I've been a trucker for the last ten years but now I am back home at "Camp Chaos" and I will be working at the Fontana terminal as a safety specialist. I hope now that I'm home I'll have a lot more time for blogging!


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Surprise!! I finally have a wireless modem for my laptop. Now I don't have any excuse for not updating my blog on a regular basis... hopefully ... maybe ... 'daily'? ... we will see.

Ha! I'm online!

I'm in West Memphis Arkansas, we just got our wireless modem working and sent our first picture to my students wife. Thanks to my daughter, everything worked good. We are on our way to North Carolina and then back to Las Vegas NV by next tuesday.

Here is my last blog from a week ago:


A beautiful day in Laredo Texas… 74 degrees… blue skies, March 9, 2005. There are a few reasons I really like Laredo in March. Mostly its because I remember Laredo in July… 95 degrees at midnight, 115 degrees the rest of the time. Today they tell me I have a load to Southern California.. Home.. I Like that. It seems I can always get a load to So Cal. That is more than I can say for a lot of the rest of the country.

This morning though, wasn’t destined to be referred to as a ‘good’ morning. I brought this load of metal castings here to be transferred to a Mexican driver who will take the load to some metal plant in Mexico. My company employs a broker to expedite the transfer process so I take my trailer to InterAmerican, a big warehouse with lots of docks along one wall.

The man in the guard shack asks me to open the trailer door so I open the right door and start to open the other door. “NO NO.. just one door” he growls at me, “now take this trailer and put it in dock #27.” (it seems strange to me to put a trailer in a dock with only one door open but whatever the man wants).

I drive down to the other end of the dock area and begin looking for dock #27. There are no numbers visible anywhere so I ask another driver whose truck and trailer are already in a dock. He says he didn’t know either and had to ask. They told him he is in #25 so I figure two docks down will be my dock. Before I can back into the dock a man pulls up in what we call a ‘Donkey’ (a small tractor used to move trailers around the yard). He yells at me to put my trailer in between two other trailers at the other end of the yard. As I start to move he yells at me again and gets out of his truck and walks toward the end of my trailer.

I stop and get out to see what he wants. He looks at me like I’m stupid and says “You have to open the other door!” I tell him the guard told me to only open one door. “No, you have to open both doors” OK.. make up your mind I mutter under my breath.

So I put my trailer in a dock which ends up being four docks from the end of the other end of the building. Still no numbers anywhere… I walk back to the Receiving office to turn in my paperwork and the first thing the clerk asks me is “What dock did you put your trailer in?” I tell him I have no idea what the number is, I just put the trailer where the ‘Donkey’ driver said to put it. So the clerk instructs a fork lift driver to drive his fork lift out to see where I put my trailer. He glares at me like I’m really wasting his time and he drives out and comes back to announce that my trailer is in dock #6. Obviously they use a numbering system way beyond my comprehension level. Maybe the heat does something to your brain.. I don’t know.

What I do know is I’m heading west now and I guess that’s enough to be thankful for being sent to Laredo Texas.
posted by Tom at 5:39 PM