Tired, Wet, and Starving

Published on July 21, 2006 By MasonM In Blogging

When I had delivered the Indianapolis fire truck to Oshkosh yesterday my dispatcher asked me to take a priority dispatch. My choice of course. The same severe storms that had shut me down on the way up had done a lot of damage in the St. Louis area and several thousand people were without power. He wanted me to pick up a load of generators and get them down there over night.

Normally I wouldn't accept such a rush dispatch but as there were a lot of people down there who were in trouble I agreed to take it. The load paid very little but under the circumstances the pay was irrelevent. I was one of several trucks running the generators down there to get some of the important things like grocery stores and gas stations powered up.

I made the run, delivered the generators this morning, and then hauled butt to O'Hare airport in Chicago to pick up a truck coming back up to Wisconsin. I had to make the Chicago pick up before the maintenance people went home at 3:00. Talk about a tight schedule! I didn't have time to stop and eat last night or at any point during the day today.

I made it to Chicago and pulled into the airport maintenance facility at 2:15. Cutting it close, but I made it. Naturally it was pouring down rain at that point so I got nice and soaked while loading and chaining down the truck. Yuk.

When I got back in the truck Socrates jumped on me and saw that I was soaked. He looked down at the floor where the forbidden pedals are and back up at me like "ok, where did you go that you weren't supposed to?" It was hilarious and made getting soaked almost worth it. I fought my way out of Chicago and stopped here just South of Milwaukee to get some food into my desperately empty stomach. I feel much better now and am now going to do the remaining hour and a half to the yard.

At this point I'm exhausted and looking forward to a nice cold beer or three and a good night's sleep.

Comments (Page 1)

Dr Guy

on Jul 21, 2006

Cats do that! Sorry for the rush job, but I think Socrates made it all worth while!

Hope you are resting. And thanks for the laugh!

quietly

on Jul 21, 2006

Nice job, hats off, and beer well earned. Hope the down time is calm and peaceful.

What goes around, comes around.

Trudygolightly

on Jul 21, 2006

Thanks for what you did for those folks Mason

Cats are hilarious! I can just see the look he gave you!

Tova7

on Jul 21, 2006

Mason you are an all around stand up guy.

Hope you make it safe and sound to the "yard" (whatever that is, heh) and enjoy a few cold ones.

Cordelia

on Jul 21, 2006

Sounds like you earned your rest! Take care.

Tova7

on Jul 21, 2006

Well I am off to bed....loooong day..hope you made it in safe and sound.

Send some of that rain my way!

MasonM

on Jul 21, 2006

#1 by Dr. Guy
Fri, July 21, 2006 6:48 PM

[Dr. Guy]

Cats do that! Sorry for the rush job, but I think Socrates made it all worth while!

Hope you are resting. And thanks for the laugh!

Thanks, and you're welcome.

I just returned to the truck after a few beers. The boss showed up at the bar looking for me. He knew that's where I'd be after a hard run. He wanted to talk to me about a couple of "problem" drivers and get my input. He also asked me to get the truck to the dealership tomorrow to have the damages repaired from that rookie that hit me in the truckstop.

He gave me a blank check and told me to have whatever fixed that I felt needed to be fixed and he trusted me to take care of things. That was kinda nice.

It's good to know the boss has faith in you.

MasonM

on Jul 21, 2006

#2 by (quietly)
Fri, July 21, 2006 6:54 PM

Nice job, hats off, and beer well earned. Hope the down time is calm and peaceful.

What goes around, comes around.

Thanks.

feisty_in_ohio

on Jul 21, 2006

Commendable job on the generators!
So, where did you tell Socrates you were? Did he believe your story?

MasonM

on Jul 21, 2006

#3 by Trudygolightly
Fri, July 21, 2006 7:49 PM

[Trudygolightly]

Thanks for what you did for those folks Mason

Cats are hilarious! I can just see the look he gave you!

Thanks, it was pretty funny. As for the run, it's what we do. The trucking industry has always answered the call when there's a disaster to be dealt with. I helped haul in supplies and haul out debris after 9/11. It's just part of what the trucking industry is here for.

Those are some of the reasons I am proud to do what I do for a living. While many people see it as a low level job, I see it as an important part of what keeps our country working. *stepping down from soap box now*

MasonM

on Jul 21, 2006

#4 by Tova7
Fri, July 21, 2006 8:20 PM

[Tova7]

Mason you are an all around stand up guy.

