Back In The Saddle

EscaLADE!

By the saddle I mean Gary of course.  I got pegged by a rock on the way back up home last week, thanks to the dude in the Escalade passing me doing 80 and effectively kicking a golf ball in my face.  3/4" crack 2" below my straight line.  Between that, the rear toolbox panel peeling off, and my drivers seat back being angled 10 degrees to the right and screwing up my back for the last 4 months (Somehow I only noticed it 3 weeks ago), it was time to head in for some work.

I just happened to land on the weekend that 4 techs were on staff, 1 of which was assigned to trailer repair.  I have to give them credit for staffing the shop 7am-2am 7 days a week, but there are only so many tractors that 3 guys can fix in a weekend.  Considering that number was about 7 I can't say I could have done the same.  So I got done with my run which took me from Southboro to just down the street in South Holland, IL.  It was a 5 hour unload so while I spent 6 hours there I was surely losing my place in line here at the terminal.  When all was said and done I handed them the keys at 1pm on Saturday.

Well, fast forward to about 20 minutes ago, I was up and ready to head in and start another long day in the lounge and I got a knock on the door.  "Door 31 whenever you're ready"  So alone and back upstairs I am now, a far cry from what it was all weekend.  Looked kind of like a Superbowl party without the food... or beer.  Shoot the shit about our jobs, watch bad Sci-Fi original movies, Law and Order, and Nascar.  The satellite package they have is rather limited here, though it is a nice HD box.  Next time I'm at Wal-mart I'm getting a $30 dvd player and bringing in Christmas in July.

I estimate it will be about... 6 hours before they're done here. Though we've gone from 3 techs to 23 techs they are very... thorough. 

No Sleep Till Brooklyn

Recap?  Well when we last left our heroes Matti and Sheila, they were on a quest taking them to the perilous and dreaded streets of the Bronx.  Or so the Prologue said.  In reality, Taking a semi into the Bronx at 3am isn't really a challenge.  The truck routes are numerous and well marked, and with a little help from Google Street View the night before it was like I had already been there.  Easy $75 bonus.  Funny how I get $50 for a Canada crossing but $75 for a NY/Long Island run.  Should be the other way around.  I pulled up to the empty curb with the other trucks, (first time I was ever happy to see a "No parking 1-5am sign) checked in, and they said the other 2 trucks were ahead of me and they'd come get me.  I went back, passed out, and was woken up by the sun in my eyes and about 20 minutes after that, a knock on the door.  Maneuvering into the place was also cake, even though it was 2 and a half hours past appointment (and 1 past receiving hours) and there were significantly more cars on the street.  I don't know what happened to truck #1, but #2 and myself couldn't have been at the dock for more than 15 minutes each.  Ice cream spill, somebody tripped, who knows.  Whatever it was it made me late for my last stop in Trenton, whose receiving hours are STRICTLY 6-9am.  I arrived at 10.   Nice of them to set me up with overnight parking and get me first in line in the morning.

Freakin' Space Terrorists

Though that 15 hour setback had screwed up the initial plan to get me home on Saturday.  Better luck next time but at least it was sunny this time.  Also, Prometheus wasn't the most badass piece of the Alien franchise, but worth a watch for fans of the first movie.  There were some hallmark moments reminiscent of the 1979 masterpiece but there was a serious lack of  Lance Henricksen.  Thanks Pat for buying our tickets, matinee is really the only way to go.

Six figures. Twice

That's the milestone Sheila will reach later today, at least.  200,000 miles.  Though it will be 45,800 with me behind the wheel.  Not too bad, considering I got my keys just shy of 5 months ago.  I haven't counted up the paid miles, though I'm sure its significantly fewer.  That's the trick to reaching 125,000 PAID solo miles.  That's the zip code to zip code formula.  Which in the case of picking up cranberries in Philly and dropping them off at the Bensalem yard, it works in my favor.  Z-Z it pays me 14 miles.  Physically its 2.3 miles around the block.  #winning.  On the flip side, whatever my final assignment ending point is + x miles to home time doesn't count.  Those miles aren't on my own dime, but they are on my own time.

Though I don't know my paid miles off the top of my head, my pay stub brought a startling realization this week.  My YTD gross surpassed the maximum potential of my perpetually part time job I held dear for so long.  Considering it was marked June 5th, that's pretty damn good.

