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?