Moving Right Along : A Spudwick Update

The Muppets capture it well in their song "Moving Right Along". Some days, you wake up and wonder how you ended up in Saskatchewan when you were heading for Hollywood but the bottom line is you're moving forward...or at least a relatively forward motion.

For the past month or so, Jeff has been rather upset with his company because he has not driving a lot of miles. For a job that pays by the mile, it's imperative to have a reasonable number of miles, thus translating into a paycheck to make it worthwhile him being gone from home all the time. Despite his many and repeated efforts to get the point across to the dispatchers (the people who set up his trips for him) that he needed more miles, he was ignored. I would get repeated phone calls in a day hearing how disgruntled he had become with this company. So he began to seek out alternative employment, focusing his efforts on the local companies. He did find one that he applied for but really had little hope that he would get. It is a small city and as is typical in the Maritimes, it's all about who you know or who's your family. Because he was out on the road when he put the application in, I encouraged him to call the company to make sure they did indeed receive his application and get a gauge on when they thought they might have a decision made. A week or so later, there was a message waiting on our answering machine from this company. They wanted to interview him. He scheduled the interview and they were ready for him to start that day. Not that he likely would have done that anyway, we already had a friend coming from out of town.

I asked him how the interview went and I got a rather somber reaction and response. Not the typical, "Woot, woot....I just got a new job!" It was very much a "yup...they want me but I don't know if I want it" reaction which was not what I was expecting. Long story short, this new job is not just a straight trucking job like his last ones have been. You jump in your truck, hook to your trailer, go to destination A, pick up your load, drive to destination B, drop off the load...(in a well run company, it would be repeat. With this last company, it was sit for an unspecified time until figure out where to send you next). This job is with a waste management company but it's not the city garbage pick up. It's with other industrial waste like shredded tires. The run he was hired for is a short term contract hauling shredded tires from our city to a dump in Maine but they would like to keep him on long term after the contract is finished. Because their business is garbage and waste, they use different trailers than just the straight box trailer with a refrigeration unit. Their trailers have conveyor belts and tarps...equipment he's not familiar with. Anyone who knows Jeff knows that he can learn to do anything if he's taught how to do it and that was where some of his apprehension was coming from. We have lived in the Maritimes for many years and know the tendencies of life here. Small companies just don't have the manpower to dedicate one person to training so they walk you through briefly, show you all the important stuff but then you're on your own. The rest you figure out along the way...sometimes that fine but other times it can be really bad. He didn't want to find himself in a situation that would be beyond his ability to figure a way out since he'd be working with unfamiliar equipment that likely has a lot of $$$$ attached to it too. He went for a few hours the next day to be "trained" on the equipment and get familiar with the truck he'd be driving but he still felt really nervous about it all. He decided to take a stab at the job and see it plays out.

He's being working at it now this week and it has been a very trying week. There have been a lot of very early mornings and not so early bedtimes. There have been several truck issues, all fairly minor but certainly annoying. Overall, he has been rather unsure if he could really do this job to the standard he believes he should. He is a man of integrity and he's figuring and working the driving times and distance to see how he can maximize the number of loads he can haul in a week and still be legal. (This company pays by the load rather than by the mile.) The company wants him to get two loads a day, 5.5 days a week, which can't legally be done. He figures he could likely get nine a week which is reasonable. He had one really good day this week where he was able to get two loads done and no truck issues so that was encouraging for him. We'll see how the rest of it goes.

On the up side, he is gaining a paycheck based on his loads, not his miles so even if he only gets one load in a day, he still gets paid for that load. The potential is there to make a decent wage and be home a good bit more. That's the latest news from this neck of the woods. This has been Fan of the Muppets reporting. I leave you with this song.