CHAPTER 27
(Their New Pay Package vs My Big Package)
5/18/2018
My t-shirt is covered in sweat and my hands are full of brown rust. I only keep so many subway napkins above the visor and I find myself using the very last one. Between shifting gears I spit on my left hand to loosen the rust and wipe it off with the Subway napkin. I realize I'm too late as much of the rust has already made its way onto the steering wheel. It's okay though because my ten speed tractor was issued to me old and smelling like an ashtray. I not only have rust in the Palms of my hands but my t-shirt has rusty nail marks as well. I'm hauling a load of Toyota forklifts that involve numerous stops. It's that rare occasion where I'm stuck with a load that requires me to help unload. The forklifts are nailed down to the floorboards by wooden blocks. My t-shirt is soaked because I have to use a crow bar to pull out the wooden blocks nailed to the floor. If that's not bad enough it's hot and sticky out not to mention there is no ventilation inside of the trailers that I haul. I'm doing a great job on this Toyota run so far and all my deliveries are being made on time. Messages keep popping up on my Qualcomm so I pull over so I can read them.
"Hey Bob. Is there any chance you can get done today instead of making last delivery on Monday?"
It's from my Dispatcher Kathy. I'm still in shock that it's been five months with Kathy and she hasn't run away like the other female dispatchers I used to have in the past. I have surmised at this point that Kathy is happily married with children. She reminds me of the school teacher type and I think the only reason she sticks around is because I think she's curious about the indelible rumors that still haven't eluded me yet. She's a real book worm I'm sure of it and just like me she never seems to misspell words or make errors in the load plans.
My load was initially set to finish delivery on Monday the 21st. I know if I hurry I can beat the Baltimore traffic and finish up on this very Friday instead. It's a roll of the dice but I'm a gambler and trucking in itself has always been a gamble.
I type back. "Sure thing. I should be able to get done by five today."
I try to get done quickly and manage to get to my last stop at the southern end of Baltimore to unload my last forklift.
Everything is going smoothly except for one thing that has me boggled. Why hasn't my Dispatcher assigned me a load after this? Why tell me to rush and deliver early without giving me another load?
It's Friday and I'm stuck in Baltimore without another load planned which means I have to stay in Baltimore until something comes up. Unfortunately there is really only one place to park a big rig near the southern end of Baltimore. The TA travel plaza in Jessup Maryland. I hurry up and head over there once I am empty and try to grab the last parking spot. It's my lucky day and I manage to find parking in the back along the chain link fence. There is a prison up the road and I often wonder if they let the inmates out to clean the bathrooms at the TA because it's not always the greatest in there. My post trip gets done and I see I have voicemails left on my phone. I see that they are all from Indiana. I recognize my Dispatcher's number. I play the recordings. They are all from Kathy.
"Oh hey Bob! Hopefully you managed to get unloaded early today I'll look into layover pay for this weekend."
I played the next message. "Hey Bob this is Kathy I just wanted to remind you that you are doing a wonderful job and your pay got bumped to forty one cents per mile? Just look for the information in your email and that should start on next weeks pay. Once again your doing a wonderful job keep up the good work."
I giggled hysterically. I had to play the message two more times because the way she said "Forty one cents per Mile?" had me cracking up. I wasn't delusional after all. Women really were out to get me. The tone she said "forty one cents per mile?" would sit in the back of my cranium for all eternity. She had said it in such a way as if she was in awe herself. It was only a penny raise for me but Kathy said it like as if forty one cents per Mile was newly found news and portrayed it as a very substantial amount. I was her little toddler sport rolling in the big bucks now at forty one cents per mile. I may as well start taking over her mortgage payments. I was never going to get the way she said that out of my head. Was it a crime to have paychecks as big as hers? Probably.
5/19/2018 Cleveland Cavaliers Vs. Boston Celtics
I'm stuck at a Truck Stop over the weekend constantly checking my Qualcomm for a new load assignment. Nothing is coming up and I am not in the least surprised. The odds are pretty slim that any shippers will be open over the weekend to get a load out of the city of Baltimore. Fortunately for me I know that all these Baltimore folks will insist on watching sports on the televisions so I can entertain myself by gambling. It's the NBA finals and the Cavs are playing Boston Celtics tonight. I have been sports betting a lot over the years and I know how to read and assimilate all the odds and money lines. I also know that the REAL fun is through LIVE wagering where the money line constantly changes throughout the game. This of course is appealing to professional gamblers as you stand a chance to triple your winnings and sometimes make even more depending on how the money line moves. I've been watching the over/under line on this game pretty much all day and I'm quite certain it will change dramatically after the third quarter when I intend to place my wager at a better buy in.
