But I'm not Irish!

Saturday, November 26^th, 2011

      Today has been an exceptional day! After taking some time off to see Jen, coming back to work has been an experience. I know it has only been three nights and 2.5 days, yet I am surprised at how out of it I have been all day today. For the most part, everything went fairly well, and I have discovered how truly lucky I am. I wonder, perhaps, if we can only prove our luck by having things go wrong.

      To start the day off, I took the Seattle public transit system to get reasonably close enough to walk to my truck. For those that have never ridden the bus and/or train and/or light rail of teh greater SeaTac metro area, I will gladly explain. First of all, we have the Metro system. This serves King county. Sweet. It is all buses. That is simple enough, barring the archaic morass that is their website. If you weren't frustrated by the almost useless website, things get more complicated by adding a second transit system. No kidding! (Puget) Sound Transit consists of the express buses, the light rail, and the Sounder (a regional train). It got even better with 3 transfers and it being a Saturday! Hilarious. I managed to get where I was going by the time Google maps suggested that I would arrive, although i could have left a half hour later. On the upside, they have developed a new ORCA card (one card that does all of the transit) to streamline the process. I look forward to getting one soon. Now that I know things about how Saturdays and Holidays work, I am better prepared for the next time.

      So, I've made it to work, and taken a 2 ½ hour detour to pick up an empty trailer. Rolling down I-5 like my pants are on fire. Get into Portland, already knew the detour was there (parts of Marine drive are closed by the terminals) and blasted along. No traffic, making lights like it was my job. Get to the shipper, jump out and learn that my trailer is ready to go! Awesome! All I have to do is hook up to it, do my computer work and leave. Get back to the truck and open the door. Except that it doesn't open. No problem. I have my keys. Not in my hoodie. Hmm. Not in either pants pocket. “Oh shit.” Sure enough, they are still in the ignition behind the locked door. I know where the spare key is. It's on the floor next to the driver's seat. I still haven't stowed it somewhere safe. Well it was safe, but not doing its job at being a spare key for when I lock myself out. I call my company and tell them I'm locked out. Sure.... they'll send a tech out with a key who's on his way home. I call talk with every driver on the lot, seeing if they have a key that will work. Nobody does. One guy even seems all defensive and pissed off that I would even ask him. I ask people if they have a slim jim ( a long flat metal tool for breaking into locked doors, I'm quite good at using them) and nobody has one. Bummer. I learn that they lock the gates in an hour! With this new information, I call my company at 16:10. The day techs have left already and it seems nobody was coming my way. They were even trying to get somebody to deliver a key but they didn't have any techs to do it. Something tells me that the last driver might have left a key somewhere outside the truck, hidden. After a brief search, I find that my intuition is correct, and there is a key hanging on the rear license plate frame (which is JUST behind the cab faring). I am jumping up and down for joy, skipping along and relating this to another driver on site. He says, “Better go buy a lottery ticket before it goes.” Maybe I will.

      This last bit isn't luck so much as me being a space cadet and forgetting how to do my job. I arrive at the Walmart distribution center, all happy that I can drop early. Hooray! Waling into the guard shack, I tell them that I am here to drop a trailer. The guard looks at me and asks, “so uh... do you have any paperwork?” *faceplam* Every trucker knows that you bring the paperwork with you at the consignee. They might want to know what it is that you are giving them, even Walmart. I drop my load then look in the loaded row for an empty trailer. Unlike a typical trucking company, there are no empty trailers in the loaded row, and no loaded trailers in the empty row. I am just thankful at this point to be done for the day and going to bed soon. After I unpack all of my stuff. Almost back to “trucker mode.”