is the shop's job, of course, but when they find a couple of dozen problem vehicles at once, well...

No complaints from me. In theory, at least. The problems they found on my truck were real, and at least one was serious. Better they find it than a DOT inspector two hundred miles from the nearest terminal. Sitting around in the drivers' lounge watching bad TV shows beats the heck out of sitting in an out-of-service truck at a weigh station, waiting for the mechanic and contemplating the fine you just got slapped with.

But it's still a lousy way to spend a day.

Further plot complications
They got my truck in the shop while I was out getting lunch. It was out by four. Time to find my trailer, hook up, and go.

No trailer.

I couldn't find it on the yard. It wasn't in the shop. And the last time Security checked the yard, they hadn't seen it either. It took us another hour to confirm that the load had been transferred to another truck.

My dispatcher had (quite sensibly) decided he couldn't wait for my truck to get out of the shop before sending off a hot load that was already late. And in the chaos of the day, neither I nor the outbound-truck controller had gotten the message. When I did finally get in touch, he explained everything, and told me to just knock off for the day. I hadn't gotten any sleep, so I couldn't drive tonight anyway. He'd make sure I had a load in the morning.

So I shambled out to the car, ran a couple of errands I'd been too frazzled to run last night, and headed back to the house.

Just as I was starting up the front stairs, my landlady pulled into the drive, got out of her car, and looked confusion at me.

“It's a long story,” I said.

Bad news, good news

A quick note before I start packing.

I'm parked in my home terminal, after two long days of driving. My load is due for delivery late tonight, about three hours from here. I'm not scheduled to go home until tomorrow.

I'm going anyhow.

You may recall me talking about the legal limits on my driving hours. The daily limits are frequently a pain in the neck. The weekly limits are usually not a problem.

This week, however...

It would take me at least three hours to get this load to its destination. I have seven hours left for the week. And the week doesn't legally end for two more days.

For a normal OTR driver this would be no big deal. Deliver the load, find a truck stop (the nicest one you can), and park for 34 hours. Bingo—whole new week.

I am no longer a normal OTR driver. Tomorrow this truck is supposed to start a whole new week, with a different.driver. Which means tomorrow it has to be back HERE.

Three hours there. Three hours back. One hour to unload, drive to the next customer, get loaded, and get back on the road to this terminal.

The Company would not be pleased if this truck were stuck for a day and a half a hundred miles from its new driver.

So I'm going home. They dare not send me out before the next guy gets here. I've done too much driving. I've had too busy a week. I've had too much paying work.

I should have this problem more often...

There's always something

My wife would have loved this.

She loved animals. She would take her dog with her anywhere she went, given a choice. And she loved gadgets.

A rest-area water fountain with a built-in fountain for your pet? How could she resist?

I can see her now, grinning from ear to ear and saying “Awwwwww!” And running back to the car to get the dog and let him enjoy it.

The things you see just driving.

The things they remind you of.

I spent the morning in a fog.
Literally. Hundreds of miles driving through the mist. South from Pennsylvania and into Virginia. Through the Shenandoah Valley, where the fog finally lifted, bringing blue skies and the smell of silage everywhere.

At least I hope it was silage. That would have been an awful lot of fresh manure.

And then over the Blue Ridge Mountains and into Tennessee. Where the fun stuff happened.

The fun stuff
Ahead I saw a sign, telling me there was a weigh station ahead. Happens all the time, of course, especially when you've just crossed a state line. I moved into the right lane, where the station's electronics could query my PrePass* transponder. And I kept driving, waiting for the little beep and the green light.

Different beep. And a red light.

Still not unusual. They do random weight checks. Just drive across their GOOD scales, slowly. I knew I was legal, so it was no big deal.

So I pulled onto their scales. And they told me to set the brakes and bring my papers in.

Joy.

So I set my brakes and brought in my log. And my license. And my truck registration. And my bills of lading. The gentlemen looked them over quickly and asked for a few more things. After I'd parked my truck.

Gulp.

There are a lot of rules that cover the operation of commercial vehicles. I won't say it's not possible to comply with all of them, but—well, you know how your shoulders tense when you see a patrol car by the side of the road. Even if you're doing the speed limit and everything looks fine. “There's always SOMETHING,” you think.

Double for us.

If they want to look closely...

And sure enough. My personal papers (license, medical certificate,** etc.) were all in order. My bills of lading, likewise. The trailer was properly registered, and the inspection dates were in order. Ditto for the truck.

Except...

The Company changed insurance companies several months ago. They'd sent out memo after memo, telling us to get the new insurance card. I had done so. On at least three different trucks. I hadn't been in this one until this week. But by now, surely every tractor in the fleet had the new card, right?

Not this one.

Trouble.

