Sleeping with the cheese.

[Moot]

As van drivers we share space with the freight. We have all hauled wire baskets filled with stamped metal parts that rattle and clatter. Metal tubs with castings that clunk and clang. Paint and ink that give off odors. I know one E.O. member who doesn' like the smell of the oil coating on machined parts. It reminds her of her factory working years.

Well last night I slept with the cheese. Super concentrated, industrial strength, day-glo orange powdered cheese. Forty 50# bags of the nasty stuff. For 5 hours. This is the second time in my expediting career that I have slept with the cheese. Even with my Fantasic Vent, I stink and my van stinks. I smell like a human cheese doodle. I'm hoping to score a load of Fabreeze this week. Or maybe some tires. Anything that doesn't smell like bad cheese.

I loaded the cheese in St. Cloud, MN and delivered in Milwaukee. Ya that Milwaukee. The one in Wisconsin. Americas dairy land. Delivering cheese to Wisconsin? Don't they have enough cheese?

p.s.
I passed on the Dorritos with my Subway value meal today.

 

[ATeam]

Sounds like it is time to restrict certain types of freight from your van. When dispatch calls to offer that kind of load again, simply say, "Sorry, I cut the cheese."

 

[greg334]

You know I have hauled Candy which made me sick to my stomach. I do agree with the machine parts, sometimes that smell don’t go away for a long time.

With that said, I don’t mean to start something here but I heard this mentioned a few times and maybe it was discussed here on EO at sometime.

I have been told that a lot of van drivers refuse Hazmat loads because vans should not take any hazmat due to the open area the freight sits in, in regards of the driver and passenger. I mean that some of us have taken some really – I mean really nasty stuff and if it would leak I don’t think we would even know what hit us.

A while ago I had some stuff on my truck that didn’t have to leak I could not take it, the odor was bad enough and the container was a hermetically sealed glass container with straps and locks. Fortunately the paper work was all messed up and I didn’t have to refuse it – it was taken off my truck and given to another carrier who didn’t care. Yes it went in a van; I can’t understand why the driver would take it.

I talked to a Tri-State driver who had to haul insecticide 600 miles and was very sick because of a leak in one of the boxes. The way he explained it the leak was in the middle top box on the pallet so you could not see it. He stopped several times to check the load and saw nothing, but when he started into the mountains, the smell overwhelmed him and he had to stop and get out of the van. He did everything he was supposed to do after that.

But to add to this, when I was designing my box sleeper combo, safety was the mitigating factor in deciding to go to a real sleeper instead of the my original idea – safety with Hazmat.

 

[late for dinner]

Moot, try a little vicks on your upper lip or even in your nose. Sounds gross but it works.

 

[Moot]

Any hazmat listed as an inhalation hazard can not be loaded in a van. This would also apply to a truck with a pass through to the cargo area. I would think certain pesticides would fall under this category.

 

[jackdixon_2000]

If I ran a B unit I would look into building an air tight barrier for these situations.

For around $30 I built a barrier for my reefer box that works very well. I bought 3, 8' x 4' polyisocyanurate foam insulation boards from Home Depot for about $8 each. A small roll of foam insulation a knife, glue and duct tape.

I trimmed one board down the side,
to fit side by side and cut and glued the foam to the boards to fill the gaps caused by the E-track. Then the 3rd board was used for the 10" gap on top.
This whole setup weighs less then 5 pounds and I just store the boards overhead on top of a few loadlocks.
Last summer I picked up a couple of skids of frozen foods in Phoenix in 112 degreee temp and those boards sure saved my reefer some work.

Wouldn't a similar setup work for a van? I know that if you would get that board and foam tight enough it would be airtight.

The only disadvantage I see is draggin it around with you all the time. But it does only weigh a couple pounds, and would depend on how often you get noxious loads?

 

[davebeckym]

Speaking of cheese.....my daughter worked at a Dr's office a few years back. I heard a "medical" joke that I then told her. A few days later the Dr came out of the examning room shaking his head and saying "I don't believe it. I don't believe it".

