Halliburton and Drywall

From Alliance I headed to Canton and picked up some steel at a plant by the name of Timkin. The load was 5 pieces of steel rod 9.5" in diameter and 20 feet long. They were headed to Duncan, Oklahoma. To Halliburton!
Halliburtons actual business, aside from war profiteering, is providing equipment for oil field exploration and extraction. So you can see why a war in the middle east might be in their financial interest. The steel rods, I would imagine, might be used to fashion the shaft for a oil drill.
The company has its origins in Duncan, in the southwest corner of the main body of Oklahoma. I delivered and waited the rest of that friday for a load. Then I got a message from my DM (driver manager) telling me I should just drive up to Oklahoma City for the weekend. I did so, although there was not a whole lot to do there either.
From the Petro on the southeast side of town I walked a few miles to the part of OKC known as "Bricktown." There is a canal, whether it has any purpose, historically or otherwise, I do not know, but now it gives the 16 screen theatre and the Hooters a very nice frontage.
The Bricktown Canal, OKC










As it happens it was St. Patrick's Day weekend and there was a parade. This parade had the feel and audience of a parade in a much smaller municipality, say one of abour 6,000 people rather than half a million. It was charming.
I drank some beers at a few places, The Bricktown Brewery, who made beers that looked good but tasted thin and Tapwerks, a great bar that has over 100 beers on tap. Then I saw Juno, which I liked a lot better than I thought i might. The next day I drank more and watched Bank Job which was not very intriguing which is not great for a bank heist movie.
Southeast OKC

On Monday morning I got a load assignment to drive down to Duke, which is really in the southwest corner of Oklahoma (not far from where i was but kind of a hike from OKC) where I picked up a load of sheetrock (or wall board or gypsum board or drywall or whatever you call it) destined for Sioux City, Iowa.
I don't know why this material has become so popular. If you have ever worked with it (I put drywall up in the laudry room of my parents basement) you know that it is garbage, cheap crappy crap that is terribly difficult to cut accurately and is very fragile (come on, haven't you ever, surprisingly easily, put your fist through a wall?)
I took it to Sioux City where I enjoyed a walk up the Loess Hills to a mall that I remembered from my cross Iowa bike trip and spent the afternoon in a Barnes and Noble and delivered in the morning. The very cold morning. The tarps were stiff and frosty. This cemented my decision to not continue driving into next winter. I really got to get this oven built.

Trash

A Hill of Garbage in Ohio










I drove down to Stamford, Connecticut and picked up some garbage (Garbage!) which I took to a landfill in Ohio (Ohio!). Why the garbage from an outlying New York suburb needs to be taken 400+ miles over the Appalachian Mountains to Ohio is beyond me. This was perhaps the most depressing load I have ever taken.
The Jamaican lady at the "Transfer Station" in Stamford was irritated with the hispanic guys who loaded the plastic wrapped bales of garbage onto my truck. They did not do their job to her liking.
The landfill, outside of Alliance, Ohio (near Canton) was big, but not bizarrely so. I checked in at the gate and then was told to pull to the side and take off my straps. Then I had to drive up this wet god awful hill of trash (it had rained/was raining and everything was disgusting) and then back up to the spot where they would unload me. It was very muddy. It was a thick and chunky mud, made of water and trash, and was, disgusting, up to the hubs disgusting. The driver of the excavator had to rest his bucket on the back of my truck so I could get enough traction to get up the hill. He then used the excavator to knock the bales of trash off the trailer and a bulldozer pushed them towards the edge, Seagulls swarmed like gnats. The air was foetid.

As I swept the triler off I glanced down at a DanActiv lid and wondered if she ever thought her yogurt lid would end up here.

The Seagulls in Alliance.

