Murfreesboro, TN - Mileage overload

I'm not sure what's going on lately, but it seems like operations is outright desperate to keep trucks moving at any cost. Including, apparently, the sanity of drivers. I had to start this morning as soon as my break was up to try keep things going, only to lose time in traffic and get to the consignee about half an hour later than expected. This wouldn't have been that big of a problem, except that I'd already been assigned another load to pick up by noon and, though the magic mileage book claimed it was just 35 miles away, it was an over 50 mile trek on state highways. As such I was nearly 15 minutes late, though for the second time in less than a week, my pickup deadline was nothing but a suggestion; nobody seemed to even notice that I was "late" for picking the load up.

I think I set a new record picking that load up. Between the time I arrived with my empty trailer and the time I left with my load, just fifteen minutes passed. They had a yard guy bring the loaded trailer right to me so I just had to drop my empty, do a U-turn to get the load, and drive straight out the gate. After a not-so-brief (20 mile) detour to scale the load out, I started heading toward Atlanta. I hadn't yet even had the chance to trip plan any of this out, as I was moving non-stop to try conserve as much time as possible, but operations just didn't seem to care. I received yet another work assignment less than two hours after picking my current load up. By this point, operations' estimate of what I can do and reality are now four hours apart; they seem to think that I can deliver this load by about 5 AM tomorrow when I'll just be coming off my break at that point and still have 225 miles to go.

As a result of all this time compressing by operations, I have to run as hard as I possibly can over the next two days just to get my load delivered on time. I may be forced to wake up around 1:30 AM Thursday. Though the mileage on this run is pretty good, it's going to leave me in upstate New York with only about seven hours to run on my 70. For once, I have some hours to pick up; I'll be getting nine hours back Friday night and eight hours on Saturday. This, however, is the only thing that gives me even a glimmer of hope that I won't be stuck in New York state for the weekend; I don't have much confidence in operations to keep from leaving me stranded once again. To make matters worse there's essentially no truck parking near where I'm delivering, so if they can't find me something immediately I'll have to scramble to figure something out on my own.

In other, almost related news, I finally have some confirmation of a few policies that my DBL had been leaving ambiguous. Most importantly, I finally had someone confirm that I can combine my normal (unpaid) time at home with my (paid) vacation weeks, giving me a few extra days to take care of things. I'll probably be using all that time in the second half of January.

Why can't I enjoy a day off?

The subject really just says it all here. It seems like every time I get a day off, or even during the week or so I had off at home, I end up spending most of my time completely miserable. Both today and last weekend, my entire time off was spent sitting at the computer, wishing I had something to do and, ideally, someone to do it with. I'm completely uninspired when it comes to try writing things. I'm really not even enjoying looking at porn, something that I usually can at least use to get my mind off things for a little while. And during the time I'm working, it seems like I'm completely isolated, as I don't end up having time to do anything for myself at all, which just makes me even more depressed when I have those rare occasions to do something and things just fall apart.

As I posted on Twitter earlier, I rather wish I could just beat myself unconscious for a significant period of time. I'm not suicidal - that goes too far - but I see little point in continuing the daily grind like I am now since it just never leads to anything satisfactory. The brief moments of happiness I have are almost always swept away either by work, by things going awry, or some other unforeseeable calamity that leaves me feeling even more hopeless about my prospects of ever actually getting more than a transient moment of happiness that's immediately swept away in another wave of depression.

Frankly I'm not even sure why I'm writing this. I doubt anyone's going to read it anyway, especially not anyone who could actually make me happy. That is, of course, if there really is someone who could cheer me up.