He said a woman came in saying she thought she had a yeast infection. When he examned her he found 3 moldy stinking tampons that had been there for a long time.

My daughter then told him the joke.

What do you call a anorexic with a yeast infection?

A quarter pounder with cheese!

 

[greg334]

> He said a woman came in saying she thought she had a yeast
>infection. When he examned her he found 3 moldy stinking
>tampons that had been there for a long time.

Thanks Dave, I can't eat anymore.

 

[Moot]

After reading that my van doesn't smell so bad.

 

[Turtle]

I carried 2500 pounds of buterscotch flavoring from Ontario to Iowa. Delivered to a place that makes buterscotch cup cake thingies for Sam's Club. The first 5 minutes in the van were great. Smelled like heaven. 2 hours later I had a headache. 10 hours after that I was ready to drive off a cliff. Van smelled like butterscothh for a week.

Worse load was a really short run from the Chicagoland Warehouse where they are dock high-only, no ramp, and delivered it on the northeast side of town. It was like a 65 mile load, sure, what the heck, I'll take it.

Got there and we had to put an empty skid in the van and unwrap the plastic from the eight #50 pound bags of superfinely powerdered red pigment used in the printing industry, then offload it into the van. The pigment was so finely powered that you couldn't see it, but when you wipe a towlette across the dash (or anywhere inside the van, for that matter) it came up covered in red. I dealt with that red mess for 3 weeks. Washed my clothed and it looked like I was trying to dye the load red. Had to run everything through 4 wash cycles before the red was gone.

No tellin' how much of that mess I inhaled. No idea how much I spent on cleaning supplies. The deck is still kinda red, and always will be, I'm sure.

Needless to say, I paid dearly for that measly $50 load. :+

 

[wahoofan]

Van load of freshly painted fuel pumps for Caterpillar plant in North Carolina. Ohio to North carolina the fumes were very strong made sure both windows were open in the van. I sure was motivated to get there quickly. Forklift driver at the plant got a whiff of those fumes and couldnt believe i could drive that far under those conditions. Either take the load or no revenue for that day or who knows when in the expedite business. I am out of here happy truckin gang!

 

[late for dinner]

Many years ago driving local I got a call in the middle of the night to take 2000# about 75 miles into southern Ohio. I picked up the load, it was dry ice, and had a very hard time staying awake but finally made to the delivery. Only then was I told that dry ice should NEVER be hauled in a cargo van. I can't blame the dispatcher because he was stupid just like me, but the shipper knew and never said anything about it. I wonder how many accidents happen because of paint fumes, dry ice and the like???

 

[vipra]

Here's a trick to use when you have freight that stinks--- leave your sliding door and rear door cracked open while you're driving. This lets a breeze blow through the back of your van, carrying a lot of the stench out. My Sprinter's sliding and rear doors will lock when cracked open, so there's no chance of the doors opening fully while in motion. It's not 100% effective, but it helps.

 

[Roadpig]

Man, the van war stories. Seriously, the big riggers think they have war stories, just sit around van drivers for an hour. Although not an odor issue, when I first got into this crazy business of expedite I operated a van (this was back in '98, when vans were the mainstay of the biz) I had to pick up a load of fresh-off-the-line exhaust parts. These suckers were practically RED HOT, and it was early August! The dock manager had to bungee the rear doors to remain partly open for ventilation, but it was like a furnace in there. Luckily it was a mini and I had it delivered in about two and a half hours, but by the time I reached my POD I looked like I had jumped in someones pool along the way and I downed about a 2 leader of water!

 

[greg334]

Moot,

Maybe you could have made a perfume out of the smell?

[a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060512/od_nm/life_stilton_dc;_ylt=Amc5JhBHevpkVAQbvHQgBL.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3NW1oMDRpBHNlYwM3NTc-"]Cheesemakers create "Stilton" perfume[/a]

 

[younglobo]

Moot
One of the smelliest things i have ever hauled was Urinal air freshners not the white mint but the big plastic ones my truck smelled like a mixture of orange, Lemon and Cherry due to the fact that i had those 3 different kinds onboard luckly i Drive a D class and didnt have to sleep with them but the heat of the summer in the box seemed to enhance the aroma.