Today my delivery takes me to a town I've seen on the map and on signs but never passed through.  Every time I do I think "Okay, there has to be a story there".  The unincorporated town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh- Eighty Four, Pennsylvania.  Much to my dismay, the story is pretty boring.  Its just the HQ of the 84 Lumber Company.  Much like the [former] industrial center of Gary, IN is named for the founder of US Steel, Elbert Gary.  My drop is on Eighty Four Drive, but its not at number 84.  Which is good, because there is probably a black hole behind that mailbox.

Anyway that's later this afternoon.  I shut down here last night but am only 2 hours out, and if I have to spend 18 hours anywhere, an Ohio Turnpike plaza is the place to do it.  Panera, KFC, Pizza Hut, BK, Starbucks, and free wifi.  All they need is a Dunks and a Cold Stone and they'd be all set.  I dragged my laptop in to do a bit of modeling but here I am of course, doing the important stuff.

The tricky part will be traversing through Pittsburgh for an inner-city pickup at 0700 tomorrow.  You'll probably find me rolling VERY early for that one.  What time of day is it easiest to do a ghetto run?

Dad and Unlce Dennis will be happy to know 20554 is behaving mostly fine, except for the ABS light showing its ugly face in stop and go traffic.  Oh wait, all our reefers do that.  nvm lol.  With the normal record of drop and hooks all the time I was sure I would have ditched this one by now, but here I am 8 days later and she's still following me.  As long as the shoes don't rust on me overnight we'll be good.  Given this is real life and not Far Cry 2, that shouldn't be a problem.

For pretty much everybody here clueless,  Far Cry 2 is a shooter where you go through the jungles in Africa and the designers at Ubisoft thought it would be realistic to have an MP5 or AK47 go from factory operating condition to rusty as an old shovel in 15 minutes.  No, literally 15 minutes.  I'm no chemist, but I'm calling bullshit.  And I think they know full well because they actually have a multiplayer map called "Rust".

Who'll Stop The Rain?

I've been doing okay with my getting home time every other weekend, and alternating between the house in NJ and back home in MA there's a decent interval between visits to each.  Well, the contrast in scenery is getting a little stale.

Summer in The Garden State

New England.  Just wait 5 minutes, right?

I seem to bring a 4-5 day binge of rain that parks itself until I leave.  The one upshot is that on this last tour of duty the wash bays in Gary and HQ seemed to be perpetually broken so Sheila never saw a drop of water.  But come on, once every 4 weeks and I get THREE washouts in a row now?
Well soon I'll be doubling those odds, this should be the last month I'm a physical resident of NJ.
Mr. Social Life machine GO

Still Alive

Gators gonna gait...

You knew that title was coming after a month and a half with no updates, didn’t you?  Let’s see, where was I since 3/26?  Tell ya where I haven’t been- NJ.  Back in for the weekend, but the last 2 times I managed to get home I got up north to MA.  1 hiccup in the chain of command and suddenly I get an assignment from Madison to San Antonio on a Wednesday.  “Well, guess I won’t be home for the weekend…”

 

Yea, somebody misplaced the memo apparently; the best thing that came of it was seeing The Avengers opening night, which kicks ass, btw.  Despite ending up getting a Monday-Thursday off that was a nice change of pace from the constant east-west runs on I-80, or the errand boy trips from Green Bay to Madison and back.  The pain was the reminder of just how old an invention ice cream is that being eons older than the standardization of the 53’ container.  Thus, access to these facilities are a little… ehh.

I enjoy seeing this in the plans

Blocking a 3-lane road with a 50mph limit (with assistance) was a very satisfying experience.  That is, only after approaching the wrong way up said one way street from a block down, because otherwise it would be a blindside.  Still, they don’t seem to be sending me to the nightmare places quite as much as they used to.  Google Street View is an invaluable asset in planning ahead.

I managed to save up a few bucks to get myself a mobile workstation, namely an ASUS G53S.  Beats the hell out of my rig about 3 fold, but doesn’t look half as good doing so.  I started working on a new model during a 14 hour layover at Vince Lombardi service plaza in NJ.  Finished that day with 25 seconds left on my 70.  Weekend coverage was all “Why the hell did you cut it so close?”  I’m all “I didn’t, ran the numbers and it equaled over 90 minutes of leeway” The one thing I had forgotten in planning this run from Hartford to Newark is that I-95 in CT, no matter what time of day, what day of the week, always manages to get unprovoked pockets of congestion, despite there being no significant interchanges or choke points for miles around.   