Hope you make it safe and sound to the "yard" (whatever that is, heh) and enjoy a few cold ones.

Thanks. The "yard" is trucker slang for the terminal. It's the place I work out of.

And I did enjoy those cold ones.

MasonM

on Jul 21, 2006

#5 by little-whip
Fri, July 21, 2006 8:40 PM

[little-whip]
Having lived through 11 St Louis summers myself, when I heard of their predicament this week I can honestly say I UNDERSTOOD THEIR PAIN.

The heat and humidity is so bad there some summers it literally takes your breath away to step outside and it can be sooo relentless, too, not even cooling off enough at night to get any decent shut-eye.

God bless ya for making that run, and remember your boy scout lessons...BE PREPARED! My ex and I were never without at least a couple day's supply of easily reachable munchies, and it saved our ass more than once.

The next time you can stop at a real grocery store, fill a sturdy liquor box with things like vienna sausages, beenie weenies, cheese and crackers, peanut butter, tuna salad kits, twinkies, chips, or other such high calorie crud that stores well, soda and bottled water, and of course...toilet paper!

These things will keep you going and can be quickly consumed during a 10 minute rest area break, when you know even pulling in and parking at a regular truck stop is gonna cost ya 30 minutes, and that's before you even put her in park.

Just a hint from an old asphalt gypsy...our emergency food stash was as important as our first aid supplies and mini-pharmacy. Don't leave home without it!

Yeah, I always keep a food stash on hand. Unfortunately it was a case of bad timing. Between the move to a new truck and recent cash flow problems I had depleted it and was planning on restocking it this weekend. It's even more important during the winter when being stuck someplace far away from food supplies becomes a very real possibility.

Having done this sort of work for better than 10 years now, I have learned the value of proper planning and maintaining a proper supply of essentials, but sometimes bad timing just creeps up and bites you squarely on the ass.

MasonM

on Jul 21, 2006

#6 by Cordelia
Fri, July 21, 2006 9:26 PM

[Cordelia]
Sounds like you earned your rest! Take care.

Thanks.

InBloom

on Jul 22, 2006

Hope you were able to recover from yesterday's rains and hunger...may today be a little less hectic!

MasonM

on Jul 22, 2006

#15 by little-whip
Sat, July 22, 2006 07:36 AM

[little-whip]
Having done this sort of work for better than 10 years now

Ahh, I had no idea you had been at this so long! (i just started following your blog a few months ago, remember?)

I didn't mean to be condescending by offering 'obvious' advice, lol, but yeah, emergency rations are important to have around, and yeah, we found ourselves empty handed a time or two as well, mainly due to circumstances we hadn't anticipated.

Not condescending at all. I know drivers who have been out here longer than I have and are still dumber than a sack of dead badgers.

Once, we had gotten hopelessly lost in the desert and actually ran out of fuel...how stupid is that? We could raise no one, and I mean NO ONE on the CB, and this was way before cell phones and on board computers were common equipment...so we were truly stranded.

For almost two days. Yikes we were hOngrY and dehydrated by the time a fuel oil truck on it's way to a home delivery stopped to sell us around 50 gallons so we could get on our way. (angel in disguise?)

What we also had neglected to stash was ether...(we had a 425 Cat engine, a real bastard to start once the fuel cylinders had been sucked completely dry) so we sat there for another half a day before another trucker who happened to have some passed our way.

There are some spookily unpopulated areas in this great nation of ours, so surreal they look like moonscapes, and I later found out that the lack of radio communications in this area of Nevada was a well documented phenomenon having something to do with electromagnetic fields.

It was very scary though, to not even be able to raise STATIC on the CB...every channel was silent and so was the radio...both am and fm bands. Hope ya never get stuck in a spot like that...but if you've been driving for ten years, Im sure you've been through worse, eh?

Yeah, getting stranded really sucks. It's happened to me a time or two. The worst one (and best one) was being snowed in on the WV Turnpike for three days waiting for them to come dig us all out. We all made the best of it though. Some of us had food, others didn't. One guy had a grill and charcoal, so we all got our stuff together and grilled whatever we had. One guy was hauling meat and broke out 50lbs of steaks. Another was hauling beer so we broke that out too. We made it a regular party.

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