Week 6

Week 6
This week has been an adventurous one and showed me the darker side of truckdriving.
Monday -
This week I had a four day weekend. We got in last week on Wednesday and didn't leave this week until Monday (Memorial Day). As usual I showed up a little early and I loaded the truck with my weekly necessities. Our destination: New Orleans, LA. While doing that the trainer started the truck up and it showed a fault. Low coolant. He says we will bring it through the shop. Well we get to the shop and no one is there. This is rare because they usually have at least someone there during all but three hours in the early morning but this day is a holiday and the maintence shop seems to be going through some mangement/employee issues. We proceed with me driving and we hook to our trailer. We get thirty miles out when the truck overheats and I pull over. We see a major antifreeze leak and the truck shuts off. We pour more in, start up and limp the truck back to the empty shop. The only mechanic that shows up who was on call was the trailer mechanic. But at least he can look at it and determine to bring someone else in or take to the Pete dealership down the road. Fortunately he was able to fix the broken hose and four hours later we were back on the road again. I drive 400 miles to Winona, MS where we fuel at a Pilot. Miraculously (probably due to the holiday) there is parking we stay there for the night. Yay I will have morning coffee and a real bathroom to use in the morning.
Tuesday -
Trainer was super tired and he stayed in the bunk later than scheduled but wasn't too worried due to the fact that the load was gonna be late anyways due to our breakdown. He starts the day of driving. We get past the one mile marker into LA and suddenly BOOM! I look out the mirror and see our trailer tire blow apart. Luckily we were right next to a rest area/welcome center and we could be comfortly and safely off the road. We couldn't limp to the next service place because a scale was a mile ahead and according to the CB the scales were open. We pull up to the rest area and see another truck getting tire service. We make the appropriate arrangements and wait. Meanwhile we discover that a mudflap was also the victim of a blown tire and we needed a new one. Four hours later the service truck finishes the truck before us and returns with what we needed almost. The tire gets fixed but they don't have a start wrench that was neede for the mudflap. I looked at and asked if he had a socket and a pair of visegrips. No. Hmm. So the trainer finds some wire and ties the mudflap on. It will do to get across the scale and we would head into the Petro to get it put on the right way. It was only twenty miles up the road. We get to the petro and get a two hour wait to get five bolts put on. What did they use? A socket and a pair of visegrips. I make a mental note to bring tools on my truck once I get one and we park at the Petro. We get a large meal and just chill for awhile so we wouldn't have NOLA rush hour traffic to contend with.
Here is where it gets interesting. I have been to most of the 48 states. But one place I have never been is Louisiana. Since I was back at being a professional passenger I got to take in the sites of the bayou, swamplands, and the multitude of bridges. I even saw a gator swimming around. I also saw the worst parts of the Katrina damage and the amount of trash and poverty that has plagued NOLA. Now our destination. We find our consignee and it is in an abandoned looking small warehouse that is right on the outskirts of a residential area. One wrong turn into each direction and a truck would be taking a lot of powerlines down. Luckily we made the correct turns and we get to this "warehouse". We squeeze into the dock and I was told we were staying there until morning. I notice that the neighborhood was possibly a bad area for us but my trainer said before Katrina we would not be sleeping there but now it wasn't that bad. Ok but I still slept light. During the night we get one person knocking at the door. Some crackhead looking to score and the trainer politely told it to leave. I say it because he couldn't tell if it was woman or man. The rest of the night went without incident but I still made some more menatl notes for future use.
Wednesday - This is indeed the longest day we have had out here.
I wake up early and start looking for the convenience store I saw last night to see if I wanted to walk to it for coffee and bathroom. We had to go through a roundabout and while yesterday it was passable by foot now it wasn't. Too much traffic. In fact there was two cop cars that circled this roundabout to make sure people slowed down. I put a tire fire out and noticed another big truck asking for directions from one of the cops. It was easy to notice because big trucks stuck out like a sore thumb around this area. Sure enough he got in his truck and headed our direction. I flag him down and asked he was looking for this particular consignee. He said yes and I told him he was in the right spot. I could tell he had the same questions I had when I first saw this place. This was an off site warehouse for a particular store chain that they had set up. It looks like they aquired this abandoned building and was using it temporarily. Now that fact that we were already backed into the dock proved to be a good move because shortly thereafter two more trucks showed up. There is almost no room for four big trucks on this street and you could only half arsed fir two trucks in the lot. Amazingly this warehouse came to life. Within a half an hour about ten employees showed up and started to unload us.
We get our backhaul assignment. Head to the port side and pick up a load of plywood. The bill said make sure we tarp the load. Uhm... ok ( we are dry van not flatbed) we show up and wait for a dock. As we were waiting we noticed it was an open dock and we started wondering if there was a mistake. Transland has a flatbed division so a mixup was possible. Well it wasnt a mistake. We bump dock and start to get loaded. The trainer jokingly asked the dispatcher if he gets tarp pay for this load and we get our plywood. We pull out and go across thr street to a "truckstop" where we though we could scale and use the bathrooms. Apparently it was just a casino with a fuel island as an after thought so we drive 40 miles to the nearest Cat scale at Laplace. We also noticed that the airconditioning fan has gone out. It still worked for the bunks area but not up front. Going down the road blew some of the a/c in but not much. This wasn't a big deal to me because I brought shorts but the trainer likes to keep the truck a cool 65 degrees inside at all times.
We scale the truck it was a gross of 88,280!!!!! So we hightail it back to the shipper and we told them they had to strip the load or unload it all. We do the math and figure out how much each bundle weighed and told them what needed to be done. Take four bundles off. So they take two off. Luckily they had an onsite scale that was for "account holders only" but they let us use it versus driving back and forth to Laplace. Still too heavy but we had to play the "my people will call your people etc" and finally before they closed got two more bundles taken off. We scale ok but the weight on the drives are still too heavy. We go back to the Pilot in Laplace and break open a bundle and took weight off the drives and put it in the rear of the trailer BY HAND. It had to been at least 120 F degrees inside the trailer. An hour later we take some well deserved showers and we headed back towards the Petro of no tools to get our A/C fixed. This made me laugh uncontrolably. The petro was in Hammond, LA. We get there and the petro was packed for the solar trucks trying to park. We get in pretty fast but they took an hour to figure out that they couldn't do the repair because we needed a part they didn't have. Imagine that. We get back on the road and finally fuel at Winona, MS again and sleep at a rest area just up the road. The trainer has done all the driving at this point except the first 400 miles that I did.
Thursday -
I get the first drive and we head back to Springfield, MO. Around Black Rock, AR we stop at a convenience store where I had a deepfried chicken shiskabob. It was good but only to be enjoyed as a treat once a year maybe. We drop at our yard in Springfield and we get the a/c fixed. This week my trainer agreed to work this friday and we head out to Kansas city for a short run. We spend the night in KC at the consignee.
Friday -
The next morning we make the second drop and head to a beer shipper for our backhaul to springfield. We scale the load and I do the drive back. I get to bump the dock and drive into the yard. We fuel and I head home.
Next week is my last week training and apparently it's national harassment week meaning DOT will have an extra 10,000 employees out in full force. I learned a lot this week and saw some of the bad sides of trucking. I already knew about thses particular situations but to experience them made it even a more learning experience.