Wednesday - early

The 6 year old was making a lot of noise and woke me up out of a deep sleep.

I am quite sick of this boy doing this and I am going to remedy it.  The parents probably aren't going to like it either, but I am going to go in his room at 3 am and wake him up.  I mean, wake him fully up out of a deep sleep.  I will do it every night after he wakes me up that morning. I don't care what anyone thinks of it, he certainly doesn't give a shit about my sleep.   

I mean, it's quite irritating.  You are sound asleep, in a beautiful dream and then voices enter your head and if the voice keeps going, you are jolted awake. And then, you realize it's a child that doesn't care if you're sleeping even tho he's been told and even disciplined about it 100 times in the past.  

I was only sleeping in a little because I don't have to do a washout this morning.  No sense in getting up at 5:45 am to do something I don't need to do.  That was entirely erased.  It was 5:55 when he woke me up. 

Ok enough of that. Not worth raising my blood pressure over, but I am going to remedy this situation.  

And yes, I am going to Lufkin, straight to Lufkin, no washout stop in Nacogdoches. This is the short part of the run at maybe - 190 miles total driving?  If these runs would start working out as they are supposed to, I wouldn't be out so long on many days where some fluke or extenuating circumstance gets poked into it and adds hours, sometimes many hours, to the deal.  I'm not getting paid much more for having to be out there longer, this is a mileage thing with stop pay. Stop pay covers the washout, loading and offloading. Detention pay doesn't kick in until you've been at the plants for 2 hours, which is pretty unfair to the driver, that's too long.  If the washout goes over an hour, that also kicks in detention - which shows you that washouts typically don't take that long.  Maybe 20-30 minutes max if everything goes well.

I am working until 2 weekends from now. The dispatcher simply said "I'm working you until you say something different".  Fine, she already had me scheduled this weekend, I want the next weekend off. I'm not going to start losing all of my weekends and especially Sundays to this job.  In reality, because the work days are short enough, I could work 7 days a week in perpetuity for I would never cross the 70 hour threshold in any given 7 hour stretch of days. 

I don't wonder if they made HOS (Hours of Service) regulations to include mandatory ELD's because the new generation of drivers won't be able to figure out some of this stuff. 70 hours/7 days or 80 hours/8 days, most companies do the 70.  There is 8 hours of driving then 30 minutes off, 11 hours of driving then 10 hours off, 14 hours on duty, 16 hour exception, only valid in adverse weather conditions (and some other situations), there are all kinds of clocks.  When you are doing paper logs, you have to figure out all of that yourself, the ELD's do that for you.

The thing I hate about ELD's is there is no cheating. And yes, I don't a monkey's @$$ about "cheating" government regulations one-size-fits-all applying to millions of drivers. If I'm 30 miles from the yard and I am out of hours, guess what I'm doing? Yup, I'm driving back to the yard, I'm not uselessly pulling over somewhere because the government thinks I'm too tired to drive. These unelected bureaucrats making these decisions need to go jump into an icy cold lake. They need to get people in there that actually understand the trucking industry.  Think of people like Pete Buttigege, who literally has no clue about any of it, not just trucking.  Aviation, trucking, Rail, cargo shipping, not a tidbit of experience, no idea what he's doing and it glaringly shows.

Well whatever. Since it's early I might as well just go. Get there early, maybe they will load me early. If not, I'll sit there and wait, don't really care, I'm awake and want to get this day over with if possible.  

G'day