Friday

Left work at 2:30 - but there were a lot of people there - doing a full inventory. I didn't feel sorry for them and I left quite happily. Corporate HQ says that drivers cannot participate in the inventory. I have never heard a reason WHY we can't - but inventory is quite tedious, dull and boring work. You count everything, write the count next to each item on a sheet, then take it back to the office. Somebody there checks the physical count against what's in the computer system. When the 2 clash, someone else is sent out there to do a second count. A third count. After enough repetitive counts are made, and it's still bad, then they cost off whatever it is, or if there are too many, bring them into the system. As I said, I don't particularly care for it. They will be doing it into the night today and tomorrow as well. Usually takes til' Saturday afternoon to finish.

Mary got paid today - which totally escaped me as I don't really care at this point. See her in court on Tuesday is all I can say about that.

Superbowl Sunday - bring it on! I'm not necessarily the most well-received individual in Phoenix when I hear people talking about the Cardinals and I say "Go STEELERS!!" Especially in the bank today - they were like, huh? People have less of a problem if you're a Steelers fan in this town when you tell them you were born and raised there, versus the people that are Steelers fans that never stepped a foot in the city of Pittsburgh, or the entire state of Pennsylvania for that matter. I don't quite understand that, either. If I were from here, I would undoubtedly be a Cardinals fan. It won't kill me if the Cardinals won it, but - I would love to see Sixburgh happen. That's the latest craze, I've heard, it's no longer Pittsburgh, it's Sixburgh. lol.

Oh, and Mary - has totally stopped working/doing anything around here. Not even watering the plants out front. I don't really care to be honest - but, it just dawned on me that I was going to go out there the other day and water all that stuff out front and - I didn't do it. Fortunately this time of year plants don't need near as much water. A thing on my list of things to get done around here is to install a drip watering system. Of course, that's WAY down the line. Actually, I haven't looked into see how much it would cost to install Much more effective way of watering plants - a deep watering - and much easier as you can put the thing on a timer and it will come on whenever you want it to.

Hooray for me!! I DID get the Safe Driver Award for 2008! A full week's pay coming on next paycheck. If ONLY it were NEXT year I would get getting TWO week's pay! What am I going to do with the money? Pay bills - hooray again!!! Yayyyy, I get to spend all of my money on bills, isn't it wonderful?

Oh, and what would I LIKE to do with that award money? Buy a big screen TV. Not a fancy HD thing, just a nice, 50 inch rear projection or something that is cheaper than all this newfangled expensive stuff. I was offered one - a rear projection version - for $200 - the catch is the TV is in a cabin in Pinetop, AZ. Look that up on the map. I doubt the boss is going to want me using the company truck to drive clear up there for a TV, even if it is a steal of a bargain.
What else would I like to do with it? Buy landscaping rock for my back yard. Fix the windows, buy some trees, put ceramic tile in the living room - umm, - lots of things, really.

Done for now.
ben

Thursday

What was going to be an eternity of a day - nothing to do basically - turned out pretty darn good - excepting a little incident this morning. Semi was loaded with ductile iron pipe.
This is VERY heavy pipe. Each stick of 8 inch diamter pipe I was hauling weighs approximately 500 pounds. That's only 20 feet of pipe - get the idea.

I was on the Loop 101 - a newer freeway they built to try and alieve some of the congestion problems in the metro Phoenix area. That particular freeway is just as congested as all the rest of them. In fact, they are already in an expansion project on it - which is slowing traffic down considerably.

Anyway - I was cruising about 20 mph in the slow lane, following behind traffic. Heavy traffic, it was one of the rush hours. To the point of the matter - a car cuts in, slams on it's brakes. I had no choice and my mind raced at the same time - I knew I had to slam on my brakes to avoid running this nitwit over, and I also knew that kind of force would cause some or all of the pipe to slide forward on the boards they are on.

Prophecy come true. Fortunately I wasn't going that fast or I wouldn't be here, writing to tell you about this right now. If I were going 55 and had to do that, I would probably either be dead or definitely seriously injured. Even with a Headache Rack - heavy pipe with enough force can ram a hole right through that diamond plate - and right into my head - hence the terminology: headache rack.

Oh, and mind you, I had PLENTY of strapping on that pipe. More than legally required. The straps, as always, were cranked down to the point that you can play harp music on them by simply pulling the edge of the strap with your finger. I learned about strapping loads when I worked for J.B. Hunt. They show you videos of tragic, horrific accidents that have occured with understrapping. One such video? Titled: "If Only One More Strap....". They had graphic photos of it. It wasn't a video that time, it was photos.

