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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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2023 06 21 MN-WI 1 trash truck to Muskego WI (delivered) 1 box truck to Fridley MN (Thursday) ... spending the night at Janesville WI Awoke to an alarm this AM. :( We are out of the house just about on time. One and a half hours to Dodge Center. No issues. Dispatcher is sitting on his deck when we get there, with a walker. We've guessed he wasn't doing well but still don't know the how or why. Paperwork says the name of the drop. The drop has lime green trucks. There are four in the shippers lot. It is the first one I look at, doesn't happen when it is -40 out. Truck all checks good, in and out in 30 minutes. When I turn in my paperwork I see that my local company has already picked up today, about a half dozen of them. I call the drop, or try to. The number on the paperwork is dis-connected. The number listed online has a few basic choices ... residental pickup, commercial pickup, dumpster request, make a payment. No way to get to a live person. I've tried faking it before but without an account number or a address to create an account number I can't get past the computer. Not sure if I could with that info. I don't try this time. Truck has AC and runs at 65 mph. It does not have cruise. For some reason it seems to be a rougher ride than usual. And the mirrors aren't mounted for good visibility. Oh yeah, as soon as I reach road speed the alarms start going off. For the next 300 miles. Sensor's that are not set correctly. No traffic issues, just a long ride. 1st stop is for fuel after 200 miles. At the TA in DeForest. I watch to make sure that I am not really hitting anything as the alarms could be correct. No waiting for fuel. Last trip I put in 44 gallons and left too much fuel at delivery. This time I put in 33 gallons and still left too much fuel. My first thought was to put in 24 gallons but then the gauge dropped to below half and I re-did the math. I text BB of my location, she calls back. We confirm we still want the Fridley trip for our return trip. After filling, I pull ahead and then go in and get my receipt. When I come back, the truck has done an idle shutdown. When I re-start, I have a warning light on. So I park and call dispatch. Run with it. I call the Fridley dispatcher and get the trip. 100 miles to go to the drop. Once I pull out, I remember that I haven't called the drop for my canceled trip. He had offered to stay late so I could get delivered today. He answers. He has not heard the trip was canceled. News to both of us. I have now looked at the drop location, two basic turns and an exit number. GPS says side streets but staying on the interstate is much easier and only adds 10 miles. I almost stop to look again at directions once I am out in the farm fields but don't. And I do find it. The drop does a quick walk around, signs and takes pictures of my paperwork. Once we re-park out of the way, I call the shipper for tomorrows trip. Then we are off. There are a dozen hotels in town but we stay at the Quality Inn again. This time we walk to the Road Dawg. Small bar (?) There are about a dozen people there today and room for another dozen. Not at all like the large restaurant with the same name in Beloit. Food was good, I had a Philly with a side of curds and BB had a burger. All good. Then we went for a walk in the almost 90 degree heat. And I tried again to print my one paperwork and then the help tried to print it. Then they called someone and were going to have me print it on the front desk computer again. I offered to email it to then instead so we did that. All the other Janesville trips are gone now, first time in two weeks. Not sure how many RV trips IA put out as we were both driving most of the day. MN only has one trip that might work for us for Friday. Last time we didn't commit until we had dropped in Fridley. We will likely do the same thing tomorrow. Loadboard US - 150 IA - 2/1 MN - 4 WI - 4 Seeing we just did this same trip last Thursday it hopefully will go even better tomorrow. Pickup, now we know where and how. Put in more fuel right here where fuel is cheapest. And we know where the drop is. We dropped at 3 PM last week, hoping for a few minutes earlier tomorrow. There is still one truck in MN going to NE that we could do, if it is still there after we drop. Otherwise it would have to be something new. 2023 06 22 WI-MN 1 box truck to Fridley MN (delivered) 1 trash truck to Des Moines IA ... spending the night at Albert Lea MN We go down for breakfast. Everything is empty, no eggs, no meat, no milk. We take 2 of the last 3 yogurts. I go to the front desk and stand there, they don't look up from their phone until I say something. Once I tell them things are empty, they go to the prep room, I ask them how long. "12 minutes on the eggs." I went back down after 15 and everything was still empty, and then I see two people in the prep room??? When we went to check out, then things had been re-stocked. No bacon now, sausage. I took a piece, good but too much grease to eat alone. We head to the shipper, this time we know where to go (kind of.) I'm the only one at the window and when closed the window is a mirror, or acts as one. Someone does come to the window after a few minutes. Not the same person as last week and not the same type of person. They got the job done but seemed to not know the routine. Once we were done with the paperwork I asked where the truck was. Last time it was off site. This time it is here and they will bring it up to me. So, I walk back to the car and we drive to where we saw drivers prep'ing their trucks last wee and parked so we could see anyone coming. After 15 minutes I saw a car leaving with 'tow lights' on it. So ... I decided maybe I should get out of the car and look around. My truck was parked where we had been before. Just sitting there running in