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.