Total Waste of a New Year's Eve

My sister and her boyfriend drove me back to the terminal Sunday night. I'd told my company hat I'd be back on-duty at 8am Monday morning. I'd talked to the dispatcher twice over my hometime because she kept wanting to confirm that I would, in fact, be back when I said I'd be.

The load didn't pick up until 6pm, so I didn't have much to do for the day. I rehooked to the same empty trailer I'd brought in. Then I drove to a truck stop that was about half an hour from the pick up and waited there for most of the afternoon. I got to the shipper about an hour before my load was supposed to be ready (I'd called earlier in the day hoping it would be done early, but no one answered the phone or returned the voicemails I'd left). It was ready. It was just supposed to be a drop and hook, then I was supposed to scale the load and adjust the tandems before checking out with the guard at the exit gate.

For once, I didn't have any trouble with my tandems.... both the tandems on my empty and the ones on my loaded trailer slid without any problem. There was another driver from my company picking up the trailer right next to me and we had a horrible time getting his tandems to slide. We spent more than an hour at it. Even after we finally got the pins to retract, the tandems still wouldn't slide. He did eventually get them to move, but the amount of time we spent doing it was ridiculous.

The scale they had weighed each group of axles. I drove across the scale and my load weighed in at over 81,000 pounds. I pulled off to the side and went to talk to the guy at the guard shack. He just mumbled something about how I must have scaled it wrong and told me to do it again.

Now, I could understand how the weight would be wrong if I didn't have my tires all the way on the platform or something. In that case, the load would scale less than it actually weighed. How on earth would I make it weight more? Witchcraft?

I scaled it three more times. The last time, I had the other driver from my company stand next to the platform to tell me when my tires were exactly centered. I then returned to the guardshack with my four scale tickets, each showing a weight greater than 81,000 pounds. I told him that I couldn't take the load as it was and that I'd probably need to rehook to my empty.

I called the on-call dispatch number and left a voicemail asking what to do. I also sent them a QualComm message. When I did manage to connect with them, it took a few minutes to explain that I wasn't overweight on my steer axles, but that the entire truck, regardless of weight distribution, weighed too much. I did get it as balanced as possible on my last scale. I had 12+k on my steers and 34+k each on my drives and tandems.

By this time, it was after 7pm on New Year's Eve. There wasn't any warehouse staff there to take freight off. Nor would there be anyone there tomorrow because it was a holiday. Dispatch told me to take the empty and to qc the area dispatcher to let her know what happened. So I slid the tandems and put the loaded trailer into the bay they asked me to (along with the seal, paperwork and the scale tickets), rehooked to my empty, checked out with the guard and drove to a rest stop about ten miles away. And that was my day. An hour and a half of driving and a few hours at the shipper.

And this afternoon, for a lovely change of pace, I drove five miles to a Love's so I could have hot coffee and wifi.

What will probably end up happening is that by tomorrow morning, they will have taken some freight off the truck and I'll just be taking the same load I came in for. But with two days of wasted time in between.