I got up this morning rested and relaxed, had a banana and an apple then reviewed my trip planning for today. Just to be certain I had the times right (east coast vs central time and all) I looked up the dispatch on my sat unit, only to find I was due to pick up this load yesterday afternoon instead of this morning.
We get several messages with times on them when we get dispatched, but the only real important one is the dispatch itself -- it has the "official" times. I was looking at what the system calls a stop summary, which had me in this morning at 10 AM EST. The dispatch had me in yesterday afternoon at 3:39 PM. Oops.
So, its my first "official" service failure. I was three minutes late to a customer a few months ago which kind of counts, though the customer was backed up and couldn't even give me a dock for two hours after that so it didn't make any real difference.
I called night dispatch this morning to let them know and get my scolding. I asked why it was that a message wasn't sent on the dispatch time telling me I was late, as I could have picked up the load a few minutes late as I was literally 5 miles away. "The system" sometimes blows it too, apparently. Makes you wonder when an error would have been brought to someone's attention if I was sitting at the truck stop all day today though.
I'm at the plant now getting loaded. The gate guard asked if I had any pets aboard and I answered truthfully. Apparently CFI hasn't got around to telling these folks that many of our trucks have pets aboard, and they don't officially allow them into the plant. Blaze didn't seem to care much though.
One good aspect to all of this is that I will be loaded a few hours earlier this morning than I would have been if the time had actually been 10 AM, so I can run a bit further with my sleep schedule.
