The Mysteries of Hours of Service

Today's blog post is a mystery. Will will get a shower? Will we find decent food or will we have to eat sandwiches again? Will we be able to park legally? All these questions and more on this installment of:  Hours of Service vs. Quality of Life.

well we would bring it but there's nowhere to park!

We have to deliver to a Home Depot in Wyomissing, PA at 10 tonight.  There are no truck stops within a 5000 mile radius and by the time we get unloaded we will be out of hours and not legally able to go anywhere. I won't go into all the technical bits of hours of service but the overview is that we have a 14 hour window to drive, load, unload, fuel etc. We have 11 hours to drive and that can be broken up in any way we want, but once you begin your day you have 14 hours and then you have to have a 10 hour break or you are in violation.

So we started the day at 8:30am and we have until 10:30pm to do what needs to be done. Planning is very important as it gets trickier because you can only work 70 hours in 8 days and this all adds up and restricts how many hours you have on a given day. There's a lot of math involved. This is all boring you to death, I'm sure, it's boring me but suffice it to say that these rules don't always work in our favor.

Like tonight.

By the time we get unloaded we will be out of hours to go anywhere and in this case there's no where to go even if we cheated. So it will be up to the kind people of the Wyomissing, PA Home Depot let us sleep on the lot or we'll have to find some other big parking lot to sneak into.

Once in California (cursed be that unfriendly trucker state) we got permission from the place of business to park but were in violation of a City Ordinance and got a ticket. The cop then directed us to where it was legal to park, which was on the side of a busy street, instead of tucked in and quiet on the private property of the place where we were delivering the next morning. As you can see it's a crap shoot.

Sooo. Will our brave heroes get a shower? Will they be thrown in jail? Will they be towed away while they sleep? Will Himself and Herself come to blows over having to eat sandwiches for dinner again? Will Boris and Natasha steal the secret plans from Moose und Sqvirel? Stay tuned kids to find out!