I'm going to recap this here.  This is if I decide to leave without finishing. I will do that if they don't release me from here after Friday. I might think about staying a weekend to finish training if I need more of it, but I'm not staying into next week.  I have an RV park to run and rent to collect, it's not going to continue having 15 of 16 lots full if I'm not there.  Sunday is 2 weeks, which is what I agreed to, so I would consider staying that long - maybe. 

However.

1.  No sheets for the beds, no blankets.

2.  $15 a day for food.  And that was taken from me on Saturday, which means 5 days I've had to cover my own food and rest assured, you can't eat on $15 per day.

3.  No hotel.  You are put into this bunkhouse, with sheets full of rules posted on the walls all over the place. It's more like a Boy Scout camp or a prison situation, a nanny house with rules towards grown adults.

4. There are no tables or desks here.  You can't sit down and eat your dinner at a table or put up your laptop on a desk.  The have TV tables, those little things you put in front of you while sitting on a recliner, for that's all that's in there are 2 recliners.  

5. You have no control over the heat in here.  That is left to the whims of the office manager who has decided that 68 degrees is sufficient.

6. The laundry room is directly below a portion of this house and it is open 24 hours a days. There are many nights where people are doing laundry in the middle of the night, making a lot of noise and don't care or know that people are attempting to sleep above them.

7.  Interstate.  The Interstate is about 150 feet away from this house. It is noisy and the noise goes on all night long.

8.  The nearest grocery store of any consequence is about 17 miles from here.  There are no stores where this place is beyond a food truck.  

9. There is one vehicle available. It is not available on the weekends and it is only available Monday-Friday 8-5. 

10.  Good luck finding time to go the nearest town to get any supplies during those hours.

11. Heat. You want heat in that place you’re SOL. The thermostat is in the office and the manager dictates the temperature you are comfortable with. 

You are not paid for the first day here, you have to go through drug testing and a bunch of physical tests that takes around 3 hours.  It's not fun, btw and they should be paying you for anything you are doing company related.

The first week is orientation. If you work hard, you can get done early on most days.  The second week is actual truck training.  

No hotel and your trip here is dictated by the company. I was stuck in the middle seat on an almost 4 hour flight over here and had to pay to upgrade to an aisle seat.  

There is probably more I am forgetting, but I wanted to get that down before I forget any of it.

I have lunch ready for tomorrow and coffee brewed, just reheat it, drink a cup when I get up and take a cup with me. Also shaved already to get that over with and minimize the amount of stuff I need to do.  

This presidential debate is boring. I'm not going to watch any more of it.  

 Back at this horrid bunk house after an exhausing ordeal.

It was not a good day for the trainer.

It started out with him driving off the company fuel aisle with the fuel hose still in the tank.  It popped off - all fuel hoses have breakaway couplers on them designed to simply pop off if someone does that.  It happens a lot but a company driver doing that at the yard is not a good look.

It was raining.  Windy. Cold (my version of it anyway) and I was exhausted.  I've been tired all day long.  That 3 hour loss of sleep with that s*** going on in the laundry room was too much.  I was in a deep sleep when that alarm went off this morning and I never felt right. I just grinned and beared it.  

The day got worse, much worse.  After the fuel hose ordeal, we hooked up a pre-loaded trailer and headed to a paper mill plant. It's a sprawling paper mill 2 hour's drive from here.  I'm not naming the plant or the driver or the company, no need to give out the details.  

We got there, went into the guard shack, did the stuff we needed to do to get in, drove in, found the spot which was a miracle in and of itself - this place is huge.  Then we went through the process of verifying the product in the trailer, the tank it was to be pumped into, if there is enough space in the tank for the entire load (they do not like to have partial loads floating around in tanker trailers, especially if it's hazmat).  There is a worksheet that you fill out and then you have to call a company to verify that you are at the right place with the right product and it's going into the right tank with the right quantity.  

It's important safeguards to ensure you aren't pumping a chemical into the wrong tank. There could easily be an adverse reaction and you could have explosions, fires, toxic fumes, all kinds of wonderful stuff. I absolutely understand why they would want to do this and I fully agree with it, regardless of how much time it takes.  There are several layers of safety involved to ensure a good outcome.

Well, this wasn't a good outcome.  We had everything right, but there was an important piece of information we didn't know. The trainer had never delivered this stuff before, but it's all pretty much the same setup every time depending on if it's pressure offload, pump offload or gravity offload.  I don't think we do any gravity offloading tho, at least I haven't seen any of that yet.  This setup was pressure offload.  

We had to have the operator for that area come out and crank the valve on their building open after we got the hoses set up, it wouldn't budge, They had to use a huge tool to break it free. After that we went inside - the tank is on the inside of the building, there is just a line coming through the building to hook to.  We went and looked at the tank and matched the product name and numbers on the tank to the info on the BOL.  We visually verified how much product was in the tank and we did the calculation again to ensure that we weren't attempting to pump too much product into it.  