The photos were of a load that had come off the side of a truck, smashed onto the top of a State Trooper's cruiser and instantly killed him. The scientists involved came to the conclusion that if that driver had only put one more strap on that load, that Trooper would still be alive today. In other words, the driver did not put sufficient straps on the load and it caused someone their life.

5 sticks of 500 pound pipes came shooting out of their "resting" places and into my Headache Rack. As I said, I wasn't going more than 20 MPH - the rack stopped the pipe and slightly dented the rack. It was sitting RIGHT there - no turns to be made without more damage to the rack/truck. I didn't even get mad at the driver, who undoubtedly has no clue that their life could have ended today - because of the seriousness of the issue at hand. I pulled instantly off the freeway - I was beside an entrance/exit ramp, got off the highway enough and then pulled over on the gravel on the side of the road.

Damage - almost non-existent. I will tell you right now that I would rather TRASH a truck than kill someone in a car, regardless of the fact that the car's driver is totally at fault for causing the damage. I have no desire to live my life with the thought of someone's death due to something I was doing, even IF it was definitely NOT my fault. If an accident had occured, I would undoubtedly have recieved a ticket. You have to be able to prove that the car's driver made an unsafe lane change. Today's incident makes me want to bring my camera with me at all times and simply run video constantly while I'm driving to protect myself.

I get out of the truck - and stand there looking at this ridiculously heavy pipe, thinking I'm going to have to call some people to come and help me move it.
I'm not a weak man - my life and lifestyle has had me with sufficient strength to life very heavy objects. Especially this job - 70% of the things I have to deal with, or even more than that, are extremely heavy. It's something I love about my work - keeps me moving, keeps me exerting energy to extremes, keeps me at least somewhat fit.

I got up on that truck and gave all of my strength, with good footing, to picking up the end of that pipe and sliding it back. To my surprise, it actually moved. Note that this pipe is sitting on boards, not on something that is easily give to making something on it slide like butter. It took maybe 10 minutes and I got all of it back to where it should be. Cranked the straps down again, and took off.

I've been in a couple of serious accidents - not my fault - but I can tell you from experience that any kind of situation like that can cause you to lose confidence in what you are doing. You lose confidence in driving a semi, the road is a very dangerous place for everyone else around you. This morning, I deleted any thought of that and just continued on driving like nothing had happened. There are no lessons learned here that I haven't already learned. People driving cars do stupid things in front of semi's - and seasoned truck drivers learn to interpret clues and signals of what is going to happen in front of you. I did start slowing down as soon as I saw what was going on, but the action of this driver was too much: I had to hit the brakes hard enough to avoid a SERIOUS collision.

That was the closest I have come to running into or even over a car in a long, long time. Yes, I told my boss - Federal Regulations require me to do so, but I would have told me regardless of that. He's like - did it go through the cab? No, just a couple of very minor dents in the headache rack. No reports to fill out - the other semi's in our fleet have all kinds of dented racks from the same kind of thing happening to other drivers.

See? It's not just me. This stuff happens in inner-city driving to all truck drivers. People in cars, SUV's and whatever else simply don't realize the intensity of focus we have to give to keep from killing them every day because of THEIR actions that cause such things to happen. This hardly happens out on the open road. Just the way it is. An OTR driver has to go through cities, yes, but most of his/her time is spent on the open road. You may or may not see them experiencing such. A city-driver is going to have, actually, a much better sense of how to drive in-city than an OTR driver. Trust me - city driving is much more dangerous and full of perils than any OTR driver will ever experience. It's one of the reasons why many "local" driving positions require several years of driving experience to get a job with them. In smaller outfits, the owner of the company will actually get in the passenger seat and take you on a driving test before they will ever commit to giving you a job.

That was enough for one entry. The rest of the day was going downtown, delivering that pipe, then unexpected deliveries came up which I took out. Then a pickup in Tempe which came up at the last minute and I wasn't back to our yard until 12:30pm. That's an hour and a half from closing.

Tomorrow I have some stuff to do, too, which is good. Go to a pipe company, pick up a load of pipe and deliver it as well as delivering another order to another jobsite. This will consume most or all of the morning. Tomorrow is also "INVENTORY". Lol. Every 6 months, our company - by corporate mandate - requires each location to do an entire inventory count of all product. For the reason of overtime, I will not be participating in any of it. Well, my boss may have me helping count - more eyes on one product when there's a lot of it hopefully means an accurate count.

