It is a difficult job, fraught with problems not found in other lines of employment. The foremost difficulty is having to be separated from your family. What is puzzling to me is that most of the unsuccessful drivers I speak to don't really even have a family, they are loners. They chose this occupation because they don't enjoy being around other people, yet they still can't seem to make it work. It is a job that requires a lot of sacrifice. You have to be willing to flip flop your nights and days at a moments notice, and you have to be able to recognize on your own initiative when this is necessary to make things work out properly. Nobody holds your hand out here, it takes a hard working person with initiative and a desire to succeed to make it worthwhile. My background of many years of self employment has been a really great foundation for my success at this new career.
Enough of my rambling thoughts about this career, back to the fact that I'm taking a break here at Cressona. First let me tell you how I ended up here. I already had a back haul load dispatched to me. I was picking up some return materials from Permasteel in Windsor, Connecticut. When I got there it was one bundle of material weighting only 800 pounds. That is a very small load to use up all that fuel taking it all the way back to Louisiana. So I called my dispatcher and let him know that while I was unloading at Stanley, (our very large customer, to whom I'm always running up here to Connecticut) I noticed they had at least a full truck load of return materials sitting on the ground waiting for us to pick them up. So, together we made a plan. We would go pick up the Stanley materials and deliver them to the SAPA plant in Cressona. While there, we would have them off load the one bundle of material from Permasteel, which has to go to Louisiana, and put it onto one of our empty Conestoga trailers sitting at the plant in Cressona. That way we get an extra load out of this, plus we get to retrieve one of our Conestogas and get it back to Louisiana. It absolutely makes no difference in what I get paid, but it made a huge difference in what the company can charge for this trip, plus it got one of those nice trailers back down to our plant so that we can have the benefit of it. This kind of thinking goes a long way toward helping you be recognized as a top tier driver. I still pretty much ran the same amount of miles, which is why I say it didn't make any difference in my pay, but it was a much more efficient way to manage what needed to be done to serve our customers, and our company's need to operate in a profitable way.
So, after switching trailers at Cressona I started studying my available hours and realizing that I'm not going to have another load down in Louisiana until Monday, it just made sense to put in a 34 hour break here at Cressona, and reset my seventy hour clock while enjoying my time taking a little break in this quaint little town. Then I can drive through the night on both Saturday and Sunday nights which will put me back in Delhi, Louisiana early Monday morning giving me time to take my required ten hour break before I take off with my next load. They won't have my load ready until the end of the work day Monday so that all works out like clock work! I can get on that load with a full set of hours before me so that I can do some good with it. This is how we have to think ahead, and plan our days, so that we can serve our customers and stay within the regulations that our governmental overseers have decided we need. Incidentally, I do not blame the over reaching governmental bodies exclusively for their intrusion into our business - there is a long history of truck drivers not policing themselves and going to dangerous extremes to chase after another dollar. We have brought much of the restrictions we work under on ourselves.
Man this post is getting long winded and headed off into a direction that was totally unplanned. Let me try to return to what I wanted to share with you today. I wanted to show you some of the beautiful sights I have seen in the last few days. When I woke up in Riverdale, New Jersey at around 4:30 a.m. I started getting my load untarped and ready for the fork lift operator who would be there at about five. By six a.m. I was unloaded and ready to roll. Here is the sight of the early morning light that I started driving under.
I got all my deliveries made that day, picked up my back haul at Permasteel, and after making that new plan to pick up the returns at Stanley I spent the night at a truck stop near the Stanley plant. This all put me a day ahead of my original schedule which allowed me a little free time the next day to get my work done and take the time to get a few photos of some of the fall foliage up here in the Northeast. Now, after all that, I have finally gotten to my original intent for this post - to share with you some of the sights I've seen this week. Here is what things are looking like up here this week.
It is a beautiful time up here right now, but the beauty has a foreboding effect - it only indicates that Winter is marching on, and cannot be stopped. That will be the subject of my next post, Winter time for the truck driver.
One more picture for you. Here is my truck after getting the returns from Stanley loaded. Excuse the slight intrusion of my finger into the photo, but I just wanted to show you what these return loads look like. This one is actually pretty clean, but they are always a little "higgledy, piggledy" they way they are loaded. I have to be careful and get them secured well, because sometimes the individual pieces will vibrate loose as I'm going down the interstate. I stop and check these loads fairly often to make sure everything is staying in place.
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