And then there was the fellow looking at my log book. Checking it against his computer. Big Brother hasn't taken over the trucking industry completely, but there are things they can check.

I hadn't faked my hours. I wasn't worried. Much.

Until he turned and pointed at a page from the beginning of the week. And said, “See this date? You don't have any entries for the next three or four days.”

Uh-ohhhhh.

I looked at the book while he looked over my shoulder. And eventually I figured it out. I'd written down the wrong date on the first sheet for the week. I showed him where I'd made the mistake, and where the paperwork was that filled the gap. After some dubious looks, he decided he believed me.

Not that that got me off the hook. Falsifying Federal documents? If you do it on purpose, screwing up a log can put you in prison. Even doing it by mistake is good for a hefty fine. Not to mention their shutting you down until they decide you're legal. And if they were in the mood, it was a perfect excuse for them to carefully inspect the truck itself—and shut you down, fine you, or both, if they found ANYTHING wrong.

For some reason, they decided not to do that today. I don't know why. Maybe because I didn't talk back or try to dance around anything. I'd even written up that after-hours drive from yesterday (boy, wasn't THAT a nice thing to have them looking at?).

In the end, they wrote me up for not having proof of insurance. If the company sends them a copy of the card, they won't have to pay a fine. They gave me a written warning about driving after hours yesterday, but they didn't fine me. They let the date mistake slide. And they didn't take the truck apart.

I thanked them politely and walked back to the truck on wobbly knees. Half an hour later I parked for the night. Suddenly I didn't really feel like pushing my luck, for some reason.
-----
*PrePass(tm)
is a service that lets you pass weigh stations under certain conditions. Basically, a state that has a contract with the company will install weight sensors in the road just up from a weigh station. A trucking company that has a contract with the company will install a little transponder gadget in every truck's windshield. If the weight looks good, the weigh station's computer will frequently make a note in its log and tell you to keep going.
But not always. Sometimes your weight is close enough to the limit the computer says “double check.” Or the crew decides its your turn for a random sampling. Like today...

**Yeah, I have to have one. With me. All the time. Just like a pilot.

Lovely day. Visually, anyhow.

Color has come to northern Pennsylvania.

See for yourself.

The pictures were taken from the parking lot of a hardware store in a middle-of-the-mountains town in PA. This is the kind of thing they see just stepping out the front door. Part of me would be afraid to live up here. I'd hate to take that kind of view for granted.

As it is, I earned that view.

I'm such a fine fellow...
Last night I got a call in the darkness, summoning me to a humanitarian effort the next morning. One of our other drivers had had a death in the family and needed to get home in a hurry. Would I trade loads with him, seeing as how the load I was hauling was headed much closer to where he lived than the one he currently had?

Knowing something about being trapped days away from your loved ones, I would've had a hard time laughing that one off.

So I drove north instead of south the next morning, hurrying toward a truck stop I'd been to several times. When I got there I called my dispatcher and got his cell number. (My own cell actually worked where we were supposed to meet, for a wonder.)

He told me where he was. I went there and couldn't see him.

He described the trucks pulling out of the spaces around him. I looked, and they weren't there.

I got a nasty suspicion, and asked him one more question.

He told me which truck stop he was in. I was in the one ten miles over.

Same chain, same city, different highway.

Sigh.

Earning the view
Well, I did get there eventually. And got the new load. And headed north into Pennsylvania instead of south into Tennessee.

And it was beautiful.

Up the Susquehanna River valley, and then up and over the Appalachians of central Pennsylvania. I wish I had pictures. As you can see, I do have a camera now. But I don't wave it around while I'm driving. Darn it.

At length I followed a two-lane into a little town that sat in the middle of a blank spot on my road atlas. Two twisty highways, a dot on the map with a name, and that's it. The GPS gave me a little more information, but kept trying to get me to follow ONE-lane roads to cut the corners.

Computers. Bah.

At the intersection, my directions said, go straight. Make a hard left onto THAT narrow street. Make a hard right onto the NEXT narrow street. It'll be right there on the right.

The hard left was HARD. The trailer wheels cleared the corner by about six inches. Not a good sign—right turns are much worse in a tractor-trailer than lefts, as I think I've mentioned.

Sure enough, the right turn was impossible to make neatly. No matter what I tried, I could see I would catch the wheels on that white-painted curb at the corner. And so I did.

The curb was both taller and squarer than it looked. I did some damage to one of the trailer tires—not enough to make it unsafe, but enough to affect my language. Then I carefully pulled into a small-town hardware store parking lot, wondering how I was going to get back out.

The owner of the store was waiting for me. Wondering why I'd come in that way.

Turns out there's another way in. That doesn't involve any right turns. Or tall sharp curbs. And only one tiny side street, not two.

He's been telling people about it for decades. And every single company still uses the other set of directions.