Baltimore to Boston

Okeedokee,
A quick rundown of the last few weeks so that I will feel caught up and hopefully keep on track from here on out. Seriously.
I left the house quickly. I had been ready for a load for a couple days but nothing was coming through wince it was the weekend. Sunday afternoon I received a call. There was a driver who's clutch had gone out. Could I go over and pick up his load, which had been towed to a lot in Baltimore and take it to Boston? of course I could.
I drove up to Kennedyville and picked up my trailer from where I had dropped it at the lot next to the volunteer fire department. and looped over the top of the bay and down into baltimore.
Baltimore, i am pretty sure, has the shittiest streets of any city in the developed world. but what do you expect, really? So I wind through East Baltimore and eventually find the tow yard, beneath I-95 and the gate is locked. I get out and look aound for someone, looking over my shoulder, feeling like I'm in an episode of "The Wire" (which I have never seen) and then the guy shows up, unlocks the gate, i drop my trailer and
pick up the loaded one, full of rolls of roofing materials, and head out.
I drove through the night, an awful night, midnight in new york city and there is still f-ing traffic across the GW bridge (which costs $40 to cross as a semi, thank god for company paid e-z pass) and then, north of the city i stop at a rest area and get some coffee from the burgerking. The first thing the wide hispanic woman says to me is "No Burgers."
Crawling into Waltham at 3am I park in the lot of the builders supply yard and go to bed. In the morning I drop the first delivery and then drive up to Woburn (ridiculously pronounced Wu-Burn (when I say Wu you say Burn, Wu, Burn, Wu, Burn))
After that delivery I had to take a long break and so I caught the train into somerville and ate too much indian food with some friends. Then I got a cab back to the truck, a freeking expensive cab, but one that went 90mph on I-93.

The Rest of that Week

So up I went to Warrenton, Missouri to a place that fabricated steel parts most specifically for Trailers. There is a persistent insistence amongst drivers that flatbed truckers are either (or both) scared of or bad at backing. This comes I suppose from the idea that
a flatbed truck does not have to back into a dock to be loaded and in fact can often be loaded by forklift from the middle of a parking lot. While this is sometimes true it is just as often true that a flatbed truck must back into some sort of doc to be loaded, and most often it is a tighter situation (since it will still be loaded from the side) and even more often it requires backing into a building which is difficult because the light differential makes it essentially a blind procedure. Often you see flatbeds avoiding backing in a truck stop, especially late at night, because a flatbed's trailer axles are spread apart (as opposed to dry van trailers whose axles are next to each other). Because of this flatbeds must avoid the tight turns since as the turn tightens the spread axles basically drag along the pavement and can cause severe tire damage or, in extreme cases, the trailer can torque itself into capsizing. So to those van drivers who insist on propping themselves up because they prefer their no talent lazy ass job I say fuck off. (Can I say that)
This back was one such back into a tight slot in a building.
The metal pieces they then loaded were wavy, corrugated, i guess, sheets about 25 feet long and 2 feet wide and perforated with 1 1/2" holes at regular intervals. They loaded 15 bundles in three layers in the center of the trailer in a matter of minutes. I then pulled out of the building and put the straps on to secure them to the trailer and then tarped the whole thing. It was not very big (but maxed out the legal weight) and I only needed one of the tarps to cover it. (The two tarps together could cover a load that was the full length and width of the trailer and as high as legal (9'6" from the trailer bed or 13'6" from the ground.) Then I used some of the 100 bungees I was issued to secure the tarp and I was off. And that only took two and a half hours. I hoped that it would get easier.
As I made my way into St. Louis the rainy greyness was turning to freezing rain/sleety greyness and I was looking forward to getting further east and south and back into the rain.
I chose a path that stayed on the interstate until Lexington, Kentucky and then headed southeast across the mountains and into Virginia. This was probably a mistake since the load weighed 46,000 pounds and the hills of Kentucky got some steep roads. it was slow going but I got there and delivered and again, in a matter of a hour or two got another load.
this one picked up in Roanoke the next morning and delivered to Clifton, New Jersey, not far from NYC.
The next morning I headed up to the grandly named Steel Dynamics in Roanoke and picked up, you got it, steel, in 20 foot long bars (3/4"x3") and angle iron (or like two of the previous pieces joined along the 20' side at a ninety degree angle). I drove into a building (strait in no backing) and a huge crane on a track that ran along the ceiling loaded the bundles from the many stacks onto my truck using an apparently very powerful magnet. The following pictures are of the bundles of Steel at Steel Dynamics in Roanoke, and their back lot full of scrap.

I drove these up to Jersey, spent the night at the receiver (a not in a particularly nice part of the state, as opposed to the nice parts of the state. Which is to say it wasn't Princeton or Cape May.)

In the morning I drove into the receiver's building Denman and Davis, a steel supplier to builders in the NY/NJ/PA area, and was unloaded, this time with simple chain hoists, and then had to back out of the building because they refused to open the door in front of me. My DM (driver manager) than told me to go home for the weekend. Three and a half hours down the NJ Turnpike, across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and down into Kent County once again.

