One Of "those" Days...

Show up to shipper , check-in, got the trailer #, can't find it anywhere in the yard. Go back to office, trailer number is confirmed. Go back out to yard. Finally find the trailer...except it's not my companies trailer. They loaded it into the wrong box. No biggie. Go back to office, they say they'll switch it right away.

Go grab some food & come back. Trailer's switched (sweet!). It's loaded to the gills (and a railroad trailer...those suckers are heavier) so I just know I'm gonna have to move the tandems...they won't budge. Buttons depressed, pins released but these things just REFUSE to slide. I hope for the best & head to the scale anyway...(20 miles away).

Get to scale, hit the button, "1st wiegh" blah blah. Just about to go in when a passer-by says "hey man...one of your wheels isn't on the scale". Crap. Fix it, re-wiegh & go in for the ticket. Load is 100lbs over GVWR. 80,100lbs! Tandems won't fix that 😝

Drive 20 miles back to shipper (it's dark now & raining cats & dogs... so can't use the Jake brake (with the heaviest load by far I've had to date), guy appologizes & tells me "put it in dock 137, we'll get right on it". Go out to the yard...find dock 137. There's a truck docked in it! Go back to office, get another appology. Get a new dock. Finagle it into this tiny little hole with yard jockeys flying all around me at kami-kaze speeds & sit.

That was 2 hours ago & the dock light is STILL green! Whenever they decide to finally rework the load I still have to go back to the scales & figure out what to do about these frozen tandems. Will this day ever end? Gah...

Just walked to the office to see what the hold up is...they've been reworking that truck in the 1st dock this whole time thinking it was me! I don't know wether to laugh or cry. 😶

I do believe those chaps should put down the ....rhymes w gong!

Be brave Charlie, be patient it will get better tomorrow...out

Just walked to the office to see what the hold up is...they've been reworking that truck in the 1st dock this whole time thinking it was me! I don't know wether to laugh or cry. 😶

OMG that's unbelievable!

Listen, seriously though - tough moments in trucking can easily become tragedies if you don't keep your head in the game. Trust me, we've all had a million situations like you're going through where it's one thing after another after another. In fact, as you're already seeing, the days where things go smoothly are rather few and far between in trucking. That's just the nature of the job. There are a million things that can go wrong on any given day and a good number of them seem to sometimes.

I was never in a wreck in all my years of driving but I've spoken with countless drivers about accidents they were in and most of the time the accident they were in was the last in a series of events that day. It's common to hear stories exactly like yours where they were having a bad day where one event led to another to another. They got aggravated because they were having "one of those days" and then BAM they find themselves in a wreck.

It's great that you came here to vent. I have a trillion stories I could share with you about days I've had where it seemed the Gods were conspiring against me. So I totally know how that feels. But it's super important to keep your cool and just let it all go. Don't start "keeping score" of the events of the day like, "D*mnit! That's the fourth thing that's happened today!" or "Man, why won't things just start going my way!"

Just try to live in the moment and move forward. What's happened has happened and it's in the past. It's been a few hours so hopefully they got that load squared away for you by now and all is well. Excellent. Pretend none of it ever happened, count your blessings, and enjoy your day. You'll have all kinds of new challenges ahead. You don't want to be distracted by something that happened in the past and cause bigger problems for yourself in the moment, ya know what I mean?

One time I loaded the last of a four stop pickup late on a Friday afternoon. Several pallets of onions. I scaled the load and it was overweight on the tandems by like 1,100 pounds and I couldn't legally put them back any further. The shipper was now closed for the weekend. So I climbed up in the back of the truck and started carrying 40 pound bags of onions from the back of the truck, over top of all of the other freight, to the nose of the trailer. One bag at a time I had to walk all hunched over and squatting down because the freight was so tall I only had about 4 feet of room between the top of the freight and the top of the trailer. I made 30 trips like that to move 1,200 pounds to the nose. It was in the desert, early evening, like still 95 degrees out. I have no idea what the temperature was inside the trailer but it was obviously borderline insane.

But in the end the weight was moved to the nose, I took a shower, and down the road I went and enjoyed my evening drive. Was I aggravated when I realized what I had to do to get the weight moved? Yeah, for a minute or two. But like always you have to tell yourself, "Get over it before you wind up being distracted and cause yourself far more serious problems down the road."

That really is unbelievable that they were working on the wrong trailer though! Wow.

But yap, that's truckin. It will make for a great story anyhow.