Travels with Jose

Jose it turns out called me back later that night.
"Hey Buddy, look, there's no parking over here at the terminal
so are you ready to go? We can head out down the road a bit and
then catch some zzzs on our way to ohio. can you be ready?"

I had just undressed and slipped into my motel bed snuggling up
with some Law and Order, SVU.

"Umm, yeah, sure."
Frantically I dressed and packed the remainder of my things.I trundled, laden, down to the lobby in the thick air. Eventually a blue truck pulled up. Werner offers its drivers a choice of trucks, Freightliners, Kenworths and Peterbilts all in both "Classic" (the traditional big truck with a long square nose and big exhaust stacks on either side of the doors lotsa chrome.)and the more aerodynamic models (lotsa plastic). The truck that Jose had was a Freightliner Century (the aerodynamic model)which was sort of releif to me because it is the same truck that I drove at Schneider.

Down from the truck came a short Guatemalan and a rotund mexican. He was so rotund that from a distance i thought the guy had to be american. Maybe it was his walk, he had a fat american walk. The fat american walk was Jose and the guatemalan, his trainee that he was dropping off. i would learn later that this guy was the bane of Jose's existence. Not a good driver, timid but obstenent.

"Are ju Mark?" Jose said shaking my hand with a big meaty paw.
"yeah"
"ok buddy, lets go."
and we were in the truck.
We would not leave the truck for any significant length of time for the next two weeks and of
that the truck was moving 80% of the time.

That night we drove to a rest area just east of Harrisburg pulled in to a spot on the re-entry ramp and went to sleep. I slept very well. which was weird.
I don't know how to describe the next 2 weeks except that it was a total blur. most of the time i had no idea what day it was or even what time it was. The radio's clock was set to Pacific Time (Jose if from San Jose, California) The Quallcom (the little satellite communications device used in the truck, was set to Central time (the home office is in Omaha) my watch was et to Eastern time. and we spent some time in every time zone in the lower 48. On top of that I drove sometimes during the day and slept at night and sometimes vice versa.
A blur.
The first load was clothing that Jose had picked up from a distribution center in Massachusetts.
The clothing was Talbot's (waspy women's clothing) and we were to drop it off at the Werner
Terminal in Springfield, Ohio. the next day when I drove Jose was pleased (as was I) to find that I was
a competent driver. I suppose bicycles and big rigs are similar in this respect.
From this point on, he decided, we would run like a team.
The next day we were to head over to the outskirts of Columbus to pick up a load from ForwardAir,
a air freight place that uses a lot of team drivers to move its freight quickly.
We had a load that was supposed to be going to LAX but after sitting for the better part of a day and a half
the load never materialized, i suppose no one was sending stuff to their homies in LA.
We were then given another load this one from a similar company across the street to its terminal
at Laredo, Texas. We still had to wait but it did show up and we drove down to Laredo.
Jose's hopes were that he was going to get routed towards LA (or more accurately the terminal in Fontana)
so that he could head home since he was going on vacation with his wife to Mexico. They are setting up a retirement
house in Nuevo Leon (near Monterrey) where they both were born.
He would drop me off at Fontana and I would get another trainer for the remainder of my time.
somewhere en route however one of his drivers. wait, i need to explain, Jose is an owner/operator.
He owns four trucks. He drives one and he has two other drivers who work for him (one of the trucks is presently
idle.) They are all contracted to Werner which means that werner dispatches all of them and pays jose for the miles
that all of his trucks run and then he pays his drivers at a rate that is actually better than what Werner pays its drivers
but also makes him some money in the mean time.
So one ho his drivers, Jever (at least that is what i think jose was saying his name was) had a breakdown in Colorado
that ended up requiring costly transmission work and so he decided that he was going to stay on with me
until I finished. You see when you are training you get paid for all the miles you drive and all the miles your
trainee drives which means that in the case of someone like me who is totally capable of driving the truck
by himself jose can essentially double his pay and the company gets a cheap team to run expedited freight
which you better believe they charge a hefty rate for.
From Laredo we got a load coming out of Mexico bound for Miami. It was a load of finely made Mexican Dell Computers.
and once we got to Miami, ( city i have never before been to and have no desire to return to) I realised that they were being
delivered to some sort of logistics facility for cruise ships. whether the computers were going to be used on the cruise ship
or whether the cruise ship was just being used as a means of conveyance for said computer i could not ascertain.
From there we were given a short load (650 miles or so)
We picked up the load at International Coffee Warehouse, a pink stuccoed building in one of the many shitty industrial parts of Miami. Inside stoned looking Hatians spoke in Creole and drove pallets loaded with burlap bags of coffee into the back of trailers. Once inside the trailer two incredibly built guys (one sort of a cuban thug, the other a ripply black guy) lifted the bags with hooks (like the kind used for moving bails of hay or very large cuts of beef) and stacked them neatly on the floor of the trailer (why they couldn't sty on the pallets I could not fathom since clearly there was going to be someone on the other end of the line, in this case the facility that processes coffee and spices for Kroeger supermarkets, putting these things back on pallets.) The beans were green and Colombian and the destination was in Pontiac (near Columbia) South Carolina.
From there we got a load from Abingdon, Virginia way down in the Southwest tail of the state. The one was hoods and farings and other parts for semis made of Meton (some sort of thing that is similar to though, i was told by the shipping clerk, far superior to fiberglass. These needed to be in Denton Texas at the main Peterbilt plant and as it was we could get there early so they organised a split for us. This means we were going to drop the trailer at the Werner terminal in Dallas so that someone else could deliver it when the company wanted it and we could move on to another load and not wait around wasting time. We dropped that load and were given a load from another air frieght company (Burlington Air Express or BAX) The pick up was near the airport and the drop at Boeing Field in Seattle (whoohoo, Miami to Seattle in 4 days bitches.) After that we picked up some merchandise from a target warehouse in Lacey (near Olympia) this warehouse is apparently the one that Target uses for its pacific imports, cheap stuff from china, no doubt loaded with lead, shipped into Tacoma.) This stuff was headed to a target DC (distribution center) In Fontana. so we were closing in. Jose liked this because being close to Fontana we could stay in the western area and not, hopefully delay his vacation too much longer.
From Fontana we headed to Fed-Ex in the charmingly named City of Industry, California. This we took up to Sacramento and from there grabbed an empty trailer that was apparently desperately needed by the folks at Amazon.com in Fernley, Nevada.
Once in the miserable state of nevada we were sent to Sparks where we hooked up to a very heavy trailer of Bush's Baked beans bound for the werner drop lot in Salt Lake City. and from that point it was up to Ogden, to Kimberly Clark, to ferry 36,000 pounds of maxi pads down I-15 to Redlands, California (just east of San Bernardino) once we had finished this I would have a grand total of one hour left which Jose and I widdled away friday morning drving around to buy food and go to Wal-Mart and take his 4th truck to be cleaned and maintained because you see, at this point, Jose had offered and i had accepted to work for him. and not directly for Werner.

in the next episode!
more about Jose!
Mark's escapdes in San Bernardino County! (and Los Angeles County)
mark buys a new computer and an iPhone!