Decisions, Decisions!

In Trucking you have got to be able to make decisions on the fly with sometimes little to go by but your accumulated knowledge of how best to make things work on a daily basis out here.  I have a practice of trying to always make some really good headway on my loads at the start of the load. What I mean by that is that if I have a load with say around 1,500 miles on it, I will try to really push it hard at the beginning, because you just never know what kind of delays you might hit later on down the road that could upset your apple cart. One of the advantages of pushing hard at the beginning is that you may even be able to get your customer to receive you a day early, which sets you up early for another load.  As long as your dispatcher and load planners have gotten accustomed to the way you handle things, this can be very beneficial to your ability to get more done, and that is how you get paid in this business.  You measure out your own success at this by your own performance.  When you get paid by the mile, the more you can accomplish, the more you can earn.

You should never take the attitude that looks at the load and sees that it has fifteen hundred miles on it with a delivery date of four days away, and therefore decide that I will do 375 miles a day and still be there on time.  Far better is to try and do about 650 miles for the first two days, and then you only have 200 miles left, putting you there on the third day with time to get unloaded if they will receive you.  Then if your dispatcher knows what to expect from you he can be working on having another load nearby that could even be picked up on that same day.  I am constantly communicating with my dispatcher this type of stuff so that he can keep me moving.

This past week was a case study in the veracity of these very principles.  I had a colonoscopy done on my Birthday, February 1st.  That was the doctor appointment that I was going home for.  On February the 3rd I was picking up this load of aluminum seating bound for Salt Lake City, Utah; seen here after I had tarped it and had it ready to roll.

February 3rd was a Friday, and the load was scheduled to deliver on Tuesday.  It was a firm delivery date, as we have a lot of these loads going up there, and the contractor on the job wants us to stagger the loads so that they come in one truck each day.  I determined to go ahead and push my load at the beginning and even though I would get there by Monday, I would just wait for them to unload me on Tuesday.  Sunday morning my phone rings.  It is my dispatcher wanting to know if it was possible for me to get there on Monday morning.  It just so happened that Sherman, the driver who was supposed to deliver on Monday, had broken down in Amarillo, TX.  The customer needed the materials badly and now they wanted me to get there early since there would be no truck to unload on Monday. Well, as you may have guessed, I can do that because I have already been pushing the load at an advanced rate because that is a principle that I know can be counted on for success.

I drove the first leg of the trip from Delhi, Louisiana to Memphis, TX, where I stayed at the Love's truck stop there.  Then I advanced from there to the Ute Mountain Travel Center near Towaoc, Colorado.  This is Navajo country and they have a very nice casino and resort here next door to the truck stop.  I think Towaoc is Navajo for "Let us count the ways we can part you from your money!"  It was an easy jaunt from there to Salt Lake City, and passing through the Spanish Fork mountain pass was painless this time, as the roads were clear of snow and ice - very unusual this time of year!

Here's a few views from the parking lot of the Ute Mountain Travel Center.  It is a unique area, both rugged and beautiful at the same time.

I was on the job site at 0700, and unloaded by around 1000.  I walked over to a local restaurant to grab a bite of lunch while I waited on my dispatcher to hook me up, and then I made my way down to the SAPA plant just south of Salt Lake City, in Spanish Fork to pick up this load of extrusions that had four stops in the Dallas, Fort Worth area.

This was loaded on a Conestoga, so I didn't have to throw my tarps on this one!  It delivered to the following locations...

✔ Grand Prairie, TX

✔ Irving, TX

✔ Dallas, TX

✔  Richardson, TX

All of these locations are in close proximity, but you have got to allow for city traffic, and the usual delays in just getting unloaded.  This load had the added challenge of the final customer's policy of only receiving aluminum loads on Mondays and Thursdays, so if I could not make it by Thursday, I would have to camp out all weekend in Dallas and wait for Monday to roll around!  I had to push hard to get down to the area on Wednesday, in time to make my first delivery, and then take my necessary ten hour break so that I could get the other three done on Thursday.  It all went like clock-work until I had to make another decision about how to handle a problem on the road.  My first delivery on Thursday morning had an unusually tight maneuver that I had to make with my truck.  I had to get myself in a very tight jack-knife position to get backed into where they wanted me to be for unloading.  It wasn't all that difficult to do, but it put a strain on my "pig-tail" cord that goes from my tractor to my trailer and it actually put enough strain on the outlet on the back wall of my tractor that it broke it off.  Now I have no tail lights on my trailer, and not only is it illegal to drive a commercial vehicle like that, but it is crazy unsafe in big city traffic where you need to communicate your intentions to the other motorists!

I spent a few minutes trying to see if I could rig it up temporarily, but it was not going to be possible. Then I had to make the call of whether I wanted to contact the break down folks at Knight so they could get someone out to fix it, or whether I just wanted to take the risk and finish up my deliveries.  It wasn't an easy call.  Waiting on a service truck to get there would make me legal, but would also make it so I couldn't make it to my final customer in time.  For me, waiting until Monday was unacceptable.  I was expected back in Delhi for a weekend load - that is how I always handle my time, and I know that my dispatcher is counting on that - in fact he has already committed to SAPA a certain number of drivers, and I am one of those on that list.  At this time I had no idea what my load would be, but I do know that he knows me well enough to have counted on my showing up there,

So... I had to go the rest of the way without trailer lights - that was an uneasy feeling, not so much for the illegality of it but more so for the safety factor.  Had it been night time, there is no way I would have risked it, but even in the day time you need those lights to communicate with the other drivers.  I was in heavy city traffic.  If I had to slam on my brakes because of the antics of some crazy motorist ahead of me I could cause some one behind me who is distracted with their cell phone or maybe their baby in the back seat, to crash right into the back of my trailer!  I purposely drove extra slowly and cautiously, paying extra attention to what was going on behind me.  That was the space around my truck that I was most concerned with, but I also paid special attention to my following distance from the vehicles ahead of me.  Any time someone was following closely behind me I slowed down gradually to encourage them to get on around me.  I also had no turn signals, so I had to take great care with lane changes and turns so that people didn't get in my blind spot not knowing my intentions.

I messaged my dispatcher to let him know what was going on, and asked him to email our terminal in Dallas to expect me to show up that afternoon so they could fix it for me.  My whole plan was to get over around Kilgore, TX and stay at a truck stop there, putting in a 34 hour reset, because I had already burned up my seventy hour clock with no hours returning yet.  My wife and daughter were going to be passing through there on a little trip to Arkansas, and we could spend some time together enjoying a meal together.  But I had to make the decision to go to the terminal, and get that repaired while I put in my break there.

Do you see how many decisions I had to make on this load to make things work out right?  I even had to make the sacrifice of missing a chance to cross paths with my dear wife on the road - that would have been such a treat for me!  Well, this is the kind of stuff you have to face out here on a regular basis.  It all went well for me, although I would have really enjoyed seeing my wife and daughter.  I am at the Knight terminal in Dallas (actually Hutchins, TX) and I am forced to take my 34 hour break here.  My dispatcher messaged me last night to let me know that he has me down for a load that leaves this weekend from Delhi and has five stops on it.

I'll be delivering materials to the following towns on this next load...

✔ Waynesboro, VA

✔ Riverdale, New Jersey

✔ Deep River, Connecticut

✔ Farmington, Connecticut

✔ Charlestown, New Hampshire

Nice!  All those decisions led to a good end result... That is how you play this game.  Consistent performance gets consistent results!