Medway, Ohio.

Naturally, that means that we’re at U.S. Xpress’ terminal.

We’ve been here since Monday afternoon. Last Friday our truck started running very roughly about 150 miles west of St. Louis. It was very cold, so we assumed that our fuel might be gelling. We stopped and put in some anti-gel additives and topped off our tanks with fuel, but nothing seemed to help. We notified breakdown and the decided that after we delivered our load we should go to a T/A truckstop that was about 5 miles away.

Well, getting unloaded turned out to be an adventure of sorts. The consignee turned out to be one of those places where they expect the driver to help break down each skid, sort the stock by item number and re-stack it according to item number on other skids. I balked at that. We don’t do that kind of stuff. Indentured servitude doesn’t work well for U.S. Xpress. Well, except when they’re the ones asking you to do something stupid. But they definitely don’t expect a driver to do all that. Not for free. The customer wasn’t willing to pay for it, and so USX sort of shrugged and told us that they would pay us to do it. Then the customer tried to strong arm us and USX and said they would have to reschedule for the following Tuesday (4 days later). We told USX that we were heading for the T/A if we had 4 days to wait (essentially pointing out that we weren’t going to cooperate with this customer under any circumstances. Someone then got the appointment changed to Monday at noon. Either way, we were having truck problems and didn’t know how long it would take to get repairs, so we headed to the T/A to put the truck in the shop and wait.

The Breakdown department at U.S. Xpress decided that since we were overdue for preventative maintenance our only problem was that we needed our fuel filter changed. They ordered a PM from T/A. We had to wait until late Friday evening to get into the shop, but when we did they did the PM (filter changes, lube, etc). It didn’t make a difference. The shop guys at T/A were of the opinion that we had a head gasket problem or something like that and that we were headed for Freightliner. We informed Breakdown, who didn’t seem to think it mattered and told us to have our Fleet Manager route us by a U.S. Xpress terminal for service. Which, of course, meant that we were going to be sitting the weekend and delivering that bullshit load Monday morning.

So we sat.

Late Sunday night USX decided to give us a service repower. We gladly handed off that load to another driver, who didn’t get in until early Friday morning, and we headed to Medway. When we got to Medway we repowered that new load with another driver and put our truck in the shop. They actually got us in the shop Monday evening. They tried very hard to maintain that it was still a filter problem and that the T/A guys had done something. But another driver team came by and talked to us about what our truck was doing and told us that their truck had been doing the same thing and that it had turned out to be a bad injector wire. I passed this on to the shop guys, who, in the end, decided that it wasn’t the filters after all and that we would have to wait for the Detroit engine guy to come in later that evening. Well, he came in, and in the end it turned out that it was the injector wire after all. They repaired that.

Then it came down to the seat.

We’ve had an air leak in our drivers seat almost from day one, and it’s driven us crazy. So we wrote it up when we wrote up in the engine. When the Detroit guy called us to the shop after repairing the engine, I checked out the seat and it seemed to be fine. So I figured we were good to go. I checked in with the shop just in case, and they told me that the seat had not been repaired. I told them that someone had fixed it because it was working right. It took us several hours to determine what the hell they meant. It turned out that they had, indeed, repaired our air leak (which was a simple valve adjustment) but had broken one of the seat-back brackets while doing it. We’ve been sitting ever since waiting for them to get that part.

Shortly after I started writing this a shop guy came and told me to bring the truck around to the shop, asking “are you the one who’s been waiting for a seat part?” Well, I’m in the shop, sitting in the truck. I assumed that they would be replacing the seat bracket that they had broken. Instead, they seem to be intent on replacing the seat itself. Hehehehe. What a company. The hilarious thing (and chilling thing at the same time) is that this new seat, while covered in leather and apparently a rather serious improvement over the old seat, doesn’t seem to fit. I’m trying to keep my humor about me and I’m grinning sitting here thinking about the absurdity of this situation, but I’m also wondering if we’re going to have to sit for 3 more days waiting on them to correct this problem. Myself, I wouldn’t mind having this new seat, even though it doesn’t have armrests (which is a problem when you drive 600 miles at a pop). It looks like it would be a hell of a lot more comfortable than the seats we have (except for the armrest problem). The mechanic has apparently abandoned the project and has gone somewhere. I imagine he’s in the office and they’re scratching their heads about the problem. I say put the seat in and see how it sits. It may be adjustable. They worry that it’ll be too close up to the dash.

Okay, the mechanic came back with someone in tow to discuss the problem. Apparently they’re trying to put in a daycab seat. Geez. What a company! ;-)

If it looks like we’re going to have to wait 3 more days for another seat, I say put the old one in and let us take our chances. The other seat didn’t seem that unstable to me. I freely admit that I might change my tune if the other seat back bracket broke while I was going down the road, but fuck man! Between sitting at the T/A west of St. Louis and sitting here in Medway, we’ve already sat for a week. We can’t afford to sit anymore.