Maybe I missed something during orientation. We waited all Thursday night and nothing happened. Friday morning, nothing. Finally I called into driver relations and found out that our qualcomm wasnt activated. They walked me through it and we were officially on the board. I was a nervous wreck. I wanted a load but at the same time was scared to get one.
It wasn't too much longer and we got our first qualcomm beep. I pounced on it and read the message. It was a load picking up about 20 miles away in Ohio going about 550 miles to Tennessee. I pushed the buttons hoping I was doing it right to accept the load and off we went. John and I discussed it and decided I would be the one to start out driving. I was terrified! I kept thinking, what in the world do we do when we get there?
I found the shipper, pulled in and saw a sign that pointed the direction to shipping and receiving. Okay, that makes sense, I'll go there. Drove back there, saw the docks, parked the truck off to the side. Me and John got our paperwork, and went into the shipping office together, since neither of us had a clue what to do when we got in there. Walked in, announced who we were with and that we were there to pick up a load. We were told to back into the dock, they were ready for us. We headed back out, relieved that they didn't seem to think we had no clue what we were doing and with John's direction, got the truck backed into a dock. We went in and watched them load the truck, then John secured the freight with load bars. The shipper handed us the Bill of Lading, which we had never seen before, but about 99% of the time you will get with every load. We went back outside, pulled the truck up, John closed and locked the doors, I figured out what messages to send into the carrier and off I went.
I was on cloud nine driving that night. I made it to Shepherdsville, Ky and decided to stop for a break. This was my first experience finding out that if you pull into a truck stop late at night, good luck finding a parking spot. Truck stop was full, but there was a closed gas station across the road from it that our truck would fit in, so I drove over there and parked and took a couple hours nap. All the stress and excitement had worn me down.
I woke up, finished the drive and made it to the consignee. Again, what do we do now? We looked for the shipping and receiving signs, found them, went into the office and we were informed that no one would be there for about 3 hours to unload us. We were directed to a spot that we could park and wait. We parked the truck, set our alarm clock and both of us went to sleep. The alarm went off, we got up and I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the time. I had gotten confused about the time because the consignee was on central time and we were operating on eastern time, so we were an hour later than I had planned to be.
We were so upset and scared to death that we were going to be terminated! We drove back over to the consignee's docks, checked in again, was told to back into the dock and got unloaded. No one mentioned anything about the time and we never heard anything from our carrier about it. What a relief and a lesson well learned! Just one of many to come I'm sure.
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