Faux News isn't the only place to get political commentary

What there IS a significant amount of is lack of overnight truck parking on I-95.  There is a Pilot in Milford, CT and heading south after that its 65 miles to VL Plaza, the northernmost one on the NJ Pike.  That’s pretty much it.  I reached the point of do or die in Milford, the numbers still looked good, so I made the call to keep going.  A few miles later CT said NOPE FU MATTI WELCOME BACK HAHA LOL LETS DO SOME RANDOM STOP N GO EVERY 8 MILES.   Ironically, I hardly stepped on the brakes the whole approach to the GWB, and had my foot on the floor after passing it.  It wasn’t just the numbers, the big reason I didn’t want to call it in CT is because I would have to traverse the GWB AND the NJ Pike early Sunday morning instead of 1300 like it was at the time on Saturday.  Weekend or not I don’t like doing cities unless it’s either before the sun comes up, or after noon.

The real kick in the ass is that dispatch receives my total hours in increments of 15 minutes from Sheila’s computer.  This is because their computers are built on the paper log foundation, which also logs in 15 minute increments.  Enter Qualcomm and Windows Truck PC, who wonderfully log with increments of FIVE SECONDS.   Biiiiiiiig difference between 15 minutes of play and 5 seconds.  They’ll never see increments of less than 15 minutes on their end, but they WILL see the red flag that goes off at 70:00:05

Despite all the zero tolerance, do I miss doing paper logs like we had to in training? 

…NOPE.

Spinners next time?

Product plugs!  This has been a long time coming, but a whole bunch have stacked up recently and I’ll be using for a while.

I’d like to thank uncle Don for recommending Nevr-Dull, taking care of the wheels and fuel tank crap.  Effortlessly dissolves all the mess into a fine greasy film that needs a whole bed sheet and a lot of elbow grease to get 3 square inches to a mirror shine.  But DAMN does it look good.

Don't know how high 13'6" is until you reach for it

Second is Dad for picking up Meguiar's Ultimate Compound for Sheila’s sunburn.  Sitting in a parking lot for 2 years paint oxidation runs pretty mean especially on fiberglass.  Works great with minimal effort, the biggest drawback is that its literally like applying a 5oz bottle of sunscreen to an elephant using only a napkin.  I’ve done all I can reach from the ground and steps, will need a pretty serious setup and a whole day to hit the roof.

Lastly, Prestone Bug Wash.  $1.89 a gallon at Wal-Mart and its clearly marked “Skin irritant avoid contact” Not “avoid prolonged exposure”, straight up do not touch.  That’s how you know it’s good.  It’s made to be used undiluted as windshield washer fluid, but I need to take it a step further.  In comes my multi-purpose pesticide spray bottle and she’s good to reach the mirrors, the visor, grille, headlights, everywhere those pesky bugs like to stick to.  I use that just before I drive through the auto wash bay in Gary and it works *almost* perfectly.

I’ll update as things progress, for now know that I’m hanging in there, having fun when I can, and in retrospect, making bank doing so.

The best laid plans

While the trucking business is all well and good, one of the unspecified points of this blog is to keep my ass on track with my original career goals. Thus, you get to read about my journey back towards video games from time to time. Don't act surprised- people who know me already knew this wasn't going to be permanent. Though its not exactly going to be done with next week, either. It's going to be ranted here because working in solitude for 2 weeks at a time does things to you if everything ferments inside that 7 square foot box. Both in your mind and the laundry basket.

And nothing motivates you to getting back in the business quite like these 2 things:
-Attending GDC (which I sat out on this year)
-The conclusion of this weekend's project:

I'm not sure I've ever heard of a video game trilogy whose conclusion was so disappointing that an overwhelming majority of fans rise up and dead seriously demand that it be re-made while the studio defends their decisions without a hint of regret.

While that would be nice and all, I'm content with refusing to accept what I saw as the ending, imagining my own variant, and convincing myself that is what I really witnessed yesterday. Funny enough, it was very easy to do so. You know how when you have a dream that seems like real life but some element is just so out of place that you can easily believe it wasn't real? Yea, that's kind of how this was.

Back to Rocksmith we go!

