My co-driver and I had been waiting to get assigned a load in Sacramento for a good 12 hours. We are both still pretty green. About 5 months OTR so far. I go to sleep.
They finally send us to repower a trailer up to Portland. When my co-driver gets there he finds out that this other driver, who has only been driving for 2 weeks, was supposed to pick up an empty, but instead grabbed a loaded trailer somehow? He made it 700 miles from Portland down into California before someone figured it out. Now something is wrong with his truck, so we gotta take it back. Also, there is no BoL because the trailer had already been dropped off at its destination and the BoL was turned in.
A couple hours after we pick it up, I wake up. It’s time for me to drive. Co-driver gives me the whole story and then mentions he doesn’t understand how the dude didn’t notice because this trailer is heavy. My first question is did you scale it? No. Of course not. So I scale it and the tandems are at 40k. Holy shit. I get the tandems right on 34k but they are definitely slid too far back for California.
This is where I fucked up. I should have called my company then and there to get someone out to adjust the load, but my dumbass was hoping I could get by the one scale I needed to pass to get into Oregon. Nope. Weights were spot on but tandems were at 44″8′. Fuck.
So here I am at the Cottonwood, CA weigh station waiting on someone to come adjust this load. The DOT lady was super nice and didn’t give me a citation, thank god. Never again. Learned my lesson.
