Saturday, November 13, 2010

SLEEP DEPRIVED

It's been a couple of days since I have posted, mostly because we have been doing nothing but driving at night, and then making the deliveries in the morning, and then finally trying to get some sleep before they send us on yet another load assignment.  I'm happy to report that last night we were able to go back to a normal sleeping pattern, but with falling dead asleep by 7pm, we were up and ready to hit the road with our newest load assigment at 3am.

To finish up on our last load, we left Weed, CA at 1am Thursday morning to get into Fremont for our first delivery at 10am.  We were concerned with commute traffic, but then we remembered that it was Vertern's Day and that most likely traffic would be dramatically reduced, and it was.  We arrived about two hours early for our appointment, but was given a dock right away.  You'd think we would be done early since we got that dock assignment, but nope!  We ended up being there over 4 hours, and on top of that they refused 3 cases of hamburger because the boxes were torn. ( by the way, the hamburger had to be dumped)

After all the phone calls and paperwork were completed, we headed out with only enough drive time left to get us into Santa Nella, CA.  Then it was trying to sleep again before getting up 1am to drive into Vernon, CA for our last delivery.  Again, with the holiday the previous day, traffic was much lighter than it would normally be.  We had a bit of a wait to get into the dock at King Meat, and then were hoping for a day of rest.  What we heard instead was a preplan to pick up a loaded trailer in the yard in Bloomington and be in Clackamas, OR by Sunday morning.

Well, Craig does the math quickly and with us having to drive two more nights to get there by 7am Sunday, he would be about 2 hours short on driving hours on his 70hr clock to make it.  I was never more relieved than when the message came across that the load would be assigned to someone with more hours and for us to head to the yard and await a different assignment.  That dispatch came across at 6pm for us to pick up a trailer loaded with bananas in the yard, and deliver in Puyallup, WA on Tuesday morning.  Praise the Lord!  A load assignment with more than enough time on it, which would allow us to go back to normal operations.
Now let's just hope I didn't jinx ourselves by saying so!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I notice that your blogs of interest that most of them have quit. Glad to see that you are still going strong

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