Five Hour Hold

Getting put on hold can be boring. Waiting on hold when you’re broken down makes things feel worse. So what could a person do while waiting on hold for five and a half hours? Stare into space? Swirl around in a chair? I can tell you exactly what to do…go bonkers from boredom. I had the unfortunate opportunity to wait on hold for five and a half hours at a winery in Sunnyside, Washington on one beautiful day. I was excited for the load because it was my first load to Nashville, Tennessee and I had always wanted to go there for a visit. The company I worked for hauled a lot of loads for this winery and it had become a drop and hook facility (bring an empty and pick up a preloaded). I arrived for my appointment, checked in, then took the empty trailer I had brought to the empty yard. I came back around to the shipping office and they told me that my trailer was just finishing being loaded and it was in one of the docks. So I backed my truck up to the trailer but didn’t hook up. I ran the pretrip function on the reefer unit (reefer units have a computerized self inspect function) and did a walk around inspection of the trailer while I waited for the warehouseman to finish loading. After he was done loading my trailer I hooked up to the trailer and went back into the office to pick up the paperwork for the load. Because the nature of the loads out of the winery (wine is liquid and it’s heavy) the drivers slide the trailer axles to the rear of the trailer so that when the forklift goes over the tail of the trailer the trailer does not tilt up and cause an accident. I came out of the shipping office and closed and sealed the trailer doors . Then I went to slide the tandems back to a better driving position but I couldn’t get the tandems to slide and the brakes to release. After rocking the trailer to try and release the tandem pins a couple of times I discovered that the airline to the tandem pins was broken and no amount of rocking was going to loosen the tandem pins, but I was able to get the trailer brakes to release. So I went back into the winery to use their phone to call my company’s road service department. That is when the real fun started. I was on hold for four and a half hours without speaking to anyone within my company. Then, while I was on hold at the four and half hour mark the winery’s phone system crashed for about 45 minutes. Once the phone system was back up I called into my company again and was on hold for another hour before reaching someone in the road service department. They finally sent someone out to the winery to help me get the tandems moved if not able to complete the repair on the pins. When the mechanic arrived he fought with the sliding pins for an hour before determining that he wasn’t going to be able to fix the problem or even get the pins to move temporarily. By this time the winery has closed for the day, but the mechanic thankfully had cell phone coverage at the winery. So back on the phone I went and again was on hold but nowhere near as long as the five and a half hours I had spent on hold just to get the mechanic out to the winery. The mechanic was never able to fix the pins but figured out a trick to get the pins to release long enough for me to get the tandems to slide to where I needed them. He followed me to the truck stop to make sure the brakes weren’t going to lock up again (the other part of the problem) when I stopped to fuel and I got back underway.