First Load

So after sitting in Tulsa for a few days I got a load out. The woman at the local dispatch window said when I asked "well, we got a short little 400 mile load." great, I said, I'll take it.
The load had come from Laredo (i.e. Mexico) and was headed to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a Mississippi river town south of St. Louis. It had been dropped in the Tulsa yard because the other driver needed to go home. It was a jumble of metal pieces, mostly I-beams painted grey and ladder sections with the sort of cages around them that are supposed to somehow increase their safety. They were painted a cheery yellow.
All of this was headed to a cement plant that was being built on the banks of the mighty Mississippi. I looked it up on line, it was going to be huge. One of the benefits of its position was that they had built a big harbor so that this cement they were making could be shipped down the river and around the world. Or wherever it is they send cement.
When I got there in the morning it was cold and grey and rainy. I got in line behind a number of other flatbeds and settled in for what I thought would be a long wait. Within a few minutes though a guy in a golfcart with knobbly offroad tires came up to my truck and motioned for m to follow him.
I did. Up a steep muddy road, the construction of which, in the surprisingly steep valleys that lead down to the river here, would have been a great undertaking in and of itself. Stacked all the way up along the length of the road were other parts. Down by the river the half constructed plant loomed in the greyness looking quite post-apocalyptic. It looked like this parts, leading a mile or more up the road that wound up the valley, might be parts of an extensive conveyor to bring some of the raw rock materials from their source to the plant. The whole thing was bizarre. A trip into a world I would never have seen otherwise. and I liked that, since it's really the reason i got into the business in the first place.


The cement plant looking east towards the river from the mud road.








The parts were unloaded. My straps and new shiny truck were covered in this thin pale mud. Basically a mud of ground up rock and water, like a shitty cement itself. Into the truck it comes on your feet and then dries and disintegrates into a fine dust that blows about and covers all the new shiny surfaces. What a bummer.
By the time I had my straps wound up I had another load, this one a pick up in Warrenton, Missouri and delivered to Glade Spring, Virginia, way down in the western tip, near Tennessee.

The Rest of Orientation

The point of this orientation is, as I mentioned earlier, to fulfill the requirements of the FMCSR Sec.380.500-380.513 which typically takes about a day and a half. Topics covered included: Safety, Logging, Hours of Service (the number of hours you are allowed to work in a day, week, etc..) Benefits, and so on and so on. The safety section was especially memorable with lots of pictures of horrible accidents. Then we learned that flatbed trucking is, in fact, after Alaskan Crabbing and Logging, the third most dangerous job in the country and to go with that many pictures of people horribly mangled by not using the proper safety equipment. Lots of compound fractures and bungee hooks in eyeballs.
The second half of the week consisted of load securement training. Learning how to use straps and chains to attach things to the truck bed so that they do not fall off and get damaged (or hurt people.) We also learned how to cover things with tarps so that they do not get wet or dirty in transit. All pretty basic. After many weeks of inactivity the five of us were exhausted after this first day of pulling chains and throwing straps and crawling up onto and under trailers. This is great, it is exactly what I wanted.
On Friday, after being given an assignment to tarp a large and bizarrely shaped piece of machinery on a truck bed out on the backlot, we were taken over to the main building where we got paid for the week (in cash!) and were taken to our trucks. They were all spiffy and cleaned and had all the paperwork we would need sitting on the front seat. This was pretty sweet. Melton's trucks are mostly late model Kenworth T-600s. Mine is a 2007 with about 135,000 miles on it. (it's a baby) here:














and the interior. (leather baby)











After getting settled in my truck I headed over to Lowe's to pick up some of the things I would need like a few hand tools an extension ladder and nails and whatnot. Sometimes securing freight can be a bit of a puzzle, another plus in my opinion.
Then I settled in and waited for a load.

The Scam

At 6:30 I woke up, much to soon, and made it to the lobby where the hot breakfast consisted of a steam table with biscuits, sausage, eggs, and gravy, pretty good for the econolodge. The bus from Melton arrived. A short blue bus. It looked nice but sounded rough. It reminded me of bussing to middle school. There were only 5 of us in the class. That would be nice.
The bus driver was also the orientation leader or teacher or whatever. A skinny young guy from all over the place who let it be known he had just gotten over a nasty divorce in Dallas. We went through the first part of the orientation. i don't remember what it involved, all of these things are pretty much the same since it is required by the FMCSR (The Federal Motor Carriers Safety Regulations) that all new trucking company hires go through an orientation that covers all the things that it should.
At one point the orientation teacher who I'll call Paul asked if any of us had received any odd phone calls at the hotel last night. Another guy and I said that indeed we had. Paul said that people had received these calls last week and they were trying to figure out what they were about.
After the first break, about 2 hours in one of the other students said he had gotten a call from his parents saying they had been contacted by someone from Melton about wiring some money. I checked my cell phone which had been turned off. There were 4 messages from my parents.
I thought that was odd.
I listened to the last one first.
"Well" my mom said "I've done it. I've wired you $650 dollars to Western Union in Myrtle Beach."
My heart was racing. I called her back. My dad picked up the phone.
"Dad, you didn't send any money to anyone did you" I said, knowing that they had but hoping otherwise.
"yes, mom did."
"oh shit. it's a scam, it's a scam."

