It's a Team's Life

Feast or Famine

Feast or Famine

The expedite world has always been a hurry up and wait business. Those of us in this segment of the trucking industry understand what that means. For those not on this side of trucking, let me explain. We wait for loads to present themselves. When they do, we hurry to pick up the load and hurry to make delivery. And then we sit again. And so the cycle goes.

Last week was not one of those weeks for us! We were able to get a reset. We picked up a load on Friday and worked the weekend. We delivered that load on the following Monday. We deadheaded to our next pick up over 700 miles away. Again, for those not in the trucking industry, to deadhead means that we drove those miles for no pay. We picked up the next load on Tuesday and made delivery on Wednesday. Fortunately, we were able to pick up our next load on the same day as we made our delivery. When I accepted the load to pick up on Wednesday I gave no thought to how many hours we each had to travel across the country. Once I figured it out I found that we would have enough hours to make our delivery on Friday. It was tight. Neither of us even had 10 hours left on our 70 hour clock. We normally give ourselves more time in which to get our working hours back.

How often do you get that close to using all 70 of your working hours? What do you do to make sure that you don’t get stuck with few hours left? Have you ever taken a load before you realized that you might run out of hours? I find that I get so eager to take a load that I don’t always remember to look at how many hours we have left.

This year has been such a feast or famine year for us that working for eight days straight was a surprise. Such a surprise, in fact, that I completely forgot to write an article last week! But looking at the big picture it is good that we had a full week of work. Now we are getting our reset and hoping to start fresh this week. 

Here’s wishing you millions of safe and prosperous miles!

Kelly Plumb