It seems as if hotmail has deleted my account with them, but as I logged on it gave it back to me sans addresses and any email I might have had.
Lot of stuff has happened, some of which are worth blogging but most not. I have written a lot in my notebook/journal, but the quicknotes are what I wanted to blog, though not at this time. Probably a bit later tonight. Going to go get beer and maybe have a gin & tonic or two.
I really just want to go for a walk, so might as well go to the liquor store.
A really quick run of the series of unfortunate events that happened in the past week (which really pales in comparison with the plethora of gold material that I have noted about my trainer).
Truck gets called in for a way overdue service check so we take a load from Calexico, CA to Seattle, WA and plan on taking the truck in the shop there. On the way there, the shocks break so the truck needs to be fully serviced. It's a Friday with less than a week left of training and they tell us they can't get to it until Monday and may not be ready until Wednesday. I'm happy, because I can just hang out in Seattle for a while. This does not sit well with my trainer who goes through hoops to get a loaner truck to go through with the newly acquired Seattle, WA to Spring Meadows, IL run. We get an older truck whose engine brake works sporadically.
The engine brake basically slows you down by just releasing the accelerator leaving your brakes free which really is there for mountains so you don't burn your brakes and lose them going down the steep grades which surrounds Washington, Oregon, Idaho, parts of Montana...
We take the load to Illinois and get an emergency load from Des Moines to Denver. On the way my trainer gets pulled in to a scale house and forgets the permit book there so we have to go back to get it. Instead of getting it then, they give us a load to two southern Colorado cities. Then from on of those cities again up to Cheyenne, WY. Then from Loveland, CO to (gulp) Grand Junction, CO which, unless your truck can fly, places you on the I-70 through the Rockies. I wouldn't be so concerned if a) We had a reliable engine brake and b) it wasn't snowing.
Through a long and arduous journey through the mountains we get a load going back the other way. This is about the time that I should be getting off the truck and on our own. Instead, we're routed to Gary, IN to go back past the scale house to pick up the permit book.
When we get there that night, they're closed so we have to stay at a truck stop overnight, further delaying us. We wake up before the crack of dawn the next morning to get it and, a pity, we just missed it. They mailed it to our main terminal the day before. This is stupid because the entire past four days of runs we for nothing since the reason we were given those ones were to try to get us back to the scale house to get the permit book which we needed to take back to Seattle to get our regular truck to drive back to Denver to release me from trainee status.
So we take the load to Gary and get another one back to Seattle. Only thing is we have to wait till the next morning to get loaded. Another wasted night. At this point, Jeanne is already in Denver getting released with nothing to do but wait for me.
Once loaded, we fucking haul our asses back to Washington to switch trucks and get me back to Denver. We did it fairly quickly and even got our load unloaded three days early, which we were told there was no way to. So everything's looking fine, but with the way things were going, I should've been worried. We are about to get our load to take back to Denver when, shit, the trailer brakes lock up and they need to fix the air leak and change tires. No problem, only eight hours to do this.
Once that's done, I'm ready to go but my trainer's talking his fucked up politics with the mechanic for 45 minutes, so I listened to Andre 3000 on "Fresh Air." We get to the shipper and they're closed, but the trailer's there so I pull it out of the dock and switch with my empty one and set aside so the next morning, all we do is get the paper work and jet.
Everything's going well, but I figure I should back the trailer into an empty dock and bobtail through town and hang out. As I do this, this trailer's, a completely different one from the previous one's, brakes lock up and the tire blows. So not only can I not go into town now, it will further delay us from completing our runs. This fix takes 12 hours. Finally we're on our way and I just expecting more things to happen.
Nothing really does except through Idaho there were extreme wind conditions topped with wind gust of 40-45 mph, which is not good to drive in if you have a light load and aren't too experienced a driver. Two things I definitely do not lack. I drive 30 mph from Boise to Snowville, UT.
We switch there and I go to sleep hoping everything will turn out all right. It does and we get back to Denver. I get scheduled to take my driving test the next day. Okay. I wake up to six inches of snow and snow still heavily pouring. Great.
I passed my test, even though the yard was so fucked up and packed with trailers, after all these attempts to back into ridiculous spaces and parallel park into even more ridiculous spaces.
I get released the next day but the truck's in the shop again. We take it out late and head to Boulder for a few hours to get stuff and hang with Shane. We do and it's fun, but we have to drive back to Denver early the next morning to set up our days off with the step-in driver manager and do our load to get to Omaha.
We get to the terminal the next day and through a long series of misunderstandings and miscommunications, we get the go ahead to take our truck and do the load. We go and after we fill up our fuel, our truck computer (which we use for everything with our load assignments, communicate with the terminal, get directions, basically the only way you're able to do your job is with this shit) dies. So we get told to pick up our load and bring it back to get serviced.
Reluctantly we do and we sit for five hours....
We're in Omaha now. I'm going to the liquor store and I'll be back later.
Peace.
