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The past two days has been interesting. I was sent to Arkansas to deliver a load. Then on the way to pick up a return load, was asked to take a new driver to recover a truck. Needless-to-say, we still haven’t made it there yet. Arkansas is a “black hole” for me. I go there and it takes forever for me to get back to my regular pickups and deliveries.
When I arrived at the terminal, the requirement for all of the company trucks is to go through the inspection bay. They found a wheel seal that was about to completely blow. They wrote the truck up to be put in the shop. When alerting the driver manager that was on duty for my division, he was pretty dumbfounded why I was at the terminal. No one told him that I was coming. Wasn’t his fault the personnel working in the inspection bay found a problem with my truck. I didn’t catch the seal because the small leak was found behind the inside tire behind the brake chamber. When he asked why I was there, I told him over the phone and over the qualcomm so our communica would be in writing. And he asked me why didn’t I tell him about the problem with the seal, that he could have “expedited” my truck going in the shop….. Because I didn’t know about the problem.
When I look back on that part of my day, it wasn’t a big deal. The seal was fixed and found out that they rewired something from the qualcomm to the radio. I don’t know what they rewired but after they did, there some sort of sensor failure in the qualcomm that had to do with my logs. Now I’ve got two big chunks that are “red”… Whatever that means. It still logged my day correctly. It makes the qualcomm request a log update and prompts me to accept it like if someone else was fooling with my logbook. Safety/Log department will do that sort of thing if they see something that makes them raise an eyebrow and get a better look.
Anyways, after they fixed the truck and the “wire problem” and picking up the other driver, we go to deliver the load. Dispatch gives us another load to pick up. When we get there, the customer was closed and we are having to wait to get the load taking me back in my service area and getting the other driver to the recovery truck. In the meantime, while waiting, we are dispatched on another load going to central Arkansas and then dispatched on the initial load we are having to wait for. We still have over 30 hours to get back to Broken Bow so there isn’t really any rush. It’s only a 3hr 45min trip back down. Not a huge problem getting there on time. The customer won’t start getting the product ready until midnight, Monday morning. That 34 hour work week is definitely a bummer! It effects everybody, the employees, the company, not to mention, my paycheck because of being short a load or loads.
That’s what we’re doing. Waiting. If I can go to sleep with a chainsaw buzzing on the top bunk that’ll be a miracle. Should have bought some ear plugs from WalMart while it was open. LOL.