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...My Life as 'Drive away' driver
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2024 03 13 MN ... spending the night at home No alarm, but we are up and watching the load board when they open. BB spends an hour (confirmed by her phone) on the phone with SS. Yep, 65 is coming up. Finally close to noon there are two short rentals. I call one dispatcher who says to call the other dispatcher. I call the 2nd one and he is at lunch and will call me back later (the down side of working with that terminal, it's like a part time hobby for them.) So we leave and run errands. Two hours later I still have not heard back. I call and they are just getting back to the office. Then we talk. The two trips I want are 12 miles each ... BUT ... the shipper will no longer give us those trips because the carrier is paying us/the drivers, $200+. Plus the carriers overhead. And we find out that that shipper is no longer going to be giving us 1,000+ mile trips because it is cheaper for them to flat bed them. More lost work. The short ones are great money, now we know they are <> gone. We never did a long trip so no lost to us there. So no work, but now we know. Would have been a great 3rd day for a good week. Later on our errand trip, we drop off my paperwork for my trash truck trip. That was our 'work' for today. Then we went for another walk before heading home. There is still a trip to IA on the load board but doesn't pay much. Two hours dead head to and two hours from and the trip is about an hour long. Better than staying home? Maybe. Load board US - 149 IA - 1 MN - 8 WI - 4 2024 03 14 MN 2 tank trucks to GA (Friday) ... spending the night at home We watched the load board. Nothing even worth calling on. Near the end of the working day, local dispatch calls with 2 trucks for me to stage. Then asks if another driver can ride with me. A while later they call and ask if a 3rd driver can ride with me one time. OK ... Not how we had planned on this going. BB had planned on not working part of this week and I would let them shuttle me if needed. That didn't happen for other reasons and now we are shuttling other drivers. BB shuttling me started because I didn't want to spend time in close spaces with other drivers. Now it has turned into something else. Pays better than sitting home, and now I have done three trucks for them and we still have two weeks left of the month. Load board US - 166 IA -0- MN - 20 WI - 4 2024 03 15 MN-MN 2 trank trucks to GA (staged) ... spending the night at home Up and rolling at our usual time. 7:30 AM. No frost on our windows, but from on some of the neighbors cars and houses. 8 AM at the office, both other drivers are already there. Only one dispatch on time and they come out to say hi as we have not met before. She has now been there three months. We talk about which accounts are hers. She now does the buses, when there are some. Sounds like there should be 60 foot buses for Canada before the end of the month. Maybe ... I will ride the shuttle to Crookston if I am in town. We all pile into our car and head out. Two old timers. One has been around since we were at the old location but we must not have run together much. We also gave him a ride back from Duluth last year. The other driver started his first time about the time when I did, but he has had 'green card' issues a couple of times so now has a later start date. The shipper has changed their office again. When they first changed our contact, there were four people in this office. Now there is one. And she has a stand up desk ... We sign for all our trucks and get all our keys so we don't have to come back in unless there is an issue. I check my Peterbilt first ... somehow it went into a 'pre-trip cycle.' Not sure if I hit a button to cause it to do that or if that is something it is set up to do automatically. (Pre-trip cycle - the lights go from off to on, low to high, flashers, back-up lights) As soon as I moved a few feet they went off so I could do my pre-trip. It may be helpful for some drivers working alone but we have a 'routine.' Also doing it on 'auto' I don't know if the right blinker is turning on when I turn the left blinker on ... that has happened before on new units. First truck has over a quarter tank of fuel so I do not fill. Sometimes I have, but not today. Company pays all fuel so makes no difference to the driver other than time. 35 miles one way from this customer. $ doesn't make it worth doing, just trying to stay active with the company. We stage our trucks at the office and two of us head back and do it over again. My second truck is a Mack. Both going to GA. Would be a nice trip but BB can't ride with me with that carrier as she does not work for them. They thought they might have another truck for me but that got pushed until Monday pickup. This carrier got dumped on with Dodge Center trucks also. IA did put out a couple of good trips to CA today but not at the same time and we are going to <> stay home. No short work for our long haul carrier today so I close my log paperwork and we call it a day. I do call on a MN-IN truck to find out the pay. The trip is only 600 miles so we do not want to pick up today and have three nights hotels. And they are only open M-F so no weekend pickup. Money is OK, so we may call on Saturday for a Monday pickup. We do need to keep working. Just because I have had to sign up for SS doesn't mean the money starts rolling in. Two of the trucks from KS to MN are back on the load board. BB and I could each do one and the money would be OK but that would take a lot of shuttling on both ends. Load board US - 130 IA -0- MN - 13 WI -0-
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