Working With A Plan

It's Monday night and I'm settling in for the evening and getting comfortable while parked in the truck parking area at Eastern Metal Supply in Charlotte, NC. When I left out of Delhi with this load late on Saturday night my dispatcher was a little bit upset because the folks at SAPA had taken so long to get my load ready. It had a critical delivery time for the first stop at 7 am this morning. Since they didn't have it ready until 7:30 Saturday night it makes it difficult to have the legal driving hours, while taking the required breaks in between, to make it on time. Of course the way this works is that the dispatcher gets blamed for not getting it done, when nine times out of ten, it is the driver's fault. The dispatcher wants to try and get the right drivers on the right loads, so that they can handle the delivery times depending on their available hours. If a driver is careless about wasting his time when he should be giving it all he's got to get there, then the slightest problem that might arise can mess everything up. When you live a life on the road, you just have to plan on Murphy's laws coming into play – there are just too many things that might possibly go wrong.

I finally figured the best way for me to handle this first stop was to just give it all I could on Saturday night, then after getting my ten hour break out of the way, go at it just as hard as I could again.  That would put me arriving at Chatsworth Products at around 1:30 Monday morning and I could park back behind the building near the receiving docks to get a little sleep in while I wait for them to start receiving at seven in the morning. Now, here's the trick in this plan: I'm kind of cheating a little (let's just say that I may not be following the letter of the law). Let me explain my plan... when they get their product off my truck, I'm going to roll just down the street to a road side rest area that I know is there. If I move my truck less than two miles it will not start the electronic logs showing me as being on duty. So I can move down the street, go back to sleep and start back to driving at around 11:30 am, and I will have gotten in my required ten hour break that way. Technically, I'm not supposed to be doing any work during that time, but it would really mess up the rest of my schedule if I had to start that ten hour break after they got their product off the truck. This way I start my break when I arrived, instead of when I leave here. That will put me about five or six hours ahead of the game. These are the little kinds of details that one has to know how to handle in order to be successful at this career.

I'm not sure what was happening with all the other drivers this morning, but when I sent in my message showing that I had gotten that critical first stop unloaded, and was going to be heading over to Charlotte around 11:30 to get set up for the next delivery, I received this message in reply from my dispatcher: “It's nice to hear some GOOD news this morning. Thanks Dale. It's nice to be able to count on you. I truly appreciate it.” That is what I'm talking about when I try to teach other drivers about how important it is to establish a relationship of trust between themselves and their dispatcher. It will make their lives so much easier if their dispatcher knows he can count on them, but still most truck drivers think they have to bully their dispatcher into giving them the kind of runs they think they deserve. I have been very fortunate in the three dispatchers I've worked with so far. I didn't care much for the second one I had at Western Express, but he knew he could trust me to take care of my business and that made it so that we could work together successfully.

I ate a simple meal tonight without even leaving the confines of my truck – the last few pieces of some homemade bread and butter pickles that were given to me as a Christmas gift, along with some crackers and an ice cold can of V-8. Simple fare for a simple man – Life is good!