What did I do at work today

MikeJ

TB Veteran
Credits
189
So some of you might want to know what it's like for me on Wednesday? I'll tell you ha-ha.
So this morning I woke up by my alarm at 2:15 am and I was pretty tired when I was awoken by that thing. So I drug my self out of bed and into work horray! Then I got to work loggin and got back into my car and drove to where we park our trucks it's on the same property, but it's a ways from our office. Anyhow got into the truck lot found my paper I'm still pretty tired at this point and then walked over to the line up and got into my tractor and hooked it up to my trailer for today.

I then took a look around checked lights and trailer coupling and raised the landing gear all that good stuff and then I grabbed my paper work and went off on my way. My route on Wednesday is not far from the yard not really so I think I only drove 54 miles today.

Any rate though headed out did my first stop at about 3:30am or so took me a hot minute, maybe 45 minutes, but what ever got that done got my second stop it was also pretty early gee maybe 4:15am went to that stop got them off and then went to my third stop my Wednesday route is pretty much a route that could be described in 3rds. Anyhow got to my 3rd stop which is pretty much the end of the first third of my route. They normally get there till 5:45am so I had a good solid hour to rest my eyes didn't fall asleep, but I did shut my eyes and that was good, because I read on here even if you get like 20 minutes of rest sometimes that's enough to reset the chemicals in your brain and you'll be good to go for a minute.

Anyhow took a little break and then about an hour later I was out of my fog and started to wake up and I went off and hit the ground running got my 3rd stop off pretty quick and then that pretty much wraps up that part of the route.

So now I'm on two my 2/3rd of the route which is the biggest part of the route. It's mostly a school district and a golf course knocked out all 4 elementary schools 1,2,3,4 went and did the golf course then went and hit the middle school which took about 40 minutes or so then ran over across the way and did the high school.

The high school is the biggest stop takes about an hour. My freezer on Wednesday is about half the trailer and what happened was this a dock stop and it's a pain to lump the stairs and with 68 coming out of the freezer I said forget it, so I said I'll bust through the bulk head. I had to do a little reorganizing. Well with an over size freezer I had two layers of cases right up against the bulk head it was like digging to China. There was a minute there where just for a split second and I mean a split second there was a little bit of doubt ha-ha, but I was able to dig through and get out of the back and not have to use the side door horray for me. So about an hour and the 130 cases at that stop are done. So now were 2/3rds of the day through the route.

So I drive to my next stop which is a retirement home it's a new account nice folks they just threw US Foods out of there told us they like us better easy stop although they had a good 89 case order which was pretty big for them.

Then I had 4 more schools to do. Now the 4 other schools the one district used to be real big buyers from us, but they must have put out for bids and Sysco out bid us because now we still go there, but what used to be a 4,000lbs stop is now a 20 case stop. It's hard to tell with the non commercial accounts I think with non-commercial accounts a lot of that is contracts and price bidding and long term contracts basically who ever is cheapest on 80% of the stuff is who they buy from and the remaining 20% they get from someone else. I know US Foods doesn't really do schools like they do colleges and stuff, but like public schools and just K-8 schools I heard US Foods isn't interested in that business, they say there's no money in it. That might be true it seems like it's either GFS or Sysco doing the schools. Well there's an Ohio company called Avalon Food Service and they do a lot of the catholic schools, but it seems for the public schools it's either GFS or Sysco.

Anyhow did 4 more schools all pretty easy and quick and by 1:15ish I was headed back in. Got back to the yard about 1:45 and spent a few minutes chatting with another driver about his new Volkswagen and dropping my trailer and parking my truck nothing really on the cutting edge there. The other driver was driving a different truck and his normal truck was parked in the middle of the yard he told me if I parked his normal truck then he would buy me a coke so I did and he did (we have a vending machine in our office)
Then went and did my end of the day paper work and headed home. Not really a bad day, load quality was not the best, well it was hard until the middle school and high school came off after that the trailer opened up and then the old folks home also helped to make room and before long it was no big shake.

Anyhow that's it for me.
 
Hey Mike,

Liked reading through what you do everyday. Do you have set start times for everyday, or do you use your own discretion.
 
I use my own discretion pretty much if my trailer is on the lot I can roll out of there. However like on Tuesday if I've not left or started by 3am then there's a problem, but no I usually chose what time I;m coming in .
 
That is funny Mikej down here Sysco does not do hardly any schools and us foods has all the schools in NC and SC.
Now that Gordon's is on the scene US better look out LOL! Were the kings of the schools. GFS pretty much dominates the school market in well everywhere we are. GFS and it was the reason for the name change and re branding, GFS there reputation was "that company that only sells to hospitals, schools and prisons." Like for instance we do not do a lot of pizza shops. Pizza is a huge thing in Ohio we have more pizza places then anywhere else, yet we do not do to many pizza shops we do some, but not a whole lot.

Now we do quite a few restaurants don't get me wrong, we have many commercial accounts some big some small. We do a lot of generic family restaurant type places. We go to a lot of Mexican joints, but we only supply them with like chicken and beef and maybe some fryer oil and 6-10 stuff, but there's a lot the Mexican joints don't buy from us.

We do some nice places believe it or not there's this one place I go to on Friday it's pretty legit when ever I go on my first third date ever now that I am a serial dater LOL! I think that might be where were going I'll let you all know what happens of course I figure though if there's a pattern that I have about 4-5 months before my first third date ever ha-ha!
 
When I started we had the KCMO district and I ran a couple school routes, about the only thing I didn't like was that the buildings were really old and smack in the middle of neighborhoods that were never really meant to handle tractor trailer traffic. In the suburbs here several of the districts have built their own central warehouses so you never have to go to the schools themselves. Think nice,easy, palleized dock stops. You don't have the old lunch ladies giving you cinnamon rolls though.
US has the bulk of the school business here now and Martin Bros (regional out of IA) does one district we lost a few years back.
 
US here in Cleveland doesn't do any schools at all. It's either Gordon's or Sysco Northern Hasserot and US Foods seem to stay away from the schools.
 
When I started we had the KCMO district and I ran a couple school routes, about the only thing I didn't like was that the buildings were really old and smack in the middle of neighborhoods that were never really meant to handle tractor trailer traffic. In the suburbs here several of the districts have built their own central warehouses so you never have to go to the schools themselves. Think nice,easy, palleized dock stops. You don't have the old lunch ladies giving you cinnamon rolls though.
US has the bulk of the school business here now and Martin Bros (regional out of IA) does one district we lost a few years back.

What's funny though for all the schools we do, we do not to Cleveland Municipal School District. Now there has been lose talk of them coming on, but that's all lose rumors I don't even know where the people heard it from GFS never really did CMSD well they put in bids and got nibbles here and there, but never really were the main purveyor. Word is if we were to get them it would ad 2-3 routes on, but I'll believe it when I see it. CMSD has a central kitchen I would bet 2:1 GFS would volume truck the central kitchen out of the warehouse.

Heck I lost a really good stop on Monday because they decided another big high school was going to be volume trucked out of the warehouse. That driver then complained that his income was taking a hit because now he was missing 200 cases a week and they gave him a nice big stop I had on my Monday route so I kind of got screwed a little on that one I guess, however today I had 836 so they seemed to make it up on the back end. What ever will see what happens as I say. However I already got my second option researched and ready to go if it ever comes to that, but were still a ways away from that one. Actually the new route hasn't been bad I've been making good money on it.
 
Top