There is no Mary report today. When she came through the gate, I left the kitchen. I didn't want to hear it, I didn't want to talk to her.

Ken is in love. With a married woman. Ken is my other roommate. Geeeeeeeze.
I've seen this before and don't wonder - again - if I don't need to arm myself for any potential confrontations with that woman's husband if he finds out and comes over HERE looking for trouble. Sometimes I wonder why I have tenants - then I kick myself and remember that I don't have any choice - at the moment.
ben

Feedjit/Boeing

I was over at Fin's journal and saw the Feedjit thing he put on there - seems to me the next best thing to what JS used to have in being able to see all of your visitors for that day, and on your blog, the last 10. Well, whatever. I just put that up.

I just read this rather long article about Boeing's intention of ridding itself of fully 10,000 employees. I remember when those machinists went on strike - and even made an entry on my JS journal about it - that they shoud be THANKFUL they even have jobs and can the BS with pay and all that jive.

They shot themselves in the foot and stuck a toilet plunger up their rear. Nice going, Boeing Machinists Union - you are mostly responsible for the reason that 10,000 of you folks are going to lose your jobs.

BenB is NOT clapping. I thought they were idiots then, I think that now. Boeing is a good company - my brother works for that company over in Mesa (AZ of course) building those crazy helicopters for the military. I have NO clue whether his division will be affected by this, and if so, whether he faces a job loss as well.

He has survived several layoff bouts in the past when it was McDonnel Douglas - I hope he gets through it this time as well, if it even hits there.
I'm still reeling at the staggering loss of jobs: 10,000. That's a LOT of jobs and a LOT of people that are going to lose good paying jobs for - what? There ain't nothing out there, Jack. You wanna work at Burger King, great, otherwise, good luck with that.

I feel a little more trepidation every single day when I see this continuing parade of job cuts coming from all kinds of different companies that exist in all different trades/services/whatever. My company continues to either lay people off or simply not rehire for those that leave on their own. You think I'm not sitting here fretting along with everyone else? I am not consumed by it, no way - I won't go that far with it - but I definitely think about it and often.

How many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of yearly pay does 10,000 jobs equal? Or is that in the billions? We don't wonder why the economy is totally trashed right now, we see how it's only going to get worse when news like this is unleashed upon an already tense, nervous and hurting society and economy.

And with that, I continue on with my campaign to store up food stuffs. I am now putting it in another location besides my kitchen for fact of certain tenant eating my food. Okay, eat my food - but only that which I have for the week at hand, not the stuff I am using to store up for a potential catastrophe in the near or not-so-near future. I dunno - but I don't want to starve finding out.

Fry's is having yet another awesome sale on things I will be dumping into that little storehouse. They got this deal where you buy 10 items and the price varies - but the Hormel chili goes down to 50 cents per can, a LARGE box of Captain Crunch goes from almost 4 per box down to $1.50 and a lot of other things. Hey, cereal lasts a long time in storage, it's one of those things recommended to buy for such an endeavor. You have to buy 10 - and it can be mixed - anything that's on the 10-for sale you can buy as long as there's 10 of them. Not 9 and not 11, I found out the hard way. You can buy 20, 30 whatever, that's how they're doing it. They've never done a sale like this before, but the savings are QUITE substantial.

Well, anyway, I hate to see Boeing going through the same crap as everyone else. It doesn't make sense - it does but geeze. I have never been in a union, so maybe I'm just ignorant. I just don't see unions going on strike when one of the worst economic environments ever is occuring. What, they don't need the income? I have strong opinion about people who are making googles of money yet act like babies cause' they don't think they're getting a big enough piece of the pie - while the rest of the world around them is falling into the hell-hole of financial disaster.

I think I'll stop that at this point, because the more I think about it, the more outrageous their actions become - my view of it anyway.

Sighhhhh. I'm just glad to still be employed.
No Mary report today, either, I haven't seen her as she hasn't been home. Ken - left who knows where before I got home, Wednesday and Thursday are his version of a weekend. I did speak to Ken today on the phone as he had left me several messages last night wanting to know what happened in court. I missed the calls cause' I had the ringer turned off when I was in court yesterday and forgot to turn it back on until this morning.

ben