The town had been talking about putting “no trucks” signs up on that street for twenty years. They were still talking about it.

Sigh.

I did a pretty good job, he said. About the least damage he's seen anybody take coming in from there. The worst? He remembered the fellow who'd come in with a heavily loaded trailer in the dead of night, and apparently hadn't slowed down much when he took the last corner. That tall sharp curve had blown every tire on the right side of his trailer, then hooked a rim and pulled the wheel assembly loose from the trailer. It sat in his parking lot for two or three days before a crew came out and got the wheels reattached.

I feel a little better.

Scenery is where you find it.
As they got their forklift out of the corner and started pulling bundles out of the trailer, I wandered into the store, and out into the parking lot. The store was nice enough, but what was around it was lovely. There was a valley with a little stream right behind their little warehouse. Walk over to the back door and lean a little. Beautiful.

And looking up from the parking lot—well, go back up top and look again.

I sat in that lot for a couple of hours before I had both an empty trailer and instructions on where to go next. No hardship.

They do it with mirrors
At length, the old fellow who owns the store helped me get the rig out of his parking lot without running over anyone. This time I took the route HE suggested. And it was good.

Got one good scare, though.

I got to the end of his little street and prepared to turn right onto the highway. I looked to my left and saw a car coming around a curve.

Then it disappeared.

So did the highway.

The yellow lines were gone. I could still see asphalt, but neither the paint nor the trees were there anymore.

Before I could panic completely the car reappeared. Right in front of me, passing casually before my windshield. I still didn't know where it had gone, but at least I knew I wasn't losing my sanity. So I looked anxiously out my left window again.

After several seconds I realized I was looking at a different road. Unpainted. With neatly cut lawns lining it, instead of trees.

I was looking at the road behind me.

My mirror was blocking the whole highway, and the street in the mirror was exactly where the highway would have been. And it looked right.

It looked right. If I hadn't seen that car disappear, I would have pulled out happily. And God knows what would have happened.

Shivering a little, I looked to the right. And as my eyes focused, the town disappeared.

Exactly the same way. Apparently my right-side mirror was blocking the entire road THAT way. And the reflection of the street behind me looked just as right on that side.

Neither view really looked right, of course. But they were close enough to something you could expect to see that I had to consciously TELL myself I wasn't really looking “out the window.”

Suddenly those magician's tricks started to sound a lot more believable.

And the stories I'd heard about truckers who'd pulled out in front of speeding cars they never saw seemed a lot more believable, too.

I spent the next thirty seconds or so rocking frantically back and forth, looking for angles where I could see the real road, past my mirrors. I finally satisfied myself that nothing was coming and pulled out.

But I must have looked awful strange, if anyone was around to see me.

The problem with “scenic"
I had to go back the way I came. And it was still beautiful.

And I was behind schedule. And I didn't dare go much past tourist speed. Not on those roads.

I got to my next pickup late. And by the time I got my load, I was past my legal hours.

The customer didn't care. Truckers are a security risk, don't y'know. So they politely told me to get off their property.

On the other hand, they did tell me where I could go to park for the night. And it only took a few minutes to get there. And the DOT does understand that sometimes you can't just park where your hours run out. So I carefully wrote down in my logbook what I'd done and why. In theory, I shouldn't get in too much trouble about it. It's the guys who ignore the rules and/or try to lie their way around them that get the heavy end of the hammer. Or so I'm told.

I hope so.

But that's for another day. Right now we sleep.

G'nite.

Oh, yeah. Random note.
Passed a small business this afternoon, with an interesting name.

Curl Up and Dye

Wonder what they do there...

Just call me Chester

It really is fall up here.

The color is starting to show in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Not so much in Maryland, but hey...

More to the point, I was almost chilly when I got up yesterday morning. And it was late afternoon before I bothered to turn on the air conditioning. In a tractor-trailer, that's fairly cool.

I dropped a load in Maryland yesterday, in the early afternoon. I was scheduled to pick up another load from the same customer this morning. At 1:00 am.

I'm not going to run the early-morning thing into the ground again. Let's just say I wasn't celebrating.

I did drop by the shipping office as I was dropping off my load, just in case they'd gotten ahead of schedule. They hadn't. After all, the seasons are changing. All their stores were looking for their fall lines. So the warehouse was up to its ears in shipping orders.

1:00 am it is. Sigh.

So I spent the afternoon trying to sleep. With mixed success. I was drowsing and waking up all day and a fair part of the evening, but when I got up around midnight, I was at least semi-coherent.

Drove the mile or so to the customer, hooked to the trailer, connected the air and electrical lines, walked around checking the tires and lights and such, and cranked up the landing gear. Then I walked around the truck and trailer again. I don't know why.

Got around to the right side and something bothered me. A second glance cleared that up, though.

The landing gear was down.

