 |
|
|
|
|
...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
|
Trip 30 - New GMC - Refer ... to Dallas, TX Trip 30b - Used GMC - Pick-up ... from Weatherford, OK Trip 30c - New Peterbuilt - Garbage Truck ... from Waterloo, IA Things are ... slow, but I guess no one wants to run ... Talked to a couple of drivers who run full time ... are still running full time. ... AND ... dispatch called ME, which always means that they are short drivers ( Wednesday they ask me shuttle a truck 1 of 3 Spokane trucks to the office ... as of Friday they still have not found drivers for any of them ) 1/22/04 - 8:30 dispatch ... our trucks were supposed to be at the office, so we should be on our way to Dallas before nine ... sure. I usually try to be there 15 - 30 minutes early but not today, so I fit right in ... not prepared. Am going to be training another a new driver ... looks like they are still hiring drivers weekly ... our 'help wanted' sign has been out front for about six months, plus the ads they are running in the paper (I see our main competition in town is hiring also.) The original plan was to deliver two trucks to Dallas, a rental car to OKC, pick up a pickup, drive to Waterloo IA, pick up a garbage truck bring both home ... the trip should take about 32 hours (three 11 hour days) no problem ... But ... I see that the truck I am picking up is going to Spokane ... and I have been wanting to get out there since the day I started, so I ask about delivering it instead of bring it to the office ... "It's yours if you want it ..." I had my wife do a quick check of this website to find out what these trucks have been paying, the price was right so I was thinking about it ... in my mind, I'd have a good start on my way to WA instead of dropping it at the office, knock off most of the rest of the miles on Sunday, drop Monday AM, spend $100 to fly home ... easy money. "We need you to drop off a driver in Waterloo." (Which will add two hours to my trip.) ... oh yeah ... it was 13 below this AM with a good wind chill ... so the other drivers 'pre-trip' training was very brief ... by 9:30 we are rolling, only an hour late ... that's one of the things I hate about the new hours of service ... If you get a late start the first morning, there is little or no way to get an early start the rest of the trip ... 14 hours on duty - 10 hours off. WRONG ... that was before they wanted me to drop a driver, and before I would find out about OKC ... then I found out the cheep airfares are out of Portland and Seattle, not Spokane ... $400+ ... a couple of hours of thinking it over and I called dispatch and told them to find someone else if they could. The good news on this trip is we have dual pro-pain tanks ... 450 miles between stops, and the trucks were full at pickup ... The running part of the trip is getting less memorable ... this is my fourth trip to TX in six months. I drop the guy in Waterloo ... I should have made him drive the extra two hours it cost me, we could have still done this trip 'legal' ... instead we have to shut down short tonight, we only made nine hours of forward progress. Had hoped we would be south of OKC the first night, instead we push hard and only get to Wichita. Had took the new guy we would stop at the first IA rest area before we parted way (for me to drop off the third driver) ... instead we stop before the IA line ... I couldn't see driveaway plates or placards ... one of those things I didn't check before we left the lot ... good thing we stopped, he didn't have them displayed and the scale was open ... In reality, we didn't loose anytime ... I had sent the new driver on his own to the Des Moines Flying-J, hoping he'd be fueled by the time I got there two hours later ... instead, he is just done fueling and hasn't had time to eat yet. Seems he's another 'ComCheck' guy and starting fueling BEFORE asking if they took ComCheck ... lucky for him they let him leave ... get cash ... and come back, took him the two hours ... but at least I didn't have to wait for him. We didn't spend much time stopped, fueled every 4-6 hours ... then stopped in Wichita for the night. Found a coupon for a $44 for a Days Inn ... but the restaurants within walking distance were closed ... ended up at a Applebee's ... so much for trying 'local cooking.' 