We are stressed. We're in Kings Mountain. We were supposed to work through our day off, but the truck had other ideas and started pouring smoke yesterday and giving back the error code that said that our EGR valve was failing. So we came home yesterday evening and took the truck to the Cummins shop in Charlotte this morning.

Apparently instead of calling us, Cummins called U.S. Xpress and told them that the truck was ready. Naturally Ray called us, pushing for us to get back on the road. We have our doubts about the truck being fixed. The last time we took it to this Cummins shop (for this very same problem) they told us it wasn't smoking and there were no error codes. Ray just called us, apparently pissed at something else we've done to undermine his operation.

We're dangerlously close to quitting. I hate to say that, because to even entertain the idea is to give it form, but we're getting really fucking sick of Ray pushing us. We can't help it if the truck breaks down, but when it does he acts like a ten-year-old, like we did it on purpose somehow. Or at least inferring that we're not doing enough to remedy the situation. A good example of this is the evening while we were in the hotel room in Sharonville last week. Mara tried to call him 3 times that evening and got nothing but a bust signal; no pickup and no voice mail. Ray chewed us out because we didn't call him. And when I called him to task on it when I talked to him yesterday, he said something to the effect of "the phone was busy because I was using it talking to about three people." Ok, so we can't get him on the phone and can't get his voice mail, but we're still assholes because we couldn't get him on the phone. Huh? Classic Ray.

The problem with Ray is that he's not very good with logistics. At least not on the truck side of it. He has no references. He's never done what we do. In fairness, we've never done what he does, but just because you assign a load to a truck does that mean that the problem has been taken care of. A good example of what I'm talking about here is Ray's fondness for sending us to New York to pick up salt, not understanding that when we go to New York it's very difficult to get to our Thursday pickup in Chicago Heights on time. All he sees is that the mileages on the New York run are about the same as the mileages on the Chicago area run. He doesn't have the references or logistical understanding the grasp that the New York involves a live unload and a live load, while the Chicago run is all drop and hook, and that this constitutes a major difference in time involved.

Well, now we expect him to push us to pick up the load he wanted us to pick up yesterday, without thinking about our Chicago Heights load. If we run on the load that we were originally to pick up yesterday, it'll throw our whole schedule off and make it impossible to make the Chicago Heights pickup on Thursday. We'd rather wait and head out in the morning on our regular schedule and just get back into it, rather than have another fucked up week because Ray didn't plan ahead.

We're waiting on Cummins to call us back. Whatever they may have told U.S. Xpress, they haven't told us shit. If we dropped the truck off this morning and they've already fixed it, we're concerned that they didn't fix the EGR valve. I refuse to drive it if it hasn't been repaired.

And quite frankly, how much bullshit Ray decides to pile up on us today will determine how much longer we work for U.S. Xpress. We both had planned to finish out this year. But after the week we just had our nerves are frayed and we're pretty fucking sick of being pushed at and demeaned by Ray.

Right now our future with U.S. Xpress is contingent on what Ray does and how he does it.