Posted by admin on Oct 24, 2008 in
Where Am I? Obviously I made it into Omaha without further incident… we left out of Charles house Tuesday morning and started a roller coaster ride!
We picked up an empty trailer and headed over to Des Moines, Iowa to pick up a load of dead pigs (NO, not the while thing…pieces parts… frozen), that load was headed to Virginia. We started out and hadn’t gotten very far down the road when we got a call from dispatch saying that another truck had broken down in Booklyn, Iowa with a HVL (High-value load) and would need us to drop our trailer at the truck stop and take over on the HVL. So we met up with those guys, had to use a tire chain to pull the dead tractor out from under the trailer (apparently these rigs don’t move on thier own much when they puke the drive-shaft!)
So we got rolling with HVL… going to Boise, Idaho! A load of chewing tobacco, and because it’s an HVL we have additional security measures we have to follow, including not telling anyone (even other Prime drivers) that we HAVE an HVL, where we got it, where it’s going, and what the contents are among other things. One of the biggest security things is that one person of the team must stay with the truck at all times, and we have to “phone home” to dispatch everytime we need to stop with all THOSE details.
Anyways I digress… we head Westbound on I80 and cruise along just fine… then we get a call (after several hours of driving) from dispatch again. There’s a guy at Little America, Wyoming that is trying to get home to Idaho and they want us to swap loads with him, giving him the HVL and us taking his load of ice cream headed for Clearview, Utah. Well, we’re going that way anyways and we get “credit” for the miles we put on the HVL so what the hell.
We meet up with that driver and swap loads at the truck stop there and hit the road again… we no sooner got up to speed when we got a qualcomm from dispatch telling us to not roll out yet! Charles calls the night dispatcher to find out what’s going on, and come to find out, the guy we just gave the HVL to doesn’t have his Cuff-lock (a cuff-lock is a device that locks over the two air-brake knobs for the tractor and trailer and prevent someone from releasing the brakes, thus taking the trailer – a MUST HAVE on HVL loads!)
So we stop at the next rest area and wait for the other guy to catch back up so we can give him Charles set of cuff-lock and Abloy locks (high-security locks…all of them keyed the same and a very expensive set).
Okay… we’re off again! We finally arrive at Clearview, Utah and drop that load, then bobtail down to Salt Lake City, Utah to our yard there to pick up a load waiting to go to Plant City, Florida!
Yup.. more I80! Which is where you now find me… actually we got off I80 a couple of hours ago and are now in Missouri heading south. This load is due in Florida by 0700 Saturday morning so we don’t have a lot of time to waste in getting there.
I’ve posted some pics I’ve taken with my new digital camera out on my flickr account… but when I got up Wednesday morning..this was the view out MY cubicle:
Remind me to tell you about the meals we’ve been eating since leaving Omaha… we’ve gotten a fridge before we left so we now can cook and store food on the truck and stop eating at all the damn truck stops! WHOO HOOO!!
More later…
Posted by admin on Oct 19, 2008 in
Where Am I? Well, I flew out of Portland last night into Philly without a hitch…then caught the second leg of my journey to Omaha into Chicago where my luggage was kind enough to greet me! That was around 2200hrs last night… decided that since my next flight wasn’t until 0930 this morning, and as I’m getting older and don’t like to sleep in terminals too much these days…and I had ALL my luggage (couldn’t check it into the next flight that early)…I figured I’d bite the bullet and pay for a hotel room at the Hilton O’Hare. VERY nice…VERY swanky (had a 53″ LCD in the room which was nice…as was the leather recliner!)…of course the room rate reflected that niceness…but I digress.
So I get up and outta the Hilton and into the airport through security and all without a hitch…hang out at the gate…got there an hour and a half early. Per United instructions, you just sit and wait for them to call your name to assign your seat TO you…so I wait…and I wait…and they start calling for boarding… and still I wait. The get DONE with boarding… and I wait… (yes, I DID check with the gate person on the status of my seat…both times was told she would call me). So I wait some more… “Final boarding call to Omaha”
WTF!?!?!?
