34 hours . . . where?

I received notice a few days ago that I had completed my apprenticeship and was ready to 'upgrade' (get my own truck) as soon as I could get back to Salt Lake City. So we let Manni's "driver manager" (DM) know about this and after a couple of days we got a load scheduled for pick up in Chicago and delivery to Salt Lake. Unfortunately, we discovered we didn't have enough legal driving hours to make it back to Salt Lake in time to deliver the load on time. Also unfortunately, we didn't grok this fact until we were 500 miles away from Chicago in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. We then let the night DM know this and his solution was to find another truck with hours available to get to Salt Lake with which we could swap trailers. A common practice that I've been part of before.

So after driving seven hours until about 5am, I arrived this morning at a truck stop in Sidney Nebraska, about a hundred miles from the Wyoming border (and only 500 miles from Salt Lake). I found the truck and driver to swap with, unhooked my trailer and connected to his. He did the same with mine, we swapped paperwork, entered all these transactions into the satellite comm system and he was on his way to Salt Lake with our trailer by 6am for a 3pm delivery.

We, unfortunately, were out of hours until we completed a 34 hour reset (take 34 hours off which will give us a 'fresh' 70 hours of drive time for another week). So we are now effectively trapped in southwest-nowhere Nebraska for a day and a half. We're both bummed. We both had plans of things to do in Salt Lake and I'm eager to get my upgrade done and start out on my own truck. Damn.

After a four hour nap I got onto MapQuest and checked out Sidney Nebraska and found this little wheat town has a golf course only a two mile walk from our truck. When I ask him, Manni says he's played a bit of golf before so about noon, after much needed showers, we walk over to the golf course, rent some clubs, pay the very reasonable green fees, hop in our golf cart and hit the links. It turns out Manni has swung some clubs before but never really played. But Goddamn, this boy can hit the ball when he doesn't try to destroy the ball.

I'm far from a golf expert having played a total of less than a dozen rounds in my entire life. But it must be something about turning 50 'cause for the first time ever, the ball is actually going straight down the fairway and it's a beautiful sight.

On one hole I actually scored just one over par. We don't keep score other than adding up how many balls we lost out of the eighteen we purchased (eleven lost, but we found a few along the way too ending up with a total of eight balls). It was so much fun that on the last few holes, both of played two balls at a time (and lost half of them into the rough). But on the last hole we found three abandoned balls which we also played!

A couple of sandwiches and cervezas in the club house afterwards

and this has ended up being a pretty good 34 hours off-duty.

It turns out Sidney Nebraska is also the home of Cabella's Sporting Goods. The Cabella family started the business in their cellar, tying fishing flies. Over the last decade they've expanded all over the US and saved this little town by employing everyone they can find at Cabella's corporate headquarters.

With any luck, our DM will have found us a swap to do tonight (No such luck I've now found out) and we'll be off to Salt Lake after midnight, since by then, we will have accrued enough hours to get there. If not, we'll be taking this trailer we now have back to Indiana in the morning (sixteen hours of driving to get back there), then hoping for another load back to Salt Lake immediately after. (Yup. That's what we're doing.)

Oscillating Fuel Prices

Nearly every week for the past couple months we've received an email from the England corporate telling us to fill up the fuel tanks tonight because at midnight, prices are increasing again.

(In the big picture, putting in another 50 gallons we might not have out of the 800 gallons we already burned through this week, probably doesn't make much of a difference - individually - but will save England thousands of dollars that day across the 3,000 trucks they have running.)

Yesterday we got a message saying hold off on filling until tomorrow because fuel prices are dropping!

