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Wed.Jan.04.2006

2:53 pm EST        42°F (6°C) in Lansing, MI

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If everything that has happened in the last day and a half isn’t some kind of message from $_DEITY_$ that I need to quit my current job and get another one, I don’t know what is. As if two (yes, count ’em, two) breakdowns within two hours of each other wasn’t enough, how about we throw in the oversleep that has made me almost two hours late for the 1:00 pm EST appointment I was supposed to have here?

Yesterday morning, I was about to pick up a drop-and-hook load in Iowa City, IA, when I discovered upon switching my reefer unit on that its battery was dead. Being a major international corporation, Procter & Gamble requires (quite obviously) that reefer units on thusly-equipped trailers must, in fact, actually run (what a concept!). Thankfully, the place I was sent to get it running again was only four blocks away, but I still wasted a little over an hour getting a new battery installed and a tightening of the alternator belt.

No sooner had I made the four-block return trip to the P&G facility than the tractor turned into a fucking piece of shit. I went to pull the door release handle to open the door, and got absolutely no response — the door was stuck closed, even when I pulled the lock button up into the unlocked position. For the last day-plus, I have had to use the passenger-side door to enter and exit the truck; that involves more or less crawling over the gearshift lever to access the driver’s seat, or almost any other part of the cab for that matter. After I’m finished with this delivery, I’m going to drop off the truck at a Freightliner dealership to have them fix it; at least the downtime is coming when I’m at home anyway, which means dispatch has one less excuse to pull some stupid shit (although it’s not like that will stop them).

(I’m reminded of an old joke about Freightliner trucks which seems eerily true now, given what has happened to me:

Q: What’s the difference between Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freightliners?
A: You can close the door on Jehovah’s Witnesses.)

I had set my alarm for 10:45 am EST this morning, hoping to give myself enough time to grab something to eat and complete the two-hour trip up here from Ottawa Lake, MI, just outside Toledo. The very first thing I knew, it was 12:05 pm and I had never heard the alarm — there’s all the provocation dispatch needs to can my ass. To top that off, the directions they gave me to this facility ran me right into a road closure — do you have any idea how fun it is to back up half a mile in a big rig? I got to find out on the way in here.

Well, it didn’t take them terribly long to finish with the unload here. It’s off to the Freightliner dealership to get this pile of shit fixed.