No Good Very Bad Day

Yesterday was a really bad day.

I had only about 30 miles to drive to my shipper for my noon appointment (just south of Las Vegas). I got loaded and everything was fine, but I had another incident. Not good. I'm not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say: it was my fault and totally preventable. I just didn't see the other truck. My truck was fine, but I messed up his headlight and bumper.  He just looked at the truck and said "You know, I hit a deer last year and it did about that much damage.  These things happen."  He was so nice about it though and far kinder to me than I deserved.

I have been told that if anything else happens, I will be let go. Honestly, I can't blame them. I'm not turning out to be such a great truck driver. I'm trying hard, but it just isn't going well.

Then I had a DOT inspection later in the day at a scale in California. And my load routing looked weird (there was a much more efficient way to get where I was going), but it's been mentioned to me several times lately that I have a lot of off-route miles and unscheduled fuel stops, so I followed the load routing. Any time I've missed a fuel stop or had to make one that wasn't in my routing (either due to a faulty fuel gauge or more commonly, not being sent my load routing or fuel routing until I was several hundred miles into my trip and had already passed the fuel stop), I've always called in and talked to the guy in the main office who handles all the fuel issues. That's what I was told to do. Apparently I need to be writing on the envelope that it's an out-of-route stop. So I've racked up quite a few fuel stop violations.

Anyway, those three things combined to make me late on this load. I was supposed to deliver at 10am, but there's no way I could get there. The shipper closes at 2, but they open again at 9pm so that is when they made my new delivery appointment for. On the bright side, it gives me plenty of time to get there.