I’m going into all of this in detail not just to sing my song about the work but to let shippers out there know what it entails to get a truck to your front door. If any of the things I’m checking needs attention, it’s more work, time, and money. A new tire is $400 at the truckstop and a lot more if you’re out on the Big Slab, plus hours of wasted time. A DOT inspection is $150 and at least a day if there’s nothing that needs fixing, and something always needs fixing. It costs $125 to register the trailer, $1,000 to insure it, not including cargo, and $20,000 to properly equip it. My tractor costs $3,500 to register, $10,000 to insure, and $125,000 to replace. Everything requires an army of office workers doing accounting, insurance, and federal compliance in fuel taxes, registrations, logbooks, driver certification, drug testing, and DOT physical exams. Any compliance violation results in a shutdown of the vehicle.
After I’d finished with the trailers I was going to air out the mattresses in my sleeper, wash and vacuum the tractor interior, and stock the fridge with Gatorade and water. I do all this ahead of time so I don’t get delayed getting to your job.
By Friday night I’d gotten the ten trailers and my tractor cleaned and ready. Call me a sentimental old mover, but after Carlos and Julio left at 9 p.m. it was still light out, so I cracked open a beer, unlocked each trailer, and looked inside to enjoy the handiwork. Rows and rows of clean, perfectly folded pads. Belly boxes filled with cargo bars and plywood of various widths. Equipment boxes with floor runners, straps, car tie-downs, bungee cords, shrink-wrap, door pads, and humpstraps. Each trailer was perfect, and I was ready to mess them up all over again.
I ran out of room in the lot for trailer number ten, but I was loading it the next day in Littleton for San Diego, so I parked it out on the street. That night a mini tornado howled through Erie and blew the rig over onto its side. I got a call from the state police at 11 p.m. asking if there was anybody inside. I told them no and went over to supervise the two tow trucks I hired to put the tractor-trailer back on its sneakers. I have a video of the truck being upended. It cost $2,000, and one of the tow trucks took my tractor to the shop. The whole left side had been crushed. No mirrors, no windows, no lights. The trailer doors had been sprung and the landing gear destroyed. That trailer never went back out on the road.
I got to bed at 1 a.m. and was up at 4 for the trip to Penske Truck Rental in Aurora. I arrived at 6, picked up a rental tractor, drove to Erie, hooked up another trailer, and arrived with my crew at the residence in Littleton at 8:30. As I walked up to the shipper, holding my card in my hand and a smile on my face, he looked at me and said:
“You’re late.”