Just Like Clockwork

That's how my day went today.  Everything went off as planned and I will be emptying out my trailer at my final destination first thing in the morning when the employees at CEC Metal Processing show up at work.  I am sitting in their driveway waiting to back in the door of their building.  I will sleep right here tonight and I will be the first truck to get unloaded here in the morning.

My alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, and I started rolling down the highway by 6:00.  I made it to my first stop in Nashville, TN at Thyssen Krupp about 10:00 A.M., was unloaded and on my way by 11:00.  My next stop was General Electric in Selmer, TN - they stop receiving at this location at 2:00 P.M.  I was going to be hard pressed to make it in time, but I got there at 1:52, and they were glad to see me.  Once I got that portion off-loaded I began the last leg of this trip down to New Albany, MS.  Arrived here about 4:00 P.M. (they close at 3:30) but my plan was to just get in here tonight so I could shut down in their parking lot for a first thing in the morning delivery.

Now, I have the option of taking a 34 hour reset of my clocks if I want to.  I will have to decide that in the morning when I get unloaded.  Since I was able to get here and shut down tonight, I will have one of my time periods of 1 A.M. - 5 A.M. out of the way for meeting these silly regulations.  I can just take the day off tomorrow and get started back to work on Wednesday morning at 5 A.M. and I will have a fresh set of seventy hours to work with for the next eight days.  That will give me a lot more flexibility in planning my days and making sure everything works out properly.  I ran this whole last week on my re-cap hours which meant that each day I had to look back and see how many hours I worked eight days ago, and that was how may hours I could work for that particular day.  The reset will give me more freedom to manage my time efficiently, plus I've been getting after it pretty hard, so a day off is actually sounding really good right now.

Our new Republican controlled congress just sent a ridiculously massive spending bill to our dear leader's desk, and tucked away somewhere deep in that voluminous stack of unsustainable, reckless, out of control efforts at buying off the uneducated masses votes, there is some language inserted in there that will remove the silly provision for truck drivers to have to include those two time periods of 1 A.M. - 5 A.M. in their 34 hour break.  It will also eliminate having to wait 168 hours in between each reset.  That will really be a big help to the American Truck Drivers.  Now, if they would only see the light on how restrictive the 14 hour rule is, the American Truck Driver would be able to rest when he needs it instead of when the government's elitists think he needs it.  As the rule stands now, if a truck driver feels the need to take a 2 or 3 hour nap because he's tired then it will take away from his legal driving hours.  So instead of taking a break when he needs it, he just has to keep on working and driving when he is really too tired just so he doesn't lose the income.  We are a highly regulated industry, and I understand the whys of that, but some of this stuff just takes a little common sense to figure out.  Sadly, common sense went out of vogue back in the days of Thomas Jefferson.