Truck drivers often work long days to get their loads where they need to go, but there are many rules in place regarding how long they can drive.

What would you do if your dispatcher sent you on a run that you knew would put you over the number of hours you were legally permitted to drive?

That is what happened to the truck driver in this story, so once he hit his limit, he pulled off the road and made the dispatcher send someone out to pick him up.

Check it out.

I said I didn’t have time for that. So, do you want to tell the boss that I’m stranded and on the clock, or can I?

First off, a moment of silence for The Bandit.

He will always be the greatest member of the Truckers’ Film Trinity.

And, with that in mind, we will turn to one of the great banes of every trucker’s existence: the federal Hours of Service regulations.

The HoS rules are so Byzantine and impenetrable, that they might as well have been crafted by Anthemius.

Wow, that is a lot of rules and restrictions.

A full explanation would need animated diagrams and, preferably, narration by John McLeish, but the ELI5 explanation is that all freight drivers have to keep track of four clocks:

• Drive Clock: 11 hours, only counts down while behind the wheel. Resets after a 10-hour break.
• Duty Clock: 14 hours, counts down when you first go on-duty, and doesn’t stop or reset until you complete a 10-hour break.
• Break Clock: 8 hours, counts down when you first go on-duty, and doesn’t stop or reset until you complete a half-hour break.
• Weekly Clock: 70 hours, a sum of all time driving or on-duty for the past 8 days or since your last 34-hour break (can also be 60 hours/7 days).

If any of those clocks run out, you can no longer drive until you take the appropriate break.

Of course, these are only the rules until they aren’t, and the regulations have more loopholes than Himeji Castle.

For instance, I am considered a short haul driver, which means that in exchange for a number of restrictions on how and where I drive, I don’t have to keep my own time log or keep track of my Drive Clock.

Unless I work more than 12 hours, in which case I do.

I am still limited by the 14-hour duty clock, though once per week I can extend that to 16 hours.

Still, company policy is not to load drivers after they hit 12 hours; it’s safest that way.

That brings us to Gary, my dispatcher.

My old dispatcher, Jack had been dumped on scheduling for playing games with how he dispatched drivers.

Gary apparently never got that memo.

I have met dispatchers who were former drivers.

They tend to have a solid idea of the realities of driving.

Gary was not one of those dispatchers.

Gary saw the world through his tracking map, which didn’t bother with inconsequential things, like traffic or elevations.

Trucks were just little blips on his board, and he seemed to delight in moving those blips around.

Gary thought of himself as a prankster and a wit.

If he had known the word, he might have described himself as puckish.

If his drivers had known the word, they would have thought it was one letter off.

And that is how I end up in Corona, CA at 1pm on a Friday afternoon.

That is a lot of driving.

I call Gary and tell him that I’m at 11.5 hours, and I need to start heading back.

Gary needs me to take another load; their local plant is closed, and I’m the only driver available at a neighboring plant.

I pull under, figuring that this is going to be somewhere in Riverside, maybe San Bernardino or Moreno Valley, somewhere vaguely in the direction I am going, that will let me get my grumble on, without actually delaying me too much.

It’s in Tustin.

Tustin is not on my way home; it is the opposite direction, on the other side of a weigh station.

And, of course, I am at a plant with no scale, because trying to send loaded trucks through the Santa Ana Canyon is the kind of employee management you’d normally expect only in Dickens’ most unhinged laudanum dreams.

Still, Dispatch wants me to go…

I call my manager, Bob, before I leave to let him know what just happened, and that someone is going to have to collect the truck (and me) after this job.

I didn’t even know you could avoid weigh stations.

I’m certainly not going to brave the Scale Goblins without being able to check my load, so it’s time to partake in the time honored trucker pastime of dodging the weigh station.

I have to go 20 miles out of route and drive through the Orange Crush (which is as much fun on a Friday afternoon as it sounds) to reach the job (for those who live in the area, it meant taking the 71 to the 60, then coming back down the 57).

The job, itself goes off without a hitch, but now it’s after 3pm.

I have half an hour before I can no longer legally drive, and I am on the wrong side of the Santa Ana Canyon, which at this hour is moving at about the same speed as my aunt on her Rascal.

I call Gary to let him know that I won’t be making back to my home plant, and he sounds a little cowed.

It turns out Bob called the regional manager, and the regional manager called the operations manager

The operations manager called Gary (from what I gather, he called him many things).

Hey Gary, rules are rules.

Gary asks, practically pleading, if I can make it back by 16 hours.

I can’t, not through the traffic I’m facing, but that’s a moot point; with malicious cheerfulness I remind him that I blew my 16-hour exception on Tuesday, when he decided to send me on a late-afternoon run up to Joshua Tree.

I’ve got just enough time to get my truck someplace safe and park it.

When they figure out how to get me back, they’ll find me at the Crab Cooker just off the 55 Fwy in Tustin.

There had been several night pours the previous night; that was why I had started at 1:30am.

As a result, they don’t have anyone with the hours to make the round trip out to Tustin and back, not during rush hour.

In the end they find a rock-hauler who had a tanker endorsement on his license (mixers need a Class B license with tankers; rock trucks need Class A with doubles/triples) coming on for night shift.

Bob offers to drive him out and bring me back.

That is a very long day.

By the time I clocked out, I am over 18 hours for the day.

Bob got overtime for the trip out and back, and he told me to just stay home Saturday.

Last I heard, Gary had been moved from dispatch to IT.

Wow, trucking sounds far more complicated than I would have thought.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this story.

Here is someone from the same area.

This commenter says a good dispatcher can be very valuable.

Yeah, why did IT get stuck with him.

It really was a great story.

This person experienced something similar.

Driving a truck is way more complicated than I thought.

But everyone deserves rest.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.