Tuesday - mid morning

Not feeling so bad today, didn't have to get out of bed early.  IN fact, I still have an hour and a half before I have to go over to the yard.  That is because we got back so late last night, can't start up again before a 10 break.  Ask me how I'm feeling 10-12 hours from now and I may very well give you a  different story.

Regardless, I intend on sucking in as much information as I can and also getting more hands on experience.  In other words, let me do all of this and you can tell me what I'm doing right and wrong as we go along.  Because I don't have forever to stay up here and I do not want to be here beyond this coming weekend, at the latest.  

It was interesting to hear from 2 different drivers that I probably won't even have to load a truck myself on the "east side".  They delineate the company between the west side of the Rockies and the east.  My experience is that most places will not let you load a trailer by yourself even if you are more experienced than their personnel at doing so.  

Whatever.  Their requirement is to load a truck by yourself before you can leave with some person that does the .. test I guess I'll call it.  

I've heard nothing from anyone at the park save a couple who came in last night and couldn't figure out where to go.  Yes, well that's the problem when you are coming in at 10:00 pm. They had driven the entire state of Texas from New Mexico all the way to my place, which is quite the feat if I do say so myself.  That's a lot of driving for an older couple.  

I pulled up the camera and saw them sitting in the main driveway. Well where are we supposed to go? There is only one lot available, just turn into that U-turn you are sitting at and you will see the numbers on the pedestals.  So they did that, I watched them go into their space and haven't heard back from them, thankfully. 

I've got another 2 day stay on that lot coming up on Friday and had to turn down a stay for the same days to another person yesterday. Sorry, I can't help ya. Are you mostly long term? Yes, that's the market around here but I do try to keep a space or 2 available for overnighers.  So he asked me to suggest another place, I really didn't want to for I haven't heard much of anything good about nay of them, but I went ahead and suggested my main competitors since we are on amiable talking terms and they have, on occasion, referred people over to me.

It was them or other parks which are far worse.  I don't like telling people to go somewhere else for that fact that they may, indeed, find it nicer than my place? Who knows? And if they are coming here for some particular reason on a repetitive basis, then I've lost more than just a few nights worth of business. 

I try to keep my mind focused on the task at hand: learn these tankers and get out of here, but the business has dominated the money-making portion of my life for 9 months now and I begin to worry about how the park is actually doing versus what people are telling me.  

Whatever the case, they do payroll on the 27th, meaning whatever you have done up until that point, that is what you get paid for for the last 15 days.  Yes, they pay bi-,monthly. Not bi-weekly, bi-monthly.   The driver telling me that yesterday was like, I really don't like it.  Well, personally, I really don't care.  As long as you get paid for what you have done, I don't care if they pay once a month unless I"m desperate for money.  

I can honestly say my coffers are "down there" right now, but coming up soon will be a lot of payments due. And sometime after the 1st a paycheck being automatically routed to my bank account.  

I'm really trying to just hang in there and get this done, over with and move on with my life.  They don't make it easy with all the reasons I have already given in other posts.  I've worked 4 full days, 4 more including today to get to the end of Friday.  Today is allegedly going to be light, but that could easily change and probably will. The driver I am with now gets paid by the day regardless of what he does or how long he works.  They are paying him a lot when he starts talking 6 figures.

I'm interested in 6 figures, just not from the trucking industry., Get me 30 spots and charge them at least $450 per month.  I'll be grossing $162k if it was constantly full, so take off 10k for adjustment.  $152k.  Average it out to about $30k per year for electricity.  $5,000 for water.  Maybe factor in a couple grand per year for septic maintenance.  Add a part time worker at 2 grand per month.  Figure 2 grand a month for general expenses.  Another grand for repairs.  We're at $44k.  Add $5k to that for leeway and unexpected whatever.  $49k.  Add another $10k to $15k for improvements.  We're at $59k.  

I'm at $101k before taxes for profit for me.   This is why I'm going back to trucking. It's the goal to get to where I need to be to kiss trucking goodbye forever.  Oh, need to add $800 per month to business expenses for health care coverage.  Still over 90k.  Take home around 55 to 60k.  That isn't rich but it's very, very far from poor.  You start talking about expanding to 45 units after getting to 30 and then we're talking some serious money, at least in my world and no need for the government to give me what I've been paying into the SS system for 4 plus decades.  I don't trust that they're going to fix it.

There are so many different ways they could take on the SS stuff - which they are going to be forced to do eventually - that it's too much. If you are talking a conservative viewpoint, get rid of it altogether.  If you're talking a far left viewpoint, fund the account and give people more. If you're somewhere in the middle, such as I am?  My view is to give people over a certain age the full benefits they were promised and then get phase it out for everyone else.

Age 40?  You get X percentage of SS coming to you and then if you really want to force people to save, put the same money they have taken out now into a private fund that can't be touched until 62 or whatever and then, you have far more money saved up accruing interest and dividends than you will ever get through the government.  Age 30, even less SS, Age 20, just stop it altogether.  

The 20 year olds who work grow old, are rich by the time they retire, done deal.  It's really not all that difficult to come up with a plan that will work for everyone.  

Well anyway.  Hopefully today is productive and I can get some of this stuff out that's in my head and attempt to start offloading if he'll let me.  Supervised, tell me what I did wrong as I go along.  I can only get so far in training watching what other people are doing, it's time for hands on. I"ve done some of it but certainly not the entire process from beginning til end. 

Paperwork I don't care about, that's the easy stuff. It's the processes of even where you have to stop the truck.  You have to park the truck in the exact spot if you're overhead loading to have a cage come down over the cap on the top of the trailer so you have something to keep you from falling off the thing.  If top filling, obviously the cap is opened and the nozzle is stuck in there.

If bottom filling, you either open up the cap or a valve they have up there to let air escape as the tank fills.  If bottom unloading with air pressure, then you leave the cap closed and sealed but you open a little valve for the air pressure to go in. If you don't open it, nothing happens lol

The hose hookups are easy as well.  Just metal fitting with clamps on them.  You put a velcro strap around it to keep the arms that keep the thing on there from accidentally falling off. 

AT the end, you close the main valve on the trailer and then open a little valve next to the main valve to allow pressurized air to enter the line and force the product still in the line back into the tank it came out of. Clear the lline of as much as possible and then close the valve at the tank so the product doesn't flow back into the line once you shut off the air pressure.  Then it's just a matter of unhooking the lines, putting the plugs back in them or caps back on them, some other small minutia you have to do and you're done. You double/triple check everything and leave.  

See? I've got most of this down in theory.  There is a pump on some of the trucks they have been teaching me but expressly told me I don't have to learn.  Too late.  I've been watching all of that as well.  

One of the biggest things you have to remember is that when you are unloading, you must have a vent open at the top.  There HAS to be air coming back in, otherwise? The walls of the trailer get sucked in, the trailer is destroyed and you lose your job. Something like that.  They haven't really been pounding that into my head near as much as they should, so I have been doing it to myself.  They take things for granted, as is the case when you've been doing something for 15-20 years, they don't realize that starting from scratch you need to not only know everything, but have the really important things repeated over and over. 

The guy said that anyone wanting to come into the west division would have to go through as much as 8 weeks of training.  

Well, the driver just texted me. He's arriving early, I must get off of here, get my stuff and get out. 

But, I have my lunch ready and there isn't much to do, thankfully, I'm ready to go.

G'day