2007, Week 2, Day 1

Getting ready to head out for another week. I'm delivering in Charlotte today. Who knows where from there? I've already had a run-in with my dispatcher. He and I are going to have to have a talk. He's becoming something of a pissy little mother, and acts on occasion like I'm some kind of problem child. This won't stand. Basically, he called and wanted to know when I was going to deliver. I told him by noon. He said he'd have to check and see when they would take it. I told him it was “first-come-first-serve” at the receiver, but he was pissy because it was supposed to deliver on Saturday. He asked me why I didn't do so. I told him that the weekend dispatcher told me to deliver it today, and he said “I see you didn't pick it up until Saturday.” I just said “yeah,” meaning ... “yeah. so?”

Just for the record, the load was scheduled to pick up between 02:00 to 07:00 Saturday morning. On Friday I sat at the receiver on my last load from 9:30 am to 9:30 pm. When finally loaded, I left Baltimore and got down into the Richmond area before I finally had to stop. I was so exhausted that I had a headache and was getting sick. Apparently according to my dispatcher I should have gone on down to deliver in North Carolina and picked up my current load early enough on Saturday that I could make on-time delivery in Charlotte on the same day. Sleep is for the weak, and all that.

I feel compelled to make an issue out of this later. I know it's annoying that there are biological processes like sleep that occasionally screw up the company's randomly laid plans. But don't cop a pissy attitude on me when you go home every night. These fuckers expect us to keep on going like machines, but you never find one of them lingering in the office a minute past 5pm. So yeah, we're going to have a chat.

In other news (and the real reason I started writing), I ordered a hard drive and a new copy of Windows XP for my laptop today. So sometime in the next couple of weeks I'm going to finally be getting my laptop straightened out. I have a kick-ass computer, but the installation was screwed up by some spyware that someone installed. So I'm just starting over from scratch. It's going to be nice to finally have it working right again.

Well, I need to shower and get the hell out of here. I was only here yesterday, but I've had about all of Mama's apartment that I can take. I love her and like being around her, but this building full of old women is like an ongoing soap opera, and there's been plenty of melodrama lately. The current crisis has apparently arisen because some stranger has parked in one of the residents' parking space, and she's rallying to troops to try to expel the invader.

Thus far I'm not overly impressed with 2007. But it's early yet. Now if I can just keep from strangling my dispatcher (and losing my job), being compelled to introduce reality into the senior apartment complex where Mama lives, or start calculating the relative velocity of various projectiles that I would like to direct toward certain people who keep talking about my mistakes regarding recent decisions I've made (especially those regarding my old Thunderbird), I might just get along and find my official 2007 groove. There are already things to recommend 2007. My Thunderbird is officially being worked upon now (meaning it's actually in the shop instead of just sitting in the lot). My $3,500 laptop will soon be running like a $3,500 laptop again. And that's not a bad start, I don't think. Although I admit that it's been somewhat balanced out by the fact that the air conditioning in my new truck has stopped working already.

*sigh*

Oh, well. I'll work it out.