1/23/04 - Eat too much, too late ... not really hungry for breakfast, but the hotel had free breakfast so I eat anyhow ... cold cereal, a cup of yogurt but passed on the hot grits ... By the time we get to OKC we can tell we shouldn't need anymore fuel on this trip ... if I hadn't lost the two hours yesterday we wouldn't have ended up in Dallas close to rush hour. We end up behind in stop-n-go traffic ... then merging four lanes down to two because of an accident, but just as we get up to the crash site ... the last guy was running back to pick up the cones and open all lanes ... That cost us about a half hour and the customer let us know it ... seemed to be good hearted about it. Called the cab as soon as we located the drop, with only 14 hours a day we had no time to waste ... When the cab dispatcher asked me "Which airport?" it should have been a clue ... Our dispatch had said the cab ride would be 'cheep' ... $35 didn't sound cheep, but I hadn't asked an amount. At the airport they couldn't find my reservation that the office had made, so I had to call in ... seems I picked the wrong airport ... the office said I would have to go to the other one ... "Not after spending $40 to get to this one I'm not ..." Ended up renting one myself ... hadn't planned on it so I hadn't grabbed my 'Avis Preferred' info ... it was $15 cheaper here than the other airport. (Now that I'm BACK HOME, I checked and there was an Avis location 20 miles closer than either the one I went to, or the one they reserved the car at) got to start being my own travel agent. The other driver offers to drive and I let him ... and he ends up missing I-635 / the shortest way out of town ... so we end up going to OKC via Fort Worth ... may have been just as short, or could have cost us a lot of time, hard to tell in rush hour traffic ... which we shouldn't have been in to start with ... Trip 30bUsed GMC - Pick-up ... from Weatherford, OK Now I have to call our customer in OKC ... except he's not really in OKC ... he's in Weatherford ... 80 miles west of OKC ... add another 2 - 3 hours to this trip :) :) :) ... see how I'm smiling ... this is going to turn into a four day trip ... and we are now going to be picking up the vehicle at 9 PM on a Friday night, not the 4 O'clock we had originally said ... another guy that let us know we were a little off on our timing ... So far, I had been the leader ... all the new guy had to do was follow the back of my reflectorized truck ... now he wanted to lead with the rental car ... shouldn't be a problem, we were back tracking where we had just been, even talked about which gas station to stop at ... just west of OKC there were four truck stops at one exit less than five miles from the airport. He doesn't stop ... just keeps driving, right up to the passenger drop off ... I didn't really loose it (I hope) ... just opened his door and said "We're not paying $3-5 per gallon, we need to find a gas station." His response was "I didn't see any ... don't they have one here?" ... not many airports have gas stations on premises ... I had him follow me, until we found one. With the car dropped we are out of hours ... to make it back home Saturday we would have made it back to Wichita tonight, three hours away. Again I was looking in the discount flyers for cheep hotels, found a couple, but we would have to back track a couple of miles ... instead we pushed ahead. Found a Motel 6 for $29 / Single ... being a Friday night it cost us $38 for the two of us. As a added perk, there was a Waffle House right next door ... I thought we'd be eating here again in eight hours so tonight I have waffles with my meal .... not sure what was the cause, but something I ate didn't agree with me ... that's kind of why my diet doesn't change much on the road ... 1/24/04 - No wake up call needed with the new hours of service ... wasn't really hungry, but the other driver was so I went and had a light breakfast ... it came with grits, but a half a spoonful was enough for me ... A 'cheerful' bunch of help, someone greeted everyone as they came and left ... and overheard the cook say he'd just completed 20 years at this location and planned on staying another 20 ... as a fry cook ... wow. Missed out on a little down time yesterday ... sometime after we went through OKC yesterday AM and before we got back last night, I-35 was closed for a while ... someone rolled a cement truck ... hope it wasn't a new one ... I know one of our drivers did that a couple of years back ... lost the account ... got the account back a few months later ... first truck out, driver showed up drunk ... lost account again ... forever??? We did have more good news last night, the pickup we are moving had 3/4 of a tank of fuel ... the boss was picking up the cost on this one, but it still