My last post about the American food distribution system being so highly dependent on diesel fuel got me thinking. Imagine the week when a few dozen million Americans decide for the first time to buy the bulk of their food locally, instead of from their usual supermarket. A few days later, faced with a bunch of unsold food, the grocers decrease their order for next week's food. Consequently, the trucking companies don't carry as much food and don't purchase as much diesel. While only a small fraction of the total diesel used that week, the truck stops have left over fuel and delay purchase of more from their suppliers. In an effort to unload some of this extra fuel, the suppliers drop their prices and next week's supply of fuel at truck stops has a lower price. That lower price of diesel fuel is then calculated into a lower price in shipping costs which reduces the price of the goods being carried. Do you see where this is going?

The price of fuel is so closely tied to demand and use that small changes in demand and use can affect the price. When that price becomes high enough that it is a substantial portion of the cost of the goods being transported with it, the price of those goods might well vary also. (Though in reality I don't think grocers or other retailers will vary their prices often enough to cause an oscillation in buying habits. Or would they? Hmmmm.)

Bottom line - fuel prices are going to oscillate up and down even more in the coming years, but still trend upward. Hopefully the American public will choose to get off this rollercoaster and not respond to each drop in fuel prices with a buying spree, instead maintain their reduced fuel habits for the long term. Though ironically, if enough people did that, the oscillations would smooth out and the price of fuel would likely stabilize at a lower point. Clearly, without government intervention, this could all become a huge mess for society.

The American food distribution system

Most of what we're carrying in our trailers is food. Typically, we're picking it up from a producer or packager and then delivering it to some regional distribution center. Typically, both pickups and deliveries happen in the middle of the night (or if during the day, during a time I'm asleep) so I have not yet taken any good photos of the outsides of these facilities. Future post. But the other night we made a delivery of 17 tons of cheese to a C+S Wholesale Grocers distribution center in . . . I honestly don't remember where it was. Hmmm. . . . which we'd picked up in . . . don't recall that either. Yes, the days and nights and loads are blurring together.

Anyways, this is the guy who unloaded our truck, called a "lumper",

with the distribution facility behind him. Look at the SIZE of this place ! ! ! (click on the photo to enlarge it) See how far back those stacks go? I think this is where they're keeping the ark of the covenant.

That was a few days ago. Since then we carried fifteen tons of brownies and cakes; twenty tons of ham from Illinois to Mississippi; frozen chickens from Mississippi to Laredo Texas for eventual delivery to somewhere in Mexico; seventeen tons of broccoli (behind me right now), from Mexico (which we picked up in Laredo) to near Cleveland.

Yup. This is the best part of the job. Seeing stuff like this almost everyday.

The highlight of my driving so far was carrying 17 tons of Twizzlers from the factory in which they're made near Hershey Pennsylvania to a Hershey's distribution center near Chicago. (I actually met one of the oompa-loompas who make them.) I LOVE Twizzlers and when the guard at the yard in Chicago overheard me saying to another driver that I didn't get a free sample, he found one for me. The best, freshest Twizzlers I'd ever eaten. Ya gotta get 'em fresh.

Here's what concerns me. Our entire food distribution system is based on the availability and affordability of diesel fuel. With diesel now over $4/gallon and no reason it should ever decrease in price, soon the prices of food transported by this fleet of trucks will also have to increase. At what point do people realize it's actually less expensive (and healthier and more fun at farmer's markets) to buy the bulk of their food from local suppliers? Will local grocery stores begin selling food produced by local suppliers? (Have they?) Could local food producers scale up to supply enough food for the ENTIRE local population if need be? What would it be like to not have broccoli from Mexico in New England in April? (Or, God forbid, no Twizzlers from Pennsylvania!) I've had some absolutely fabulous locally grown New Hampshire mushrooms in January. What other vegetables (plant life?) could be grown throughout a New England winter?

Capitalists concerned about Capitalism

I was heartened to find that the Managing Director (CEO in the UK) of McKinsey, one of the largest management consulting firms, has published a few videos and essays about his concerns about capitalism going a bit too far recently, and what we might do about it. (Yes, despite my recent misgivings about the direction of capitalism, I still stay on top of the best thinking in the area.)

http://www.mckinsey.com/Capitalism.aspx

And a few other CEOs have now made their own statements in response. The one from Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever is particularly well said. It seems Paul really understands the bigger and longer term issues. The guy from TIAA-CREF is clearly missing the big picture.

