I was dispatched from Albany, NY to the little burg of Florence, VT to pick up a load. Not just any load, mind you, but 44,000 lbs of something which constituted a load. Someone had also thoughtfully left the landing gear of the trailer cranked up so high that only through a dint of hard effort was I able to lower the front end low enough for my fifth wheel to grab on to it. In many cases, trucking is perfectly doable by men and women but this issue today was a bit much for the fairer sex. Or most of them, anyway.
The plant was operating but the shipping and receiving was closed when I got there. Another driver gave me directions to the back of the plant where we drop trailers then I spent the better part of an hour wandering around in my tractor bobtail trying to find the "main office". Finally I went all the way back out front, then in a different entrance and viola, there it is. Closed, of course.
Eventually got all of that sorted out, ran back to the back of the yard to get my particular trailer where I found the problem with the landing gear. After another 30 minutes wrestling with it and inspecting the trailer I was finally able to leave.
I didn't weigh the load, even though the Bill said it was 44,000 lbs. I was running west back to New York and I saw that all the coops (weigh stations) were closed. I shut down west of Albany just off of the I-90 toll road and weighed... my trailer tandems were about 1,600 pounds heavy. Tomorrow I will take care of that, fuel up and run to our terminal in Taylor, MI -- the only one I have yet to visit.
Oh, the load isn't supposed to deliver until Tuesday morning which is a day late by my taste. Hopefully I can call them Monday morning and get in early. It is going to Grand Rapids, MI.