I walked the rest of the way around the rig and back to the crank. I could have sworn I'd cranked it up. I've forgotten to once or twice (it's either noisy or otherwise embarrassing), but I thought I remembered it this time. Forty or so turns on that crank will leave an ache in your shoulders you can feel for a few minutes afterward. And I thought I still felt it.

I did. The gear was up on this side.

I went back. Still down over there.

I spent a few minutes seeing if it was something obvious (the mechanism is somewhat simple). It wasn't. So I called my breakdown department. They said they'd send somebody over.

I told the warehouse people why I was blocking their lot and waited.

The mechanic eventually showed up, looked the situation over, and decided it needed more equipment to fix than he had on his truck. So he took right leg off the trailer altogether. Since it's hard to sleep with an air impact wrench going right below your head, I watched him work. Then I got rolling to the customer—only two hours late.

I made it to the consignee barely in time. Fortunately it was a live unload, so I didn't have to unhook.

When I was done, I went to a proper shop and handed over my gimpy trailer. They traded me a new one for it, and I headed for a truck stop.

Not much choice. By that time I was pretty much out of hours for the day.

And now I sit in the gathering dark and wait for morning.

But at least it won't be one o'clock in the morning.

And my trailer will stand on its own feet.

Progress, right?

Adventures in scheduling redux

Summer is fading.

I slept comfortably last night. That's worth mentioning, though perhaps not for much longer (this year, anyway). The truck was quite livably cool. Judging by the faint chill next to the open vents by the sleeper bunk, there was a reason for that.

Sure enough. I figured out last year that the truck is only really comfortable when it's in the 50's or 60's outside. And it felt like the 60's out there.

Kentucky is starting to become fallish.

Driving north, I started to see little traces of yellow in the Ohio trees. Not much yet, but a sign of the times. Pretty soon I'll have to get the warmer clothes out of storage.

* * *

I had to speak firmly to my dispatcher last night.

The company had assigned me a load to pick up after I delivered this one. I sat down and did the math for once. And realized that I could only make the delivery on time if

• this customer took me early, and
• absolutely nothing went wrong.

The slightest delay, and I would be in trouble with the law. Those pesky rest breaks, y'know.

Sometimes this is not too bad a thing—many customers are fairly easygoing. This one is not. So rather than risk the company paying penalties, I declined the assignment.

Part of my job is backstopping the load planners. Sometimes I manage it. Doesn't always make me popular. Fortunately, I've had reasonable people for dispatchers, so far.

* * *

Good thing I was stubborn.

I got to the customer an hour early. They found me a dock door an hour late.

Then I sat in the dock for another two and a half.

I got out of there an hour after I was supposed to be at the next customer.

I was glad I'd turned down that load. Might as well be pleased about something...

* * *

There was a truck stop just down the road from where I dropped. I got there just in time to snag the last parking space. An hour later I got a new load assignment. Which picked up a couple of hours ago. Of course.

Suspecting that everybody had gone home by now, I asked my dispatcher whether I should (throw away the last parking place in town and) see if anyone was home. They said yes.

Sigh.

So I went over there. And everybody had gone home.

Everybody. Emptiest parking lot I've ever seen.

So I wormed my way back out and got on the Interstate. The little book said there was a truck stop two exits down.

And there was.

And it had two or three empty spaces left.

So I parked. With fifteen minutes to spare.

Well, I did get a parking place. And I know how to find that place tomorrow. The route in is not intuitively obvious. I'm glad to have seen it with light, while fully awake. Makes predawn maneuvers a little more certain.

Okay. I'll take it.

Odds and ends and trademarks galore

Lime Crush(tm). Interesting.

When I was a little boy (oh, so long ago!), Orange Crush(tm) was a staple. I didn't see Grape Crush(tm) til much later (that's what Nehi(tm) was for...). I've seen a few other flavors since. But Lime Crush(tm)? I was almost afraid to ask.

Not bad, actually. In fact, it joins a very limited (I can't actually think of another one just now) category that I actually look for: a non-caffeinated competitor to Mountain Dew(tm). I don't drink that stuff to stay awake, y'know. It just has more—substance, or something—than, say, 7-Up(tm) or Sprite(tm). And so does this.

One of the nice things about driving an eighteen-wheeler is variety. You're never sure what they'll sell in the next truck stop...

* * *

I'm in a different truck again this week. The oldest one I've had in a few months now.

I may like it better.

I mean, it doesn't use Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel. Which means I can actually get fuel for it. The Company's Fuel Department has occasionally had to be a tiny bit creative in the recent past.

And it doesn't have the Wonderful New Environmentally Aware Pollution Control systems. Like the Particulate Filter system that burns extra fuel cleaning itself periodically (and was directly responsible for my involuntary Labor Day vacation last week).