I also listened to a good podcast a few weeks ago on the Harvard Business Review from one of the more forward thinking guys at Harvard, Micheal Porter,(also mentioned by Paul Polman, above). Porter is on a recent mission to get capitalists to understand/agree that societal needs, not just economic needs, define markets. Here's an article about it.
http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2011/01/michael-porter-tries-to-set-da.html

Energy in the Texas Panhandle

I've now been through the Texas Panhandle a few times, always going through Amarillo either east-west or north-south. It's flat out there. In fact to the west of Amarillo is the flattest part of the world I've ever seen. Like a table to the horizon in every direction. In fact it IS a table - a huge Mesa - that the road finally drops off to descend into eastern New Mexico (which then rises back up to 8,000 feet before Albuquerque).

As is common in lots of places with old oil deposits, pump-jacks dot many parts of the panhandle. If you're not familiar with these, they're automated relatively low-volume but relatively high efficiency pumps which continually pull oil (or water in some situations) from the ground.

Think old hand-pumped water pump with an electric motor. The Los Angeles basin, especially near the coast line, is also dotted with them.

A more recent addition to the panhandle is the multitude of wind turbines.
There are literally hundreds, likely a few thousand all told in the panhandle.

Seeing these two automated 'energy harvesting devices' in such close proximity got me wondering about comparing the two.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume for this exercise that each wind turbine I see out here is a one megawatt version. Most of the latest wind turbines being installed are larger - up to about 3 megawatts - but I'll keep the math simpler this way.

I'll also assume that out here in the panhandle the wind is running at 26 mph (I don't have my anemometer with me but it was definitely windier than 20mph while I was standing in the Walmart parking lot just north of Amarillo. Why anyone would choose to live in such a windy area is something I'll never understand.). A 26mph wind speed would allow the turbine to actually generate 1 megawatt hour of energy every hour.

Compare that to the pump-jack.
Every gallon of gasoline (I know gasoline is a highly refined form of the heavy west Texas crude that these babies are pulling up, but I'll just keep the math simple) contains 1.3 x 10^8 Joules of energy. 1 Kilowatt = 3.6 x10^6 Joules or approximately 40 Kilowatt hours.

Each pump jack will produce about 10 gallons of crude per stroke, pulling about 6 strokes per minute (10 seconds each) to bring up about 60 gallons per minute, which is 3600 gallons per hour, which equals about 144,000 Kilowatts/hour.

So each one megawatt wind turbine will produce about as much energy (at full power) as about seven pump-jacks. Hmmmm While that is truly a comparison of apples to oranges, it's still interesting to note.

Over the Road

Sorry I've been neglectful of updates here for the past few weeks. I'm back in my phase-2 training and likely will be for most of the month of April. As last reported I'd gotten off the truck of my first phase-2 trainer in Laredo Texas and caught a ride up to Indiana with Buddy and his son. From there I caught a ride to Massachusetts with Kevin, a very interesting fellow who was born and raised in the UK until about eleven years old when his family moved to Oklahoma. Consequently he has one of the most interesting (and difficult to understand) accents I've ever heard - Okey/Cockney.

Kevin had an automatic verbal response of "uh oh" to every new stimulus. The phone would ring, our satellite comm system would beep, we'd go over a bump, a truck would pass us too close, a cow would sit down in the field . . . Surprising how annoying that could become in so short a period of time. Nice guy but had a serious two pack a day smoking habit. I discovered one day when he ran out of cigarettes that he really needed those cigarettes to interact with the world. For two hours after his last cigarette and until we got to the next state in which cartons were considerably cheaper, he sat immobilized in the passenger seat, nearly catatonic. Reminded me of David Sedaris' statement that cigarettes are the only thing holding all his 'ticks' at bay.

