Just another rant about nonsense

Today has been one crappy thing after another.

• Started off in a decent mood, which was quickly screwed shortly after arriving at work. I got there with plenty of time to spare, then the late-night office lackey wasted fifteen minutes messing around with my paperwork even after both I and the terminal manager have repeatedly told him that he just needs to hand paperwork to drivers so we can go.
• I get into the truck I had yesterday and discovered that they actually fixed something I wrote up. Unfortunately, I also wrote up the malfunctioning air conditioning and they didn't seem to bother repairing that. It was tolerable until the sun came up, but after that, forget it.
• Despite the delays at the terminal this morning, I made up a surprising amount of time on the road and arrived at my first stop on time, only to find that I was at the end of a long line of trucks at the guard shack. This meant, according to their time stamp by the time I finally got into the facility, I was ten minutes late. Whatever.
• Upon returning after my first run, I was told my second trip had been canceled for some reason. I found this particularly strange, as the trailer for my load had just arrived with the parts for delivery. After almost twenty minutes of moving equipment around and failed attempts to call HQ to confirm this, one of the terminal staff looked it up themselves and - oops - it turns out my trip wasn't canceled. That's another big chunk of time completely wasted due to incompetence.
• On my way to my second trip, the air conditioning crapped out completely; it was more effective to simply leave the windows partially down. This, however, led to my phone overheating and quickly losing charge. By the time I'd arrived at my second stop, it was hot to the touch.
• After my second stop, I got into the truck again and started rolling. My phone crapped out shortly thereafter and the lousy radio antenna couldn't pick up anything. For a good 50 miles, I had nothing to listen to except grumbling to myself.
• I decided to fuel at the earlier of two truck stops available to us this week. From the Interstate, it looked like there were a couple of fuel lanes open... once I got down there, somehow they'd completely filled up and two more trucks were in line before me. Once I got to the fuel island, I found that the pay-at-the-pump system was broken, requiring me to go inside before I could even start filling the truck up.
• After I finished fueling, I got onto the highway again... and ended up JUST behind an oversized load that was causing significant backups. Both lanes were filled with tailgating vehicles doing 15-20 mph under the speed limit. The mess didn't clear up for almost ten miles, as there was a work zone immediately past where that rig exited.
• When I got back to Indianapolis, the terminal manager claims he was asking all drivers to give their keys back. At everywhere else I've ever worked, turning your keys in equates very directly to being fired. I told him as much; he said to turn the keys in anyway and repeated his thinly-veiled excuse. If I don't have a job or a key tomorrow morning it's going to be quite a conscious act of will to not set fire to the place.
• Once home, I found that UPS had attempted to deliver a package that I'd been eagerly waiting for all day. Their website never said it was out for delivery; if I had any idea when it might arrive I'd have asked someone else to sign for it. I called UPS and got told the local terminal would call me back "within an hour" to arrange for me to pick it up there. So, instead of getting a shower and trying to feel slightly better, I was left waiting for a phone call. Note that my cell phone is still screwed up from earlier, so, obviously, it never rang. They left me a message helpfully telling me that I could pick it up between 6 and 8. That might be nice if I didn't have an appointment with my hair stylist at 6, which I'm now going to be late for thanks to waiting on that phone call.

So, as a result of all this, I'm hot, sweaty, have a potentially broken cell phone, may or may not be able to pick up an order from Amazon that I'd been eagerly waiting for, will be late for the appointment to get my hair done, probably won't get dinner in a timely manner this evening, and definitely won't be getting anywhere near eight hours of sleep by the time everything is done. Now to go deal with rush hour traffic as I try to make it through one of the most congested parts of Indianapolis.