The Little Things

When a little thing goes wrong or just a little wonky on you it's most often not that big of a deal, you just take it in stride.  But when those little things come at you in bunches it can make you feel like tearing your hair out.

So I got away late last Saturday because I had to throw the battery charger on my truck and that made me just late enough to screw up my daily hours of service and would prevent me from the necessary number of hours of rest on Sunday night to keep me in compliance with the US hours of service rules.  No big deal, until I hit the crappy weather just north of Thunder Bay late on Saturday.  So I went into damage control mode and rather than waste time I stopped in Dryden to take my 8 hour break, reset my Canadian hours, allowing me to leave in the middle of the night so I would not have to deal with the traffic even if the weather was still bad.

That was a great plan until I stepped out of the truck at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning to do my PTI (pretrip inspection for those of you not up on trucking acronym's) and discovered the light show taking place around the top of my trailer.  All the upper clearance lights were flickering on and off along with a couple of lower tail lamps.  Probably just a bad connection I thought.  So I pulled the power cord from the trailer, cleaned & spread the connector pins, re-attached the cord and....no change....the light show continued.  I went back to the connector and gave it a good wiggle and that did it.  The lights went out altogether.  I still had lower lamps, signals, brake lights, and reflector tape (under the snow) all around so I filled out the appropriate paperwork and had no option but to deal with it later.  I had freight to deliver in 4 1/2 hours.

Okay, now I had six easy drops in Winnipeg then switch with a driver at the Husky truck stop in Headingley.  Not so fast Al.  Everything was rolling along until the 5th drop which was 6 4x4 skids of freight to a warehouse.  Easy right?  Nope, wrong address, 3rd party warehouse facility.  Had to wait for the guy to show up after I phoned him.  The guy receiving the freight was also as dumb as a stump and could not provide me with concise directions to the dock door.  3 hours folks.  I routinely lump off floor loads faster than that.  Okay, Okay, I took a deep breath got the last drop off did my switch and then I spent an hour dealing with the wiring issue.  I thought it was the plug on my light cord that was corroded and I was right.   So I spent an hour screwing around replacing that.

It was now four in the afternoon and I needed to book 10 hours off duty before I could cross the border.  Good, after 14 hours I needed food.  Oh, I forgot to mention, I had to be in Breckenridge, Minnesota at eight the next morning to pick up a full load.  I wanted to be a truck driver because......?

It's the little things that can get to you.