the travel lane. For how long we don't know. Truck is already running so I don't bother checking the fluids. And I don't shut it off as I don't know if they had to jump this one also to get it started. Not sure the build dates on the boxes but the chassis VIN's are consecutive. Fuel on this side of the freeway is the same as the other side where we fueled last time. Now I know how much fuel I will need and this is the cheapest fuel so I plan on putting it all in here. That was the plan. But the tank is not big enough. I wanted to put in 36 gallons but only 30 gallons will fit. That should be enough to get me near my drop and then I'll only need to add what I need. Oh ... not sure what happened but I charged my smart phone last night and I thought it showed 100% so I took it off the charger before going to sleep. When I wanted to look at my phone this AM the screen showed '0%' and the plug in icon. Sooo I am the day without that phone. No biggie right? Except all my phone numbers are on that phone and all my texts go to that phone. So I have to look up my phone numbers before I can make my calls to dispatch and the drop. We head out ... I don't stop for three hours. 1st stop is the rest area in Black River Falls. I need to call the 'drop' two hours before delivery. It is not the actual drop, it is a 3rd party acting on behalf of the drop. Somewhere about by Madison I am driving along and I see a tire bouncing across the three lanes of traffic. No idea where it came from. No one stopped. Not sure if it was a complete tire or just the outer re-cap. It was enough of a tire to roll. At the shipper I had taken my truck pictures with my flip phone, not sure how I get them off of there. Now at the rest area I take a couple more on my notepad. BB had also taken pictures with her phone. I guess she didn't think mine would be good enough? I text BB, she had gone to the town of Black River Falls so she could get some shelf food from Kwik Trip. Too start with I thought I was getting great mileage, 50 miles before the gauge moved. And by the time I got to the MN border I still had more fuel than last time. But this time it kept dropping. So when I get to the last fuel station before the drop I put in 2+ more gallons. Later BB reminds me that I am to leave these at 1/8 not the 1/4 I have done the last two trips. That would have been another $20 each trip in my pocket. When I get to the last traffic signal before the drop, I pull up behind BB. We haven't been running together but I assume we have always been close. This time the guy from the office doesn't want to walk down to look at the truck so he just asks the dock guy to sign off. He does, without even seeing the truck sitting there. He does walk out when I do so now he knows there is a truck there. The trip I had wanted going from MN to NE was taken sometime between the last time I looked and when I dropped. Now we have nothing and no where to go. BB has not seen any RV's put out today but she only looked when she was stopped at rest area's. We take a chance and head south. I had mentioned heading north to Sweet Taste of Italy but that is out of route and a sit down place. Instead we will at least be in position. BB wasn't hungry when we dropped but by the time we got to Burnsville she was ready for a Honey Baked sandwich. We sat and ate ... A TRIP TO IA SHOWS UP. I try to dial it ... but we have to look up this phone number first also. I do get the trip but the dispatcher doesn't know how he'll get the paperwork ready. (I think he is in pretty rough shape) Finally he thinks of a way, someone who should be around his house (?) So we can get the truck yet tonight. We weren't quite done eating so we finished before we left. At some point after we had dropped, IA did put out 14 RV's. Lots of them to nice places like CA and FL but we don't have time. All RV's are gone within 15 minutes. So they could be putting a lot of trips out, they just go very, very quickly. We get to the dispatch office and my paperwork is there. (It looks like someone in early grade school is putting my name on the last two trips but my guess is it is the dispatcher) At the office I pull out the paperwork to find my truck number. I am missing half my paperwork. I call dispatch, no answer. Then I get a message to text them. Yup, texting from my text phone and I don't know where the erase function is. And no reply. Finally I go into the shipper building and there on the wall they have extra's of the forms I need. Just wasted a bunch of time. Glad we were not in a rush. ... and the truck is the last place we look this time. Both BB and I were looking for sales numbers instead of the VIN we had. So we looked at all the trucks a second time before doing the last row. That was were my truck was. No truck issues. We had a few options of where to stay. The cheapest place would be the Quality Inn. It has food attached, not an issue for tonight. And it has a big lot but one time we had a bed that sagged in the middle. The Best Western is a little more but out of route more miles and I may need to park on the street. The Comfort Inn is the best but they are not giving any discounts anymore so almost twice the price. Then we look at points. <> their rewards price is what we pay for a lake front room on the North Shore. We do end up paying the listed price. Before this leg of the trip this has been one of our best paying trips. Ever. And doing local work. Once we are checked in for a while we go for a walk. Then get me some juice and ice cream at the truckstop next door. Load board US - 151 IA - 1 MN - 10 WI - 6 We have about 150 miles to go in the AM before delivery. I can't find how much fuel I need to leave in this truck so I will need to call dispatch in the AM. Not likely we will get any more work tomorrow. About they only thing that would work would be one of the rental trucks that we can deliver late or on Saturday.
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