And the cab electronics are downright primitive. Which means they work more than half the time.

What's not to like?

Oh, well. It's old enough to have its own problems, I guess. We'll see.

* * *

Speaking of modern technology...
I pulled into a customer's warehouse the other day, and the guard asked me to slide my tandems back.

I believe I've mentioned the weight distribution thing before, and how we move the trailer wheels back and forth to balance the load between tractor and trailer. Well, the way you do that is to lock the brakes on the trailer wheels, and then disconnect them from the trailer itself. This involves a mighty yank on a handle hidden under the back of the trailer. By thus straining your back, you retract a set of pins that, up until now, were locking together a set of sliding rails connecting the bed of the trailer with its wheels. Once they're retracted, you can use the tractor to shove the trailer back and forth until the wheels are where you want them. Then you pop that handle back into its slot, and the pins lock the trailer to the wheels again.

This is handy for us, but the customers often want the wheels all the way back. It cuts down on those charming incidents where a forklift drives off the dock and into the trailer and the trailer dips under the weight. Nothing like feeling the floor beneath you drop a foot while you're half on it and half off, don't y'know?

Dockworkers. No sense of humor.

But I try to be nice to the people who give me a job. So I strolled to the back of the trailer and reached under to give the handle a mighty yank.

No handle.

I spent a good five minutes (or so it seemed) looking all over the underside of that trailer. All I could find was an odd-looking thing that looked like a steel sewing spool in a steel frame. With air lines running to something back behind the sliders.

Could it be?

Cautiously I reached into the framework and fiddled. Eventually I hooked the ridge of the “spool” with two fingers and gently pulled.

With a soft hiss, the slider pins slid out of sight.

I blinked. And pushed the plunger back in.

Hiss. And the pins slid into place again.

Power sliders. Neat.

I pulled the plunger out again (Two fingers! Hey, I'm Superman!) and strolled back up to the cab. That's when I noticed the fence in front of me. I probably wouldn't run into it adjusting the tandems, but why take a chance? So I unlocked the trailer brakes and moved the whole semi back ten feet or so. Then I locked the trailer brakes and started to pull the trailer forward over its wheels.

Nothing moved.

This can be noisy if you're surprised enough. Fortunately I'm the cautious sort. The semi just quivered and complained as it tried to pull the Immovable Object. So I got out and headed back. I'd been in enough modern cars to suspect what the problem was.

Sure enough. The pins had quietly returned to the locked position.

After all, I had unlocked the trailer brakes. And pulling a trailer with the tandems free to slide is a Bad Thing.* So the trailer had thoughtfully saved me from myself.

Sigh.

* * *

Some time later I was on the Interstate, idly watching the traffic around me. Making a hobby out of a survival reflex can be a useful habit. And sometimes it brings you odd and interesting sights.

Like the guy on the Harley(tm), with handlebars taller than he was. Black t-shirt and BDU pants. Black pseudo-Nazi helmet. Cruising down the exit ramp toward the traffic backing up before the stoplight.

The bike was steering itself. The fellow on it was sitting back, his arms crossed in front of him, his head bowed in concentration.

Texting.

-----

*Really, it is—you can rip the wheels right off the trailer if things go just the right kind of wrong...

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.

The days are a blur (part 3)

(NOTE: This will make more sense if you read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

Oh, are you back already? Good...)

Hmph. Must've still been sleepy.

Before I went to bed last night, I figured what the best starting time would be to get this load to its destination. Too late, and I'd (obviously) get there too late. Too early and I'd still be half-asleep when I started driving.

As it was, I think I underestimated the slowness of 4-lane non-Interstates again. I barely got the load there on time.

But I did get it there on time. So I won't complain.

Then I got my next load assignment. And for once this week the annoying delays weren't my fault. Just the ordinary fun stuff—the customer had all the time in the world. Just ask him.

I barely got to the truck stop before my hours ran out. But I did. And now I'm sitting here watching the world get dark (if you read Part 1, yeah, we're finally back to that.). Right now the brightest thing in the world is the headlights of the truck backing into a parking space opposite me.

They're about six inches away from my front fender.

(Some truck stops like to maximize their parking lot capacity. This often makes for interesting times backing in...)

Ah. No bumps, no scraped paint. He got into the slot and shut down. Dark and relaxing once again.

I've got some miles ahead of me tomorrow, but the schedule isn't as near-impossible as it has been the last few days. And I'll be awake, right? I've learned my lesson.

(So why are you sitting there typing after bedtime, boy?)

Umm.

G'nite.

The days are a blur (part 2)

(Note: This entry might not make as much sense if you haven't read yesterday's. Go ahead if you haven't. I'll wait...)

The bad beginning

02:00. Groan.

My alarm clock woke me.* My satcom didn't. The significance of that didn't register on me at first. That was the first strong indication that I hadn't gotten enough sleep.

