Friday - night

It's getting late, almost 10 pm, but I am just not ready to go to bed. Today was one of those days.  

Got up early, got out of the house, got myself up to the plant in Arkansas.  The truck was lurching badly every time I hit an even medium sized bump and it was quite uncomfortable. Felt like something on the truck suspension had broken.  

So, when I got up there, I got the paperwork signed, got the truck hooked to their system, started offloading glue and then went and started looking for a problem.  Something  was wrong, I just didn't know what.  I searched that truck from front to back to front again, underneath, I was stumped. What is going on here? 

I started thinking, could the trailer possibly have that kind of effect on the truck?  So I started looking at the trailer.  Springs, tires, wheels, everything.  I eventually found it.  And it was bad.  Very, very bad.  Like, so bad that had that assembly finished falling apart, the axle could have ripped out from under the trailer.

What was it?  A spring set on the rear axle, passenger side, had come apart.  It was obvious that one of the leaf springs had busted and fallen out.  There were 4 leafs, now there were 3.  The bottom leaf was on it's way out of there, there was only maybe 3 inches left before it  also departed for thither yonder lands.  None of that was attached to the axle, the only thing holding the axle on was the torque bar.  

I was shocked when I saw it, but I knew instantly that this is the problem. There was no way I was going to drive that thing home.  A disaster waiting to happen. I knew it was going to be an ordeal for the company to even find someone to come out and fix it and I wondered if such a thing could even be fixed on the side of the highway. I doubted it.

Called my company and the mechanic confirmed my suspicions: This is bad and this is going to be hard.  Let me make some phone calls. No matter, I was still unloading the truck, I was hoping by the time I got done with everything, they would come up with an answer and I wouldn't have to sit around waiting.  Sure enough, when all was said and done, they had to have it towed back to the yard some 2 plus hours away. 

I dropped the trailer at a lot right down the road from the plant and headed to Crossett to the washout as  my manager instructed me to, to get another trailer.  

2 hours 15 minutes later and I was there.  After much ado, the trailer was out of Visual - a yearly inspection required by the Feds for tankers.  My manager was at a loss. He said there is another trailer at the yard, but it doesn't have a license plate, it's coming but hasn't arrived yet.  In other words, I wasted all that time going to Crossett only to find out the trailer is out of spec - and - they could have seen it was out of spec if they would have bothered to look at their data online for it.

It doesn't really matter, that trailer had been sitting for months, the dude at the washout said and it hadn't been washed out because they were allowed to get inside the trailers.  Why?  Their accreditation had run out and for whatever reason, they hadn't renewed it.  There was dried up glue in that trailer and that stuff wasn't going to come off by just spraying it with a high pressure wand.  

So, I basically wasted a little over 4 hours today doing that nonsense.  I ended up driving the tractor back to my Park, otherwise known as bobtailing.  I am not working this weekend and Monday I am supposed to call my manager to find out what's next.  Monday is going to be a waste of a day as well, I can tell right now.  I dunno how long it's going to take them to fix the trailer I've been using, but they will be under pressure to get it done quickly. 

That took up  the entire day.  A person wants to move into the park and another person that said they were moving in - no show.  No biggies, I guess, I just think it strange how people do this stuff sometimes.  

Tomorrow I am going to get on that tractor and do the driveway again - well if the boy doesn't take the tractor again - and resume operation on moving that mound of dirt.  It needs moved out of the way.  At some point I'll have to move that moved mound again plus the mound I'm moving it to now.  

I also have more grass to cut.  

I am wasted tired now, it just hit me. 11 hour day, I don't do those too often anymore and it catches up to me sooner or later.