Apparently what had happened was this. The fellow who had called my room the previous night was on a fishing expedition. In the preceding weeks or months he had fished the info from recruiting about what hotels in the Tulsa area Melton used for orientation. Then the night before he called the hotel and asked the front desk attendant, identified himself as Mike from Melton and asked to speak to the last recruit who had checked in. He spoke to the other guy in class the first time he called and got me the last time since I was the last to check in.
From me he got emergency contact info and got my cell phone off so that I would not be reachable the next morning.
The next morning, just after he knew orientation had started, he called my parents claiming to be from Melton and telling them that since I had some solid experience they had decided to put me out on the road with a trainer. I was en route to Myrtle Beach but needed to pay for some insurance that they would reimburse if I stayed with them for a few months. I would need to have the money in Myrtle Beach so it would need to be wired there via Western Union. For transactions under $1000 dollars WU does not require ID but only a password that is set by the sender. This guy told my mom that the password should be "Melton." Nevertheless she specified upon sending the money that I would need to show ID. Now either Western Union did not follow through on this request or "Mike" had a fake with my name on it. By the time we realized it was a scam the money had been picked up.
It sounds absurd in retrospect just as the timing and questions of the call I received in the motel the previous night does but at the time this guy preyed on the fact that my mom cares about me and wanted to make sure I got off on the right foot with this company.
I have to give credit to Melton for working hard to right this situation which is still in limbo. My mom has given statements to Western Union and the police in Maryland and South Carolina. Melton has tried to get the attorney general of South Carolina to investigate this on the basis of insurance fraud. Nothing has yet been ironed out. With Melton, my parents, and even the police Western Union has been completely uncooperative.

The Bus Ride

Sweet God in Heaven that sucked.
The last time I took a ride on the greyhound I was headed from Sioux City, Iowa to Seattle, Washington. I had this big plan post college to bike from Iowa to Washington. I got across Iowa before being crushed by the lonesomeness. I rode up to the bus station in Sioux City packed my bike into a box and boarded the bus at midnight northbound to Winnipeg. Transferring in Fargo for the west bound bus to Seattle was perhaps where the company lost my bike. So that trip was sort of shitty. But not as shitty as this one!
Maybe it was the time of year or the part of the country or the economy but during the entire 40 hours of that northwesterly ride I had an open seat next to me and so the bus was not so bad. This ride, 34 hours from SanBerdoo to Tulsa I only had a seat open next to me for three and a half hours from Indio to Phoenix. That was no fun. No fun at all.
There was a woman behind me, a young woman, who sobbed uncontrollably for the first third of the trip. Her "boyfriend" much older, very crazy looking, he walked with a cane, was not helpful. At midnight in Flagstaff I think he tried to run away from her. but they boarded the bus just in time to head towards Albuquerque.

Finally the bus arrived in Tulsa. I called the motel and they sent the shuttle driver. A young guy who seemed like a really stoned Terence Howard told me he liked Tulsa enough, especially the riverwalk down towards Jenks.
I checked into the hotel and went upstairs and ordered a pizza. I was, you can understand exhausted.
The pizza arrived, I ate it, The phone rang.
"Hi" the man said in a thick southern accent. "This is Mike from Melton. Just wanted to check in with you and see how things are going before orientation tomorrow."
I told him things were fine.
"Well that's great, I just wanted to call to ask you to leave your cell phone in the motel or turn it off before you come to class tomorrow. We had some problems last week with people interrupting class."
Sure, I said.
"and one other thing. We're missing some info about emergency contacts from your file. could you give that to me now."
Yeah, I said, and gave him the info for my parents in Maryland.
"Great, see you tomorrow morning, don't forget to leave that cell phone at the motel tomorrow."
Yeah ok, I said, very tired. It was quarter of ten, that seemed oddly late for such a phone call.