I bustled blearily around the sleeper for a few minutes, eventually getting dressed enough to drive. It was about then I realized that I had no load information. No customer name. No address. No route.

Why, I wondered.

A quick look at the satcom showed no new messages since the good news last night. Odd. The dispatcher knew I'd accepted the load. Why hadn't he sent instructions?

Or had he?

With a sense of mounting dread I rebooted the truck computer. After the usual three to five minutes, it came fully online. And beeped. And started scrolling up useful messages.

And I'd only lost about an hour.

That was my first miscalculation.

The long and winding road, that leads me--to where?

The second became obvious within minutes, when I compared the truck's GPS-driven estimates of my ETA with my own quick-and-dirty figures from last night. The computer had me getting there a lot slower. Why? I wondered.

Because I'd been planning a trip to the wrong city.

I was going to have to cross a portion of Alabama on “ordinary” four-lane roads. Once I crossed into Georgia, though—well, Lake City, GA, is just south of Atlanta. And in Georgia, all Interstates lead to Atlanta. I was golden.

Except I wasn't going to Lake City, GA.

I was going to Lake Park, GA.

Lake Park, GA, is nowhere near Atlanta. It's over by Valdosta. Another direction altogether. And about sixty miles further than I'd figured on.

And there are no Interstates crossing South Georgia.

Sixty extra miles, and almost all of it on highways that were noticeably slower than the Interstates I'd been counting on. Well, at least I knew what the problem was.

The rest of the morning was a blur. Mostly a dark blur. Only a few things stand out at this point.

One was a deer. A buck. Nice rack—nothing the record books would be interested in, but nice. If I were a hunter I would have drooled a bit. As it was, I smiled a little.

Not much. The reason I remember the buck is that he didn't really register in my mind until I was well past him. I saw him clearly, but I didn't SEE him. The corner of my eye made a note, and eventually the brain got it. And absently filed it. Keeping the truck going was taking far too much attention.

The other thing I remember is the moment when it sank in that the non-Interstate was slowing me down a bit more than I'd estimated.

Translation: I was going to be late.

I spent the next hour or so looking for a place with two important things:

• a parking lot big enough for this monster, and
• a phone that worked, so I could warn my dispatcher I wasn't going to make the delivery on time.

Perhaps it says something about my work ethic that it was only after I found such a place and parked that I realized a bathroom would also be nice.

Fortunately, they had one.

And so on...

Daylight came at last. And so did my destination. I dropped the load (late, but they at least knew that was coming), headed to my next stop, and picked up another load. Then I drove another long stretch of non-Interstate four-lanes toward the only truck stop I could reach in the time I had left.

I drove right past it, as it turns out.

Well, actually I sat on the highway beside it. In the right-turn lane at the stoplight, looking at the parking lot on my left. Then the light turned green and I made the right turn I had to make.

It took me about fifteen minutes to get turned around and get back. At which point I was within fifteen minutes of being unable to legally drive. I HATE cutting it that close.

Oh, well. At least I'll get enough sleep tonight.

(continued tomorrow)
****
*It didn't once—and I got the only “no excuse” service failure in my glorious career because of it. I've been more paranoid about settings and batteries since then...

The days are a blur (part 1)

Dusk isn't always colorful.

When I was a little boy, there was a soap opera called THE EDGE OF NIGHT. I never watched it (or any other soap opera), but I would usually try to be around the TV when it first came on. I liked the theme music (the organ in the background was cheesy, but I loved the piano piece that floated over it). And I found the opening visual fascinating

It was a cityscape at dusk, gradually shading into night. Watching the buildings gray and fade as the lights in the windows came into prominence. The sky gradually going away. Sorta. There had to be some time-lapse or something, to make it fit into a TV opening sequence (do I remember the clouds streaking by, or am I reading that back into it?), but that just made it accessible to a three-year-old's attention span.

And the fact that it was in black-and-white didn't hurt it at all. If there'd been color, it would've likely been pastels of red and orange all over the place (soap-opera's didn't tend to the subtle). And I might have thought that a distraction. It was the gradual changes in shading and contrast that I found endlessly watchable.

Tonight's kind of like that, without the skyscrapers. Sky-blue fading into gray and thence to black. Everything below it gradually losing definition and color as the shadows change (not always deepening).

It takes longer, of course. This is reality. But then, I'm a bit older. I actually do have an attention span, these days. Sometimes.

It's MonTueWednesday, August 23-25. At least the month didn't drift. I think.

What can I say? It's been interesting...

My own fault, I have to admit. My work week was supposed to start on Sunday, but they didn't have a load for me Sunday. Weekends are often slow. So I had plenty of rest going into my load Monday, right?

Wrong. Computer binge. Five hours of sleep. Slow blinking all day.