saved us a fuel stop. Been this way enough to know that you want to fuel before leaving OK, we stopped at the last exit before the KS line ... at the station the other driver was staring at the fuel pump so I pushed the 'Pay Inside' and the 'Regular grade' buttons and went inside, when he as done filling I paid and we were on our way ... a few miles down the road when I was doing our paperwork I noticed that somehow he had reset the pump from 'Regular' to 'Mid-grade' ... from $1.45 to $.157 ... he acted clue-less when I asked him how / why. To keep it fair we traded off driving every two hours or so ... this was definitely a bonus run, hope he doesn't think this is the way it always is ... instead of paying $120 plus fuel to get home, we were getting paid $170 fuel paid, not bad for a days work ... Stopped in Lebo, KS to switch drivers ... one of those little truck stops in the middle of nowhere ... a couple of teenagers sitting against the building, wrapped in their blankets, no idea what that was about ... didn't see any luggage or any sign this was a bus stop. Also saw a road atlas that may interest a few of us drivers ... Universal has one in ... large print. Under the old rules of being able to log off duty during a shift, I think I would have stopped at Stroud's on our way through KC ... but we are going to be over hours the way it is ... all in all, an uneventful day so far. Did see a couple of things of interest ... a stack of tractors, being towed by a wrecker ... and about a dozen vans in transit, looked to be maybe Hertz or Ryder in color ... seen maybe a dozen other vehicles in transit ... Even though we are running behind we keep it 'mostly legal' ... holding our speed to with 10% of the posted, even though we are getting past by more cars than we past ... but out here there isn't much for car's and we don't want to risk it ... until ... we get to Des Moines ... I'm driving and getting passed, not just by an occasional car but by every one ... so I kicked it down ... didn't want a ticket for obstructing traffic ... these guys were moving, not just 10, 20, or 30% over either ... they were cruising. I held with them for most of the next hour ... If we had been moving at this speed all day we'd be home on time tonight ... finally the traffic thinned ... finally the last car I was following exited ... it was a 60+ year old woman. I slow down to a more a reasonable speed and start getting passed again, I try to follow the first few but they had to be doing 40% over ... I don't know, I couldn't / wouldn't keep up. Finally we are within an hour of our next customer when the other guy offers to drive again ... I try to catch a couple of winks, not too likely in a pickup ... I've tried all day, the other guy succeeded for a while. He knows what city we are going to ... when we get close, tell him it's marked as the 'Industrial park' exit ... soon we see the sign 'Industrial Park' second exit, I start looking for my paperwork and the next thing I see is our exit going by "Weren't we supposed to turn here?" I ask ... "No, it's the next one." Wrong, we had missed it ... loosing more time ... then when we do exit via a clover leaf, we should have just stayed in the right lane and caught the cloverleaf back onto the freeway ... wrong again ... He suddenly bolts to make a left turn onto the frontage road ... ??? ... I didn't ask, he didn't explain ... I just guessed as to what backroads we should make to get to the customer ... all in all, this guy was a good guy to run with ... I'm sure there were stories going around about my first time out ... Trip 30cNew Peterbuilt - Garbage Truck ... from Waterloo, IA More good news, my garbage truck is plugged in ... we weren't so lucky on a shuttle run I did Tuesday ... it took us over two hours to get our trucks started ... had to find someone with a space-heater to heat up the fuel lines / engine / etc of each of four trucks ... I would have liked one of those runs ... going from 20 below to ... West Palm Beach, FL. My truck checked out, needed to fuel and get going ... on my last run with one of these Peterbuilt's I got 6 mpg, on an earlier run I had gotten over 7 mpg ... so I wouldn't need a full tank of fuel ... but a couple hours down the road I would have to fuel again, am getting somewhere between 4 and 5 mpg ... that's in the flat lands ... and these trucks are going to Spokane ... through them there mountains ... averaging may be 4 mpg or less ... other than the milage, these trucks are a nice run ... I may offer to take more than one. |