So did you actually think I’d be posting from home, specifically my favorite chair in my living room. Oh, you silly person. I made my last drop in Naples about 2ish and was crus’n home on I75 – XM 71 watercolors – jazz on the radio. I was thinking about the bourbon chicken my wife usually gets us my first night home. I also have three movies waiting from Netflix. I just mailed in the remainder of my paperwork and logs via TripPak at the miserable Pilot in Ft. Meyers. Ever been there? It is the worst Pilot in their system – you’ve got to experience the parking lot to believe it. Anyway, my Blackberry was blinking. There was a message from my dispatcher: “Stop!” She likes to play games and I thought it was a joke. I was 50 or so miles from Naples.
It was no joke. Seems stop #3 back in Riviera Beach had material that the place in Naples needs and visa versa. Frankly, what do I care. According to all the paperwork, everybody got what they ordered and signed for it. As I said the bills were already in the TripPak box. Let me just say here that I have LTL – less than truckload – freight. I did the whole route – LTL thing years ago and I thought I had graduated to TL – truck load – freight. But there’s the whole economy thing again and my carrier is accepting more and more LTL multi-stop loads. And despite it being almost 2010 – we still can seem to find Bin Laden NOR properly label freight to see that it gets to where it has to go. Oh, this shipper tried – with little red dots no less – stop one gets 1 red dot, stop two gets 2 and so forth and so on. But as they say the best laid plans to mice and men…well, seems someone put to few dots on stuff that should have been more “dotted.”
So I responded back saying: “Roadway.” Both of them call up some LTL carrier to pick up the stuff and they’ll deliver the right stuff to the right places overnight. Well, you would think I asked them to send the stuff by rail! Noooo, they need ME to unscrew up the screwy mess up. Forget the fact that after 36 days (see last post) I’m headed home to my sweetie and the bourbon chicken and the three Netflix movies. Why, what does my life matter. While waiting under an I-75 underpass wondering how the heck the thing stay up – I thought this entire situation over. This would be the second time in three weeks I thought about sending in an application to Indian River Transport, a juice tanker operation. But then with my luck, I’d be stuck in a similar situation: “Marshall, you idiot – Publix got the pineapple and H.E.B. got the orange juice. I don’t care if you headed home, go back and suck out the orange and exchange it with the pineapple.”
So I turned the truck around and started heading – de ja vu all over again – back to Naples. The Mrs.., an experienced trucker wife, said: “Well, tomorrow when we get home we’ll have Chinese and watch the movies. It’'ll be Friday and both of us won’t have to go back to work in the morning.” What a gal! Worth more than any damn threesome, let me tell ya. Fast forward, I got the Naples stuff and started to head back East over the alley. I needed a break and some dinner, so I stopped at the Miccosukee service plaza for the $4.59 chicken dinner, some low fat banana milk and a cookie. I got two slices of za for breakfast. If I can get my oh-so tired body out of bed in the AM, I bed back at Riviera Beach around 9ish, to get the stuff that has to go back over to Naples. Tomorrow it’ll be 37 days on the road. I just hope they’ll pay for me for the extra 360 extra miles I had to drive to straighten this messy mess up. I’ll let ya know.
