It’s 12:30am Saturday and I should be sleeping, but who needs sleep when there is another night owl in the house? Not me, that’s for sure. I think it has to do with the fact that the last few days have not been good days for me and having someone to talk to, about anything even if it’s unrelated is a stress reliever for me.
My day was hijacked yesterday and then again today. I’ve spent the last week trying to get things done for Rapunzel’s birthday and instead spent hours on the phone trying to figure out what’s going on with Shawn’s disability insurance (which is a whole new post on it’s own) and when he was going to be home.
Being told over and over again that you’ll be home on Saturday is great except when your family plans on leaving town Friday night, and they want to send you back to Phoenix, meaning that you’ll be home some time Saturday, but no real idea of when.
I know that Shawn has a job with a pretty unreliable schedule. They can’t say you can go home at 5 because who knows where you’ll be at 5. Even though he basically goes from LA to Phoenix the times are always different for getting and delivering a load. You can’t predict traffic accidents, if the scales will be open, if the trailer will have a flat tire or a broken tail light. All those little things add up to more and more time that it takes to get home.
Throw a dispatcher that is not your own, because it’s the weekend and things that were set in motion are suddenly stopped, thrown out the window, and than ran over for good measure. Night/weekend dispatch isn’t good for anything but testing your patience and blood pressure. I know you think I’m exaggerating but I’m not, really.
When drivers have an empty trailer they’ll say that they’re hauling motorcycle doors, sailboat gas, and dispatcher brains. Dispatchers are quite frequently guys with some sort of schooling, so they’re smart, but they know next to nothing about actually driving a truck. It is a rare thing to find a dispatcher that has driven before and knows what really goes on. So when you have a great dispatcher, like Shawn does, and then he gos home and you have to deal with the “Other” it’s quite frustrating.
The “Other” doesn’t care that you don’t pick up your next load for 24 hours and you want to go home because you only live an hour from the terminal, and your car is parked 20 feet from you. No, they want you to stay there. They also don’t care that your load was overweight so you had to go back to the shipper and have them unload the trailer and then reload it more evenly. All this means that the hours you had to drive the load at least party way to where it was going have now been spent 15 minutes from the terminal.
Is any of this Shawn’s fault? No. Did he tell them how to load the load? No. Did “Other” actually do anything productive like tell him to take his load to the terminal before he ran out of hours? NO.
All of this did not help my mood today. Lucky for me Shawn took matters into his own hands and just drove back to the terminal before he was out of hours.
I know that sounds weird so I’ll explain. A driver has 11 hours that he can drive for the entire day. He can drive it all at once or in spurts but he can’t drive more that 11 hours. A driver also has 14 hours in which to do his loading/unloading/driving in. At the end of the 14 hours he has to take a mandatory 10 hour break. (10+14=24)
Here’s an example:
A driver starts driving at 12 pm.
At 4 pm he stops for fuel and checks his lights. He has a burnt out headlight. He goes to the shop.
They don’t finish his truck until 12 pm.
At 12 pm he starts to drive again.
At 2 am he has to stop for the day and take a 10 hour break. It doesn’t matter that he’s only driven 6 out of 11 available hours. He’s been up working for 14 hours.
For some reason “Other” can’t comprehend this. Considering that it’s their job to understand how it all works and make sure that the drivers have enough time to get the load to where it needs to be on time, they mess up a lot. It’s bad when a driver has to tell a dispatcher he can’t deliver a load because his 14 hour clock is up and they say, “but you still have hours to drive.”
All those things combined put me in an excellent mood. It’s a good thing I’m medicated, because if I wasn’t I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the same room as me. If I could have taken a second pill today I would have. It was just that bad.
Lucky for me we made it to Bethany’s house in one piece. Though there were definitely a few mumbled growls coming from the driver, who was not Shawn, on the way down about traffic, and commuters, and people tailgating, and cutting me off, and would you just stop riding my @55 already I can’t go any faster than the car in front of me, and I can’t get over because there’s a whole slew of cars in the other lane, people.