While Kevin had been driving truck for more than a decade - essentially the only job he'd ever held - he'd started driving for England just a couple weeks before. (I ended up showing him a lot of things about the truck and the satellite comm-system that he didn't know.) While he had a laptop and camera phone, he really couldn't figure out how to work them together. So he asked me to take a bunch of photos of him in and around the truck so that he (inexplicably) could "prove to my friends that I really do drive this truck". Kevin's 'thing' was country-western line dancing. He met his current girlfriend dancing and liked to do it whenever he had off-duty time at home.

After spending a few days in New Hampshire getting my Commercial Driver License converted from Utah (the temporary I needed to go through the school) to New Hampshire, I caught a ride all the way back to Salt Lake City with Moises (pronounced like the biblical character). Unfortunately, my camera/phone had some technical glitch and my photos of him and a bunch of other stuff is now gone.

Moises is from east Los Angeles and had grown up as a gangster who finally got out of it after being shot in a drive-by shooting at his parents home. He showed me the scars. After that he got into construction doing mostly sheet-rocking until he got mixed up in crystal meth. After a couple years of that he put himself in rehab and now is down to just drinking a couple of beers at the end of every day, which his girlfriend doesn't know about. Imagine a combination of the comedians George Lopez, Gabriel Iglesias and Cheech Marin. He'd call his dad on the phone and yell "Eh?", "Eh?", "Eh?" in Spanish. Every time we drove by a herd of cattle he'd laugh like a madman. He thought cows had such a cool life, just standing in the field and chewing. I started calling them "your buddies" and he'd laugh even harder. Within a few hours of getting on his truck he asked me "do you think I'm fat?" (He was.)

After arriving in Salt Lake I got on a truck with another trainer, a very unpleasant and angry little man with a serious Napoleon complex and a bunch of personal phobias. I stayed with him a week mostly because he had a really great little dog on board with whom I'd play catch a couple times a day. I awoke one morning in a truck stop in Ogden Utah to find a note on the dashboard - "have a great day!" - after I'd specifically asked him the day before how long we'd be in Salt Lake to which he replied "only minutes".

Somewhere along the way I drove us through Saint Louis.

It's all beginning to blur together.

The next day I got on the truck of Yazmani "Manni" Estrada, a 27 year old Mexican American who grew up in the east LA basin and Michoacan Mexico which has made his English vocabulary very interesting and amusing for both of us.

The other day he was describing "the little cars to cut the grass" (riding mowers), which has now become a joke between us.

We had a 34 hour reset in Las Vegas a few days ago and fortunately found a truck stop parking lot within walking distance of the strip. In the one hand of blackjack he played, he won $90 which he then used to get us into a dance club in the MGM grand. Club dancing is his thing. Asking women to dance with him, he's not so comfortable with. Fortunately, asking women to dance with him turns out to be my thing. Yes, he can dance. And he's a good looking guy who keeps in good shape so the ladies like him well. I'm looking forward to our next 34 hours off in some other city in a few days.

Like me, Manni spends much of his off-duty time just staring out the window amazed at what we're driving through. Before starting driving in January, he'd never been anywhere but his town in Mexico and the LA Basin. Now he wants to work his way up to getting a fleet of trucks and mostly make enough money to own a house his mother can live in. He has a great sense of humor, drives safely, and likes to keep his truck very neat and clean. He's even open to some minor off-route adventures. We're getting along very well.

I've never seen the desert so green.

I'm writing this while sitting in the bunk in the sleeper, while Manni is driving us through Iowa on our way to Buffalo, NY with nearly twenty tons of Sorrento cheese in the trailer. (More Cheese Please Grommit.) I drove last night from 9pm till about 8am this morning, almost six hundred miles. Looks like I might be pulling us into Buffalo tomorrow morning at this rate. Then off on another adventure to who knows where. Manni is hoping we work our way down to Miami - the dance club capital of the world - for our next 34 hours off.