Depending on your current tucking job you can find yourself sitting around and waiting at times for hours on end. While this may sound relaxing, it is actually time when you are waiting to be loaded or unloaded and can be very stressful and tiring.
Yesterday I was on the phone with our good friends Ashley and Rich who are also team truckers, and we both had one of those days yesterday. When we got to our pickup we arrived about an hour early only to be told they were not prepared for us. This mean’t that our loading time had to be bumped out about six hours.
So while this may sound like great some time relax and unwind it is exactly the opposite. While I was able to do some things around the truck like extra cleaning and organizing and a little bit of cooking. It also was a lot of time waiting and being alert in case they came to get us early.
When they finally did come to get us we then had another three hours to get our trailer fully loaded. The reason this load process was so long was we were picking three different loads, from this one location. So that was three different places within the facility we had to go to get loaded and at each location we had different staff to deal with.
This is common practice within the trucking industry. Truckers alot of time will have a set time but instead will find themselves sitting and waiting at both shippers and receivers for hours at a time. If you are solo and depending on how long you are sitting you may run out of hours just sitting waiting to get loaded.
So when you finally do get loaded and you are all done now it is time to start driving to your delivery location. Most times you are exhausted from sitting around playing the waiting game all day, and then you need to muster up enough caffeine and will of strength to then drive for hours at a time.
This is one of the things you need to expect while getting into trucking, and one of the worst parts of trucking. Wasting so much time sitting at your receivers and shippers. The other downfall is that alot of shippers and receivers have no facilities for drivers like bathrooms etc. So if you are sitting there waiting all day, you may not have access to that.
That is why we always recommend that you have some sort of bathroom alternative on your truck like a camping potty etc. Also when you are sitting waiting all day there are no food options. So again that is why we always recommend having some food staples always available on your truck.
