Those Pesky Little Details

I'm settling into my bed while parked in the small town of Olla, Louisiana. It's Monday evening and I made it down to Houston, TX today and got unloaded in the Downtown area just off of Commerce street at National Oil Well Varco. I'm on my way back to Delhi, Louisiana to start pulling some loads out of the SAPA plant again. I didn't have enough legal driving time left to make it all the way to Delhi so I'm taking my ten hour break here tonight. I'll get going again tomorrow and get this trailer back to the plant so they can load it with some more stuff. Not sure where I will be going next, but I had a pretty good week this week. Tomorrow morning is the cut-off day for turning in our paperwork for the jobs we've accomplished, but I was just too tired tonight to work on it – I'll feel refreshed in the morning and I will get that little task completed.

I had to wait till the end of the day today to turn in my paperwork because there was some confusion on one of my trips in the computer system that calculates our payroll. I discovered it, and realized I had gotten shorted on about three hundred miles, but my dispatcher couldn't seem to figure out why it was like that. Then today it all came clear to me what had happened. When I explained it to the dispatcher he agreed, and thinks I'm the smartest truck driver that ever rolled down the interstate. He sent me a message earlier to wait until they got it all sorted out before I sent my trip-sheets in. He had to get some of the upper management types involved to get it all sorted out, but just before he left for the day he sent me another message stating they got it straightened out and I could go ahead and turn everything in.

It was a load that came to us via a freight broker, but it had the wrong zip code in it for my final destination. Some times the smallest details can make the biggest difference in how something actually turns out.  The computer program bases it's calculations on your miles by the zip codes of the locations where you pick-up and or deliver to.  I delivered this load to Houston, TX, but the zip code used was in Dallas, TX.  I came from Chicago, so once I passed through Dallas those miles on down to Houston were not included in the calculation for my pay.  The thing that clued me in to all this was that the computer program also uses those same zip codes to calculate where you should stop and get fuel.  I needed to get fuel for my trip back to Delhi, and I was already surprised that the system had let me go this far without suggesting a fuel stop for me.  It will usually not let my truck get down to less than 3/8 of a tank, but I was down to 1/8.  When I received my dispatch notice which should have been sending me from Houston to Delhi it suggested my fuel stop at a truck stop in Dallas.  There was no reason in the world for me to go North up to Dallas.  That's when I realized, this computer thinks I'm sitting in Dallas when I'm all the way down in Houston.

Computers do some really amazing stuff for us, especially in this business.  But they can only work with the data they are given.  God gave us the abilities to think and reason - two very powerful attributes that we have not been able to replicate with all of the amazing technologies we have developed.