Finally the gate agent says, “We’re sorry sir, we’ve over-booked the aircraft and need to bump you. For you compensation, we’re going to put you up in a hotel for tonight, and give you a free round-trip ticket good to anywhere in the US good for one full year. The next Omaha flight isn’t until tomorrow morning at 5:40am”
Um..okay?
So… I’m holed up at the Wyndam hotel in Rosemont Village… bored, Mr. Wong appeared about Noon and decided to grab a subway train ride into down-town Chicago! Visited the Sears Tower and went up to the Skytower on the 103rd floor, then proceeded to walk around downtown Chicago for the next four hours!
So… wake-up call at 0300 for tomorrow to get over the airport for the 0540 boarding (BTW…I’m pre-booked with a seat assignment for that flight!). Here’s what Mr. Wong saw today! (Click the image to jump to the photo album and see the rest of them)
Posted by admin on Oct 10, 2008 in
Misc So now that it’s been a day and I’ve calmed down, let me tell you what it was like to visit Sysco – Freezer Division in Westbrook:
So we arrived for our 1100 hrs appointment time with a load of 6 pallets of ice cream… we go inside (there’s NO other trucks there) and they ask us if we want a lumper (I’ve explained this assenine procedure before so I won’t go into it again). They say it’ll be $110 to lump the load…we say, no thanks (well actually Charles did) and we decide to pull the pallets off ourselves.
Let me digress a moment and say that if the driver decides to lump a load, THEY get the lumper fee so it can be a decent way to earn a couple of extra bucks.
Well…the moment we said we didn’t want a lumper… a Sysco EMPLOYEE to lump the load, we started getting attitude from hell from this “Chris” there. Those 6 pallets needed to be broken down into 13 seperate “orders” / pallets… he starts “barking” orders of how the pallets are supposed to be placed on the floor (which direction) and then asks us (in a really condescending / smart-assed tone) “I supposed you don’t know how to read the Bill Of Laden (BOL) on how to break these down?” and explains to us how they’re supposed to be stacked.
So we set to breaking them down… about half-way through the 6 pallets he happens to walk by… and again with the attitude… “those are WRONG! You would’ve been better off getting a lumper!” and walks away…
Now mind you from what we can tell, not only is this asshole what appears to be the Supervisor of the receiving dock and a Sysco Employee…but we think he was more pissed that we didn’t pay HIM the lumper fee to break these pallets down.
during the whole time, you can almost hear the other Sysco employees and this “Chris” passing smart ass comments back and forth… we’re the only truckers there, the only non-Sysco employees there…and they would look or point at us and start laughing when one says something to the other while they go about whatever it was they appeared to be doing (which was really nothing other than checking on our progress).
So finally after about an hour or so, we get it all broken down… “Chris” comes along and tells us that we have to srink-wrap anything over two layers… okay… no problem.
Get that done… we’re finished…”Chris” comes along again and “barks” at us that “this, this and this” one (pointing to three different pallets of single layer product, “have to be wrapped”. Um..okay dude.
Get that done, move a couple of pallets around so that they’re pointing “the official direction”… Once again “Chris” barks at us that once he’s tagged a pallet that we can’t move them or the stickers will be fucked up. Um… huh? You tagged pallets before we were done with them? Whatever “dude”.
So Charles get him to sign the BOL’s and we’re outta there… head on out to the truck to send in we’re done… Charles notices that the guy hasn’t written his name in anything identifiable as english and we don’t have his name to send in on the QualComm…
Back inside I go and hear the guys in the break-room joking / complaining to each other how they didn’t get the lumper fees and what assholes we were etc. I walk up to “Chris” with the BOL’s and tell him I need him to write his name clearly please so we can send it in…
He says to me; “I suppose you don’t have a pen?” Well…of course I do and start to pull it out… the MOMENT my pen is clear from my shirt… he whips HIS out of his jacket and forcibly scratches CHRIS on the BOL’s after he snatched them from me, then stuffs them back into my hand and turns around.
Bottom line… if this is the way this asshole treats all truckers that come in there and choose not to PAY the Sysco employee to remove THIER product from a truck is a really shitty representation of Mainers and I’m ashamed to be living in the same state! Lastly… I apologize to any trucker out there that comes to Maine and get this asshole… really, we ARE much more personable and friendly than that jackass and don’t think we’re all like him in any way.