Heyburn,ID

I think yesterday has to have been one of the longest days I have had in a really long time. As you know, I blogged yesterday morning while I was waiting for my appointment at 0700. When the time came, I headed over there and was unloaded pretty quick. From there I headed back to the TA to scan our bills to get paid and to wait for our next load.

When I got back to the truck stop, J woke up and was hungry, so we decided breakfast was in order and I could get all the paperwork ready to scan while we ate. Having a full belly we walked back to the truck stop next door only to find out that their scanner is broken. Not a good thing since the truck stops in that area are pretty scarce. Now we do have a scanner in the truck, but the particular bills that we had are the kind that my scanner won't pick up. My luck, right? I called in to talk to my FM and he was at lunch so I got the guy that was covering. He told me that his payroll person won't accept faxes. I ask to speak to my payroll person and she tells me the same thing. They have to be scanned. Ok, tell me something. They don't get the originals anyway, we keep those. They also have the scanning machine there. So why can't they walk their lazy butts over to the fax machine, pick up the fax, and scan it in? I know it wouldn't happen very often because it cost us money to pay for the fax. $3 for the first page and $1 each additional page. And I had close to 30 pages to scan. So you can see it would have been expensive, and drivers wouldn't do that very often, except in a situation where there was no scanner. But I wanted to get paid. It was very frustrating.

While we were in there, we ran into another Prime driver that was needing to scan also. He was on the phone with his FM who told him of another place about 30 miles down the road. As we were heading out to the truck we just decided that if we didn't have our next load, that we would head down that direction to get them scanned. As it turns out, when we got to the truck, there was a message to head towards Prosser,WA for our next load. That worked good for us. It was only about 1230 and there was a Pilot right on the way about 100 miles down the road. So I knew that I could stop there and scan.

I made my way back to that Pilot in Biggs,WA and before I went in to scan I sent a message asking if we were going to pick up that night (Tuesday), or if it would be the next morning. Prosser isn't a big town, so if it was going to be the next morning, I was going to stay parked at the Pilot. When I got back to the truck, I had a message that we would be picking up that night. The problem is that the load had way too much time on it for a team so he was trying to work something out so we could pick up the load and then meet a solo and give that load to him. The solo was picking up a load that was a team load and he couldn't get it there on time as a solo. So that all worked out. Kinda.

Ok, get to Prosser and get loaded. I pull up and go to their scale and find out that I am at 81,900 lbs. Now I can't be over 80,000 lbs legally. So I go back and back up to the dock to have them remove about 3,000 lbs. I had told them from the beginning to allow an extra 1000 lbs because I only had 3/8 of a tank of fuel. They removed 3,000 lbs and we headed into the actual town of Prosser about 25 miles away to get scaled.

As we pulled into the truck stop in Prosser, the first thing we did was scale, and then we went in and parked. Time for dinner and a shower. We walked in and got the scale ticket and it was showing us over by close to 500 lbs on our drive axles. We wren't too concerned with it at the moment because we knew that we could slide the tandems all the way forwars and that we should be fine. So we took our time with the shower and had a nice meal at KFC and then we went out to slide the tandems and rescale. Uh Oh! We get the rescale ticket and we are still over by 60 lbs and we STILL need to get fuel. Definitely not a good sign. By this point it was 2130 hrs and I had been up since 0230 that morning. I was exhausted. We tried everything we could think of. The tandems were slid as far as they could go and we even slid the fifth wheel and that didn't help at all. It just made it worse. And we slid it forward and backwards just to make sure. We ended up scaling something like 5 or 6 times. We had even called our FM and told him what was going on, and we had about decided that we could have to go back the next morning to get it re-loaded and shift some weight around.

Then, in my delirious stupor, I had a brainstorm. We keep our chains in a milk crate sitting on the catwalk of the truck. I ask J how much they weighed and he said at least 60-80 lbs. So I figured why not take the chains and put them in the back of the trailer and move that weight back there. Good thing we didn't have a seal on the trailer! So J goes back there and moves them and we reweigh yet again, and guess what. That does the trick. We ended up moving 120 lbs to the back of the trailer. We were finally legal. Of course we had to stop for fuel about every 100 miles and only put a little in to keep us legal. But whatever works, right?

So this morning J gets me up to drive and the plan was to drive into Salt Lake City and meet the other driver there to switch loads. I get a message telling me to meet him at the Love's at x211 in Idaho because he still has one stop to make and we can just make that pickup for him. Ok, cool.

I pull in and the first thing we do is fill up with fuel. I wanted to make sure that when we scaled with the load he was giving us that we had a full tank. After we got everything straightened out, and remembered to get our chains back out of the trailer we gave him, I went and scaled and we were still overweight on the drives. However he had it in the 10th or 11th hole so I knew I could shift some weight and wasn't really worried about it.

Once everything was switched over and taken care of, I headed up the road about 6 miles to the last place I needed to pick up at. I got there and about an hour and a half later I am loaded and headed back to the Love's to get a final scale. I had already moved the tandems so when I got the scale ticket, I was pleased to see that we were completely legal. YAY!!

Now, I have to figure out how they expect us to get to Harahan,LA by 0500 on Friday morning. Yeah, I know, that isn't going to happen. Best I can figure the absolute earliest we can get there will be around 1500 on Saturday. This load was supposed to head out yesterday but the pick up that we made today, was supposed to have happened yesterday, but they didn't have the product in from the fields, so it had to wait an extra day. I am hoping that the place we are delivering is open and receiving on the weekend. If they aren't, then we just traded one load with too much time on it for another load just the same. I am hoping we can find something out here in a little while when I send it our projected arrival time. Keep your fingers crossed for me that it is good news!