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Finally got out of Columbia at 2330 Monday night, I was yawning when I was signing my bills and the forklift driver had the nerve to tell me I shouldn't be sleepy, I had all day to sleep. Yeah, wonder how he would feel if his sleep/work schedule was thrown off that much. You can't change your sleep patterns in one day and I normally have a very regular schedule, at 11:30 p.m. I'm usually out for the night plus I had evening dispatch sending messages asking if I was loaded yet so was getting woke up when I should have been napping. Anyway had a very busy couple of days after that so no time to run. Oh and I forgot to doublecheck with my dispatcher on Tuesday to make sure he adjusted my delivery time to match what I'd put in for my updated eta and it turns out that he had noted it but hadn't changed it in the system so at 2 am Wed. morning I'm getting yet more messages from night dispatch asking if I was going to make my delivery time. When I mentioned it to him later in the morning, he was like "I'm not worried about you making your appts, you are always early and there was extra time built in for the late loading." Nice to know that I'm appreciated but it doesn't help me when I'm trying to sleep and the people on the night shift don't know what's going on. All they see is the fact that I'm not making the original appointment time.

This brings me to another issue, the hours of service rules. Under the current rules you can run a split log book using an 8/2 sleeper birth split but the 2 hour break doesn't stop the initial 14 hour clock (we have 14 hours to complete our 11 hours of work once we start the workday). It simply doesn't make sense to have it split up like that, the previous hos you could split the sleeper time up in any way you wanted as long as the break was at least 2 hours and would total up to 10 hours and all the breaks would stop the clock. Now you're practically forced to work your 11 hours straight and you're just screwed if you feel like you need to take a nap or if you want to avoid rush hours. Confused yet? I won't even get into the previous incarnations of the rules. Needless to say, I was fighting this issue this week. It's so confusing I know several of the larger trucking companies forbid their drivers to run a split logbook even though it's legal under federal regulations.