Saturday - semi early
Got up early, just now getting to blogging. The kids left with grandma half an hour ago, they'll be gone until next Saturday. It's some sort of vacation - kids get lots of them nowadays from school - Taylor, James and I will be working and they would have had to pay for day care for them to stay home. Grandma coming was an easy fix, tho I don't know about staying up there an entire week. The youngest starts getting homesick and asking for mommy.
The trucking company called yesterday. This time, it was a lady who had an Oregon prefix, so I assumed it was headquarters calling about something. She didn't introduce herself on the phone and I began to wonder if it was a person calling about an RV lot, these people do that a lot. Instead, she started asking me if I wanted a load for tomorrow? I was quite hesitant for a number of reasons. This conversation, however, started out with things other than trucking so I had no clue who she was and only half way into the conversation did she identify herself as my dispatcher and that I should save this number.
What kind of person calls you in that type of role and doesn't even bother to explain who she is? The manager was over hearing the conversation and eventually took over the phone call. Why don't we have you come in Monday morning, preferably early and we can meet in person, get the truck fixed and work this out? Ok, was my reply, Monday was my desired start day anyway. Providing everything goes ok, the truck will be fixed, I"ll grab a trailer, go home after all of that and then head to Lufkin, I believe, to load and then back to the house. Then to the facility to offload the next day, rinse, lather, repeat.
We'll see. I tend to get stressed about new jobs and doing things I haven't done before. In this case, I've done it but only with supervision. However, there was a twist in this situation, or sounded like one anyway, where you air, water, air at the end instead of just pushing the final amount of product through the hose to the customer's tank. That procedure was done only for pump offs in Oregon, not for air offs. So I'll be asking direct questions about that when I get up there Monday. I want to know what the plant and management want of me in this endeavor long before I ever arrive at a plant to offload.
But, out of memory: Enter plant, find the tank. Ensure it is the correct tank by matching the numbers and name on the tank with the numbers and name on the paperwork. Check to ensure the tank has enough room to take an entire truckload. Open the valve on the top of the tank to let air pressure in. Put down the mats and the buckets under connection points - which should only be 2, one on the tanker and one on the customer tank. Hook up the hose, taking the lids off slowly to allow any product to drip into the buckets. Make sure you put the velcro straps around the arms that hold the lids on - this ensure the arms don't fall back and let the hose come off during offload.
Hook up the airline. Go find someone to sign off on everything. Turn on the air pressure, open the valve on the customer's tank, then on the tanker and let'er rip. The hose will start cavitating when the tanker is empty. But leave it do that a minute to ensure the product is all out of there and you also check by lifting up the hose, it should be light. In fact, you pick up the hose after you start offloading to check the weight of it so you know when you are at the end. If it's an air, water, air situation, then you close the valves on the tanker.
You hook the air hose up to the bleeder valve where the hose connects to the tanker. Turn that on for a minute. Then hook a water hose up to the same valve and turn that on for a few minutes and yes, it does pump water into the customer's tank and they apparently don't care. Turn off the water, remove the hose and put the air hose back on, pushing any product back through and while you have pressure on, turn off the valve to the customer's tank. Unhook the air hose and let the pressure out and then unhook the delivery hose at the customer's tank and then the tanker, putting the lids back on and the velcro strap around the arms. Put their hose away, roll up their air hose and put that away, roll up the water hose and put that away.
Now you open up the valve where the air line was attached to the tanker to allow pressure to build in the tank and let all of that pressure out. It comes out through the top, there is no worries of any product coming out. You can just leave that valve open even driving down the road until it's pressure free, it's just air coming out. You put their buckets and tarps away and you are done, you can leave. It's like an hour process. I forgot, you have to put out the storm drain tarp over the drain if there is one in case of an event. Event is not something you want to have happen, obviously.
But I have this down in my mind pretty well, I think about it daily to keep it fresh in my mind and not start forgetting stuff. I wrote this out to see how much I remember, all of it really. I would have remembered the storm drain thing if I had been there. It's just sequence. Some places don't allow you on top of the tanker unless they provide a set of stairs, meaning you have to open that valve before you enter the plant. All of that and more is what I spent 9 days memorizing. And doing, plus learning how to load, but it turns out we don't load, we only offload. Loading is actually easier than offloading.
As for today? Well, the Fire Ant Festival is going on downtown so apparently we are going to go walk around and check everything out. I'm just going to enjoy my 2 days remaining off and then get up at 5 am Monday, get dressed and ready to go and hopefully go out and turn the truck on. I have had the battery charger on there now for about 15 hours or longer. It should fire right up.
Oh, I have a mother and her kid moving in on Sunday - but I forget to ask her about the condition of her trailer. People try to pull fast ones on me. I don't want junk in there.
Yesterday, I mowed down everything around the fire pit I built last year. Or was it earlier this year? Well, whenever it was, it took many hours to get all of those weeds down and mulched up. I just went over and over it while at the same time, I built a huge fire in the thing to burn out all the weeds inside of the fire pit. The firewood almost gone, I saw several black widow spiders in that mess. I didn't know they had black widows in Texas. I was being careful, tho and was concerned about snakes. No snakes, but if a black widow bites you, have fun with that! Been there, done that, bought the farm and sold it.
I now need to go over and collect money from new rv'ers. They haven't got a clue what they are doing and called me several times yesterday. Lol. They didn't even know where to buy propane and was asking if I sell it? Nope. I might consider it if I had, say, 100 lots in there. But with only 16 lots, no. It wouldn't be profitable and the setup isn't cheap. I'm all about profit right now, get money in. Well, I've been all about profits, just want to get that business checking account to start building up money in order to save for Phase II of the park.
Not going into that right now, I've already discussed that at-length in this blog and right now? I'm heading over to see about collecting 2 night's worth of fees.
G'day
