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.