Well, we got all of that done and then you have to call a company for further verification.  After that, you are free to start offloading.  So we did. I don't know how much longer later, a man comes out, putting the cut the throat sign up, there is product coming out of the top of a tank!  So we immediately shut everything down, closed the valve on the tanker and stopped the pumping operation. We went in, this stuff was all over the place.  I mean, everywhere.  It was unbelievable.

It wasn't long and big wigs were out there attempting to determine what had happened and that went on for an hour and a half? What was determined, at least preliminarily, is that after investigating by calling a driver from another company that normally does it, the pressure we were using was too much for this particular offload.  We normally pump out 25 psi to pressure offload, the driver said more like 15-20.  And, apparently, have to stand back there holding the line to determine if the trailer is empty and then you can shut off the valves.  

There's lots more to this but I'm not getting into specific details for obvious purposes. The product ended up in retention basins especially designed for such things, so there was no environmental emergency but obviously you don't want stuff like that spraying around all over the place.  

Anyway.  He has to do a UI (drug test) - actually he should be done with that by now and then report to the higher ups tomorrow, I am being dumped onto yet a 3rd trainer.  I'm hoping we are doing a pressure off tomorrow, I want to write everything down instead of just trying to memorize it.  It's pretty simple stuff but I don't want to miss any steps.  Oh, this 3rd trainer just texted me: be at the fuel island at 4:15 am.  

Yup.  My luck has run out for not getting stuck with someone doing very early start time.  I will be absolute toast if I don't get some good sleep tonight. I will go to bed around 8:00 pm and get up as close to departure time as I can without sacrificing being able to shave, shower, have a quick bite and a cup of coffee.  I'm just going to brew a couple of cups tonight and then just micronuke it for a quick cuppa in the morning.  I have a styrofoam cup now, I can take one with me as well.  Yup, and I might as well get my lunch ready tonight, I won't want to do that early in the morning and it takes up too much time. 

But it's still quite early so I have plenty of time to figure out what I want to take with me.  I'm starting to get low on food but at the same time, I'm hoping to get out of here soon enough. 

In fact, I'm going to get that done as soon as I get this blog entry done. I want to see at least some of the presidential debate tonight, even tho Trump isn't in it.  Somewhere along that process some of the candidates will start dropping out. I doubt before next year gets here and I think a lot of those people understand they aren't going to get the nomination, but they'd probably like to get a foot in the door for a cabinet seat of some sort of appointment.  

I was just informed "it's going to be a long day" tomorrow. I can't do a long day if I don't get good sleep tonight.  It's really going to be an amazingly horrible day tomorrow if I don't get enough sleep, so I"ll just hope and pray that the night time noises are not going to pop up. It may be that I am so tired I will sleep through such things anyway.

But when a driver says a long day? You can expect 14 hours.  It's too bad because I was doing well with this guy I have been with the last 3 days.  He doesn't work near as many hours with as much seniority as he has.  We were only out 8 hours today, it was as much as I could handle with several nights in a row of poor sleep.  

Ok, I'm going to stop fretting about sleep tonight and just hope for the best.  

I still think about just leaving here and going home, frequently.  Too much has occurred but this idea they have for people to stay here at this place with nothing, literally, is ridiculous.  

I'm getting offa here.  Watch an hour of the debate and maybe just go to bed at 7:00 pm instead of the 8 I thought about doing.  

 

 Just when I had the thought that perhaps things are getting just a little bit better, here comes last night.  At 12:40 am, a banging noise. Constant, repetitive noise like the sound of a pair of shoes in a dryer.  So, that's what I thought it was.  I thought about going down there and doing something about it, but I thought twice about that.  Confrontation in the middle of the night at the trucking company's RV park. Probably not the greatest idea. 

So,m this went on for hours.  It was pouring rain out there and I couldn't imagine anyone doing laundry in this type of weather.  But after 2-1/2 hours, I thought, who would have anything drying that long?  You have to remember, I was dead asleep when this nonsense started happening and I wasn't really thinking that well.

Not to get sidetracked but btw, it's still pouring rain out there. 

I finally forced my @$$ out of bed, got dressed, went out into the rain and went into the laundry room. No one in there. Doors wide open on the dryers, but not a peep and nothing running.  I started looking around.  There it was.  The wind - still howling - was banging the damn door against a rock that was put there to hold the door open.  

I can tell ya that in that 2-1/2 hour plus time range I was laying in bed thinking about all of this, the thought resurfaced rather strongly to just not go in today and find the next flight home.  I knew I would feel like hell this morning and yes, it's rather hellish. The alarm went off, I was in a deep sleep and could have slept another several hours and probably would have.

I changed the alarm time for this morning after I got back in bed last night to the shortest amount of time I could do all of my stuff in, including drinking coffee.  So I've only got a few more minutes before I have to leave, get drenched in the rain and spend a day feeling so tired that I don't want to do anything but go to bed.  

That's it.  This is what I am facing today.  It's Wednesday, if you count today, 3 more days of this ..... stuff....in this.....place.....I really don't know how I'm going to make it through a full day feeling like this. There are no opportunities for a nap, it's just go, go, goooooo.

G'day.