Well, at least I got the load to where it was going. Got myself empty and headed for the nearest truck stop, where I had a quick meal and sat around reading the rest of the evening. Nice way to end the day.

At least until I got the message from my dispatcher. Seems he had a load for me the next morning. And I wouldn't have any trouble picking it up.

If I started rolling at 3 am.

This was not a problem, legally speaking. I'd shut down around 5, so getting up at 3 was perfectly all right.

Right?

Go back over my description of how I spent the evening. Did you happen to notice the word “sleep” anywhere in there?

If I'd been rudely awakened when the satcom beeped, I might have been all right. It would have meant I'd taken a nap as soon as I parked. But why would I do that? Nobody was going to need me before 5 or 6 am, right?

Right.

So there I was, just getting ready for bed, and here came the good news. And what do I tell my dispatcher? “Sorry, boss. Can't do it. I spent too much time surfing the Net last night and too much time reading STAR WARS books today.”?

So I said “Sure, no prob,” and went to bed.

Five hours sleep last night.

No more than five tonight.

Three o'clock in the morning.

Sigh.

(continued “tomorrow”)

I keep seeing things like that out here.

I am secure but not comfortable.

I'm trying to be a good boy about keeping this laptop safe (the last one got stolen out of my truck a year or two ago, for those of you who came in late). At the moment, I have the lock cable wrapped around a rung of bunk ladder. Reasonably secure, but a bit of a stretch when I'm sitting in the front seat.

And I pretty much have to sit in the front seat at the moment. It's cooled down fairly quickly tonight, but only outside. If I'm not next to an open window I am a puddle. I should be in bed, but not yet. Let it get cool enough to breathe in here first.

I did about 600 miles today. Not an epic journey, but a good bit of driving. With half a legal hour to go, I found a truck stop and parked for the night. As occasionally happens, there were some stores and restaurants within walking distance. More surprising, there was something to see, too. Closed, of course...

When I first saw the building from the highway I thought it belonged to a community college with delusions of grandeur. I mean, come on! A featureless concrete dome painted white, like a cue ball on a kicking tee? It looked like that, too--the building is earth-bermed, and has a roofline with one of those complicated sets of non-functional angles that architects periodically fall in love with. And the dome is MORE than a hemisphere. A white globe in a nest of white angular lines.

Something Significant Is Housed Here, it was designed to say. I doubted it, but what the heck.

I parked the truck and sauntered across the bridge to the other side of the Interstate, past the Bob Evans (temptation is everywhere...), and took a casual glance across the over-sized lawn at--a parked jet fighter? In chase-plane colors? From the early 60's from the shape. It kind of resembled a Douglas F4D, though I'm no expert.

Hmmm.

Then I saw the fellow with the kids in the empty lot closer to the building. Of course it was empty--at this hour the place had to be closed. But the lot wasn't QUITE empty. He was taking pictures of his kids as they poked around--

--an Apollo Command Module.

And there was a Gemini capsule sitting right behind it.

The interest level rose a bit. I trudged across the lawn and the empty lot.

As I drew closer, it was obvious that the Apollo, at least, was a mockup. No biggie--only somebody with an unlimited budget leaves the real thing out in the rain. It didn't take long to figure out the Gemini was a mockup, too. And right about that time I got an angle on the big sign.

I was in Wapakoneta, Ohio. And this was the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum.

Oh.

Maybe there's Something Significant in there after all.

According to the sign, Gemini 8 is. That's the one Armstrong flew, in the pre-Apollo days. And I don't doubt there's a bunch of other stuff.

It at least explains the architecture. Still more Show For Show's Sake than I like, but they really did have something they thought was worth making Stand Out. And it does look kind of spacey. In a good kind of way, I mean.

Maybe someday I'll show up here when it's still open. Or get rich enough to come back in a car.

Oh, yeah. The fighter. It was an F5D, not an F4D. According to the plaque, Douglas only built four of them (I think I'm remembering that right), and this was the only one left. Neil Armstrong had flown it in the early sixties when it was set up as a simulator of sorts. They were testing flight profiles for the Dyna-Soar, NASA's first step toward a functional winged spaceship. Call it the grandfather of the Space Shuttle. (The Dyna-Soar never actually flew, but it got the engineers thinking in a particular direction...)

Lazy days

Someday I'll have to figure out how to rig a hammock in a parking lot.

The evening was pleasantly cool, but I woke up twice in a sweat. The first time I ran the truck long enough to cool it down. And to recharge the battery--I'd been running the fan in the sleeper (didn't do much good).

The second time, I said heck with it and got up.

I've talked about the joys of sleeping in a metal-and-fiberglass tent before, so I won't belabor it. But it still surprises me sometimes, when I go to bed on a 70-degree night and wake up in a Turkish bath.