 

[davebeckym]

Back in my Railroad days we had to get a boxcar of potatos from Flint Produce that they had rejected. When we got there there was potato juice just running out of the boxcar. This was on a hot summer day.

We then were told to take it to Paramont Potato Chips. That's right, they were going to make chips outta those rotten spuds. Paramont was a spur track that could only be entered from the north, so we had to push it 3 miles. No AC on engines so we just had to suffer.

Our conductor was a big burly man who looked a lot like Grizzly Adams. He was big, he was loud, but he had a weak stomach. He started gagging and the dry heaves and was trying to tell us to cut away from the boxcar but he could never quite get the words out. We knew what he wanted but were laughing so hard that we just kept saying "what did you say? I can't understand you".

The neighbors complained about the smell and then the media got involved so they didn't get to make chips outta those spuds.

Somebody had to clean out that boxcar....glad it wasn't my job.

 

[Moot]

Turtle, you have my sympathies! I can only begin to imagine what a mess that powder made in your van. When I worked LTL a guy on our dock speared a plastic lined bulk bin of that very same stuff. It's pigment for ink. As you said super fine. Finer than talcum powder. This stuff was dark blue. Carbon paper blue. What a mess. He hauled it from one trailer, across the dock and into another trailer leaking a thin line the whole time. Forklift traffic got it airborne. It was everywhere. It eventually found its way into the office. A fine, almost invisible blue haze, until someone tried to wipe it. Days later the dock guys were still blowing blue out their noses.

Too bad your insurance company won't total your van. It's got to be a disaster.

 

[wrongwaylinda]

I have had 2 loads that should never have been put in a van. The first one was while I was working for a trucking company out of South Bend(now East Liberty, IN). They had taken a drum from a strainght truck and placed in in their van for me to delivered the next day to a company in South Bend due to the fact they needed to use the straight truck elsewhere. The next morning when I got inot the van to the stench was overwhelming. I had to have the windows rolled down and still it was overpowering. I never made it to the delivery. I went into bronchospams and had to be taken to the hospital. The ambulance came, paramedics couldn't even get in the van, the police came and they called in hazmat. I never found out what was in that drum, but manifest only said "metal for reclaiming" Was not a hazmat run! I think the parts had been cleaned with hydrchloric acid and not rinsed well. It took days for the smell to get out of that van, and the shipper kept stating that there was nothing dangerous in that drum!

The second one was after I had left FedexCC, I was gvien a run to pick up aat Eagle Freight in Columbus, OH to go to Chicago Eagle Freight. Normal, non-hazmat run. When I got to the pick-up I had to wait for over 2 hours for them to finish with the freight and when it was ready the dock worker asked me "you do have a pick-up don't you?" Of couse I said no that I had a van. Well, what I was picking up was a fire estinguisher for jet engines and was hazzards us and not even allowed to be transfer by airplanes. If it cracked, or was damaged it would suck out all the oxygen within seconds and I would be dead. Neadless to say, all my windows were open all the way to Chicago. I should not haven even taken it looking back on it. And to think, NO ONE knew that it was hazzardous till I called dispatch and told them.

And I hauled a load of cheese one time working with FedEXCC from MI to Chicago. At least I didn't have it in my van very long LOL.

Linda

 

[bryan]

HI

Ran a rail car spindle from MI to PA.When I got there to pick it up at 1600 they were just taking it out of the oven, temp 700 degrees farenhiet.Shipper called consignee and told them that they couldn't load it on my van untill it got below 250 degrees.Consignee startes going ballistic at 1900 they can't wait they want it loaded now.So at 1930 we loaded it and it's temp was 450 degrees and I was given instructions to not run ac because if it cooled down to quickly it could ruin the freight.Arrived at consignee at 0330 and sat there till 0700 waiting for them to unload it.Needless to say I was hot.

Best smelling load I ever had was laundry fabric softeners.I could of drove around forever with that in the back.