Back out at 0700 tomorrow, and time to start harassing dispatch about routing me up north for Easter weekend. And if it starts with a burnt out headlight, I know to start running this time.

Fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack.

So whats to say about a handful of runs between Wisconsin and the north eastern seaboard?  Well, not a ton since the weekend mudding.  I got  home, got my Mass Effect 3 fix, (and by got I actually mean started a long binge)  and shortly got ready to head out again.  Not before doing a quick Shoop of last weeks photo.  Say hi to my facebook header image.

Now I've been taking frozen cranberries from Philly several times now, but I have yet to actually visit an Ocean Spray facility.  Every time I get to or just past Gary I get a call for a relay and then get assigned elsewhere.  Maybe next time will be different.  At least I got a bit of nostalgia in the process, I got to do a switch at HQ, which I havent seen since the first week in December.  I couldn't stop to search for people because I was already behind thanks to some Chicago rush hour mess the night before.

Yesterday I had the best experience in Canada to date, second only to the niagra jet boat ride.  Form 7512b is my new weapon against shenanigans.  "United States - Canada Transit Manifest" says Matti came in with x stuff with seal x at x crossing and returns at y crossing with said seal intact.  Thank you very much have a nice day.  Enjoy your easy shortcut around Lake Erie and your $50 bonus.
The best part is, I fill out the form myself, don't have to contact anybody, and cross when I want to.

As long as I don't have to do any inbound/oubounds anymore I won't complain.  Seriously though people in the passener car lanes were taking longer than I was.  Good thing too, because there was no line no wait in the CMV lane.  I arrived within 40 minutes of my destination here in Rochester at 1430 yesterday.  Now what to do with this 22 hours of free time?

Tether wifi through my laptop, play a game genre that has historically been very well "offline", but thats ancient history now.  The world needs a full time internet connection so you can use the products that YOU paid for to prove that you didn't steal them.  But content protection is another day, another blog.  Suffice it to say, getting technologically ready to play ME3 for 9 hours yesterday was more difficult then switching on your Game Boy used to be. 

So yea, that was my St. Patricks Day this year.  No green beer this time.  I was disappoint.

Somebody help me root my phone so I can steal internet from Sprint.

Cold As Ice

Oh yea, that whole truck driving blog thing.  How could I forget?  Easy.  I didn't.  There is a fine line between forgetting and lack of motivaion.  At the end of each day I justified it as "oh, nothing new happened today".  Fact of the matter is, thats how the first week on reefer went.

I lost count of how many trips between eastern PA and central to northern WI I made since this tour started.  The 800 +/- mile stretch of I-80/90 that I used to dread in my road trips is now the highlight of a run.  Its the only time I can set the cruise at 60 and just sit back in the zone for 3 hours at a time and never have to worry about shifting for hills no matter how much I've got behind me.  Maximum wage ftw.

It's gotten to the point where I go by what anybody else would see as one of dozens indistinct crumbling barns or silos and think "Oh hey, I'm this far already!"  Also, every travel plaza has free shower suites for truck drivers, facilities which put Gary to shame, despite the lack of free towels.  Free shower every 40 miles?  I'm okay with this :)

So the week was a long slew of tight schedules taking a certain product of WI to the east coast and bringing back a whole lot of stuff I mix with vodka.  Its not a dedicated fleet per say but I certainly don't feel like such a mercenary anymore.  I don't mind consistency in this job, I really don't.  If things had been just running like they had on dry van for the rest of my time here I would still be feeling like every day was a transitional period from not knowing what I was doing to getting stuff down right the first time.  Its like every day feeling like the first again.  That SUCKS.

Just because the routine was coming together doesn't mean it was all good.  You know how when stuff is going so smooth, your kicking ass with 550+ mile days and you're like "damn, somethings GOT to mess this up"?

Yea Tuesday was one of those.  I was assigned to run couple of multi stops to distro centers in OH and IN, each with appointment times of either 3am, 4pm or 9pm respectfully.  How do you juggle the clusterF of  live unloads with inconsistent timing and procedures while maintaining your 14hr day rule?

Not easily.  Think too hard and you get more tired, think too little and you get your head stuck in some mud.  And by head I mean wheels.  Yea that was todays episode.  At least there was no damage to anything, but I still wonder why I'm kept on board here when my slip ups so far have costed the company about the same amount I already owe them for my training.  Not sure what I want for Christmas this year now, a tank or a CMV tow truck.