It's getting dark outside and I'm still determined to create my own layover pay because my company is already up to $1,000.00 behind in owed wages. Technically they should be paying me my new pay package like promised in my email but I've been trucking too long to know if I want to collect on it I will end up breaking even burning up my own time and resources trying to collect on it. I left PTL with over a thousand dollars of unpaid monies they owe me. When I left the Kochy Monster in Minnesota they had a nice tab racked up too. Not only had I purchased my own flight home after they left me sitting in purgatory in their lot for nearly a week I never collected all those days of layover pay either. It really gets aggravating how these Big companies capitalize on drivers with previous criminal convictions. It seems the convicts are expected to participate in the "Shut Up And Drive" attitude more than just the average truckers out there. It just doesn't seem fair that complete strangers should profit from blunders made by their employees prior to ever even knowing them.
Why do they build the walls if the punishment never ends? Was Michael Vick required to put a bigger fur coat on his boss after his release? How does it even make any sense that an employer has the right to steal from somebody simply because they had made mistakes that didn't even pertain to them?
Sure enough the Cavs/Celtics game had the wagering lines moving all over the place. Just right around when I predicted near the end of the third quarter the over/under line bumped down to 202 which was an entire twenty points less than when it started. I immediately placed a $300 wager on the over knowing that by the beginning of the fourth it would start an uptick going way back up. It did. As the minutes went by the over/under line jumped little by little back up towards 222 where it had started. By the time it reached the downward slope in the fourth quarter I knew I had this wager in the bag. Or did I? I have seen a lot of weirdness in sports on occasion. But watching this Cavs/Celtics game on May 19th was surely one to remember. Usually in any NBA game when it gets down to the last few minutes of the game the teams start lighting up the board. They often tend to score points faster as they know it is nearing the end of the game. However, to my dismay, NEITHER team scored (other than one foul shot) a single point the entire last three minutes of the game!
5/20/2018 (Chasing The Loss)
I was learning how the buses run in the city and calling myself a professional bus rider. I was learning bit by bit that nearly every city street had a bus coming through usually every fifteen or twenty minutes. I couldn't seem to get out of my mind the $300.00 I had lost last night. It all seemed unfair. I was sure Linguine the Bossman AKA "The Fixer" didn't want to see an extra $300 on my paycheck next week. If I never got along with the jocks in high school wouldn't I have to be a fool to believe they would perform their best on sports I had wagered on? I knew I had to hatch a better plan to procure last night's losses on that Cavs game. Wasn't I a pretty good craps shooter? Hadn't I already spent an exorbitant amount of time watching those YouTube videos on how to properly throw those dice?
Did Baltimore Live Casino know that I was indeed a sharp shooter at the craps table? I knew my weekend hadn't come to a halt just yet! Blaker209 could shoot those dice like the rest of them!
I lost $400 at the craps table in less than 60 seconds. I knew it was time to show off my long face to the players club and see if they offered any free ten dollar perks to hopefully pay for the bus ride back to the truck. This was panning out to be a very shitty weekend. Not only was I certain my company would dick me over on my layover pay for delivering early but I had just lost $700.00 trying to get it myself!
When next week finally arrived I was not in the least bit surprised to not see so much as a penny in layover pay for the weekend. Not only was there not any layover pay but the company couldn't even properly calculate the years I had already been trucking and I was intentionally shorted a penny a mile that I was entitled to. People don't know it but a penny can go a long way in the OTR industry. It's simple arithmetic really. Occasionally a trucker might complete as much as 3500 miles in a week. That penny would net you an additional $35.00 on your weekly check. That's almost $2,000.00 a year so of course every penny counts in the game of trucking. But what was really starting to get under my skin? Celadon was purposely not calculating my mileage pay correctly and hitting on that "shortest route button" which usually deducts approximately 10% of the actual mileage driven as they were in fact providing me with one route, but paying me for another!
Usually being lazy is frowned upon and can be detrimental to ones own health. What people don't know is that there are in fact upsides to laziness. At least when it comes to being too lazy to delete things or throw away papers. I once held onto a dated insurance paper for a couple years despite my mother insisting it needed to be thrown away. After the medical billing got tricky on me I was able to provide that time stamped and dated paper proving I was insured at the time and saved myself an entire thousand dollars. I made sure to brag about it to my mother that loathes hoarding and insisted it needed to go in the trash along with other old mail. My dispatcher was a foxy woman and I liked her a lot but I also knew there was a possibility she was joining in with the phalanx of witches in the payroll looking to prep me for marriage. I didn't have plans of getting married anytime soon so this subtle ferreting would not go down well with me. Why were these Celadon witches hellbent on giving me a little taste of marriage when they knew I was smarter than that? Did they really think I was desperate enough to be the next Rainbow Brite? Didn't they know that I had over 400 messages on my Qualcomm that still hadn't been deleted? Did they know I still had emails from Mindy in my inbox all the way from 2014? Did these squirrelly pilferers really want to play ball with a "Professional" Hoarder? Had ALL those report cards from middle school made their way into the fireplace?