Glad I don't work for Truckbert.

The day promises to be well and truly hot. And not very exciting. I'm due for home time tomorrow, and I ended up getting back to town a day early. Which means they can't send me very far and still get me back in time for the next driver to take the rig. And for some reason people don't ship huge amounts of freight on a Sunday anyway. So in all likelihood I'll sit around all day, looking for places that are fairly cool and quiet,* and checking the truck every so often for a satcom message telling me my dispatcher has worked a miracle and found me something to do.

Someone might suggest I go home--it's close enough. But technically I'm still on duty. They MIGHT find a load I can take a hundred miles, with a load over there I can bring back. And if they do I need to prove I'm willing to earn my keep. At least until tomorrow.

I've talked to several drivers who were waiting for their trucks to get out of the shop. Breakdown pay is rather nominal. And on a Sunday, I'm not the only one waiting for a little action. But (due to some oddities about the division I work for) I am the only one here right now who's paid for days when they can't find me a load.

So I sweat a bit and fight boredom. It could be worse.

-----
*qt's Law of TV-Lounge Selection: your ability to deal with the show everybody else is watching is inversely proportional to your ability to do something else instead.
(In other words, if you have to go out and do something, one of the four shows you actually like will of course be on. If it's 95 outside and there isn't another chair in the truck stop, the entertainment in the TV lounge will be unbearable and impossible to ignore.)

Long day

Part the first
Detroit's rush hour isn't too bad from the south. I wasn't expecting that.

That 700 miles I mentioned in the last post turned out to be more like 800. And it included an extra stop on the way--the guy who came out to fix my trailer tire didn't have the equipment to replace the mudflap. By the time I got to a stopping place last night I had about four hours to make a run that would take exactly four hours.

If nothing went wrong.

Like traffic. Near the center of a large city at eight in the morning.

I pulled a couple of tricks to get here early enough to make a morning delivery. All strictly legal, mind you, but still, I was pushing things a bit. Other things slowed me down, so it's a good thing I took the precaution.

But there was no traffic to speak of. In a city the size of Detroit. Weird.

Now the southbound lanes looked like what I'd expected to run into. I guess I just don't know who lives where and goes whither.

No complaints, though.

Part the second
Got to the customer on time. The parking lot was overcrowded, but I did eventually manage to drop my trailer and hook an empty for the next run.

With a missing mudflap.

I hope this isn't a trend. Sitting at garages is not a good way to make money when you're paid by the mile.

Conclusion
Ice cream bars are messy.

Yeah, I know. Not a great revelation. Call it a truth that's come back to me.

I'm at your basic El Cheapo Deluxe fast-food table in a convenience store. A floor fan sits beside it, buffeting me gently (Dyson's Air Multiplier isn't likely to trickle this far down for a while...).

The fan is there because the store isn't air conditioned. Looking around, I suspect this is normal. The only vents I see are on what looks like a commercial-grade gas (or oil?) heater near the ceiling in one corner. The building itself is an open-plan steel prefab. Looking at the window, I gather it's double-walled, so I can hope the place is at least insulated. But I'll bet Ohio winters are still a bear.

It's warmer in here than outside--if outside includes shade and a breeze. Which it does, at times and in spots. But shade, a breeze, and a place to sit down--that's a much rarer combination.

So here I sit, sweating just a little, chasing the flies off every few seconds, and generally feeling as if I'd returned to one of those old general stores of my (very early) childhood. They're more pleasant to remember than to return to, but am I complaining?

Actually, no.

When I pulled in here, I was concerned. Which is a euphemism for "wondering how doomed I was." Getting that mudflap fixed in Detroit didn't take too long. But the trick I used to get the load to the customer on time this morning involved taking a legally required nap this afternoon. When I left Toledo, Ohio, I had about three hours of driving time left to me, and I knew of two truck stops on my route. One was nearby, the other a good hundred and fifty miles further on.

I wanted to make some miles tonight (rather like my fond hope in the previous post), but 150 miles in three hours on two-lanes was a bad bet. So I looked for the stop nearby.

It was a few miles north of here. On the Ohio Turnpike.

Not next to the Turnpike. On it. In one of the service plazas. And I had been explicitly told not to give the company's money to the trolls.

So what to do? Drive nervously into the gathering darkness, looking for a place to hide?

Well, any better ideas?

So I drove nervously into the gathering darkness, until I saw a little place with the sky-high overhangs that mark a set of truck-diesel pumps. No parking lot. But if they dealt with semi's, I thought, they might know who in the area would tolerate one parking for the night.

I found a corner where I could park my eighteen-wheeler without blocking the pumps and went inside. When the lady finished with her customer, I asked her where around here I could shut down for ten hours.

"Where're you now?"

I pointed.

"That'll be fine."

No complaints. None.