The more things change, the more they stay the same. Everything old is new again. Whichever quote you use, both would apply to us this week. My goodness! What a difference seven days make! A week ago at this time we were eager to begin work with our new company, Southern Pride. Sporting our new satellite system, all we needed was our first run. And it came...eventually. Wednesday afternoon we loaded up our first engine, fresh off a UPS plane. We tarped it up, chained it down, and off we went to Atlanta with it. Driving non-stop, we zoomed over to Atlanta and delivered it to Delta airlines on Friday afternoon. We'd been told that the sooner you unload, the sooner you would be on the list for another trip. We found out it didn't quite work like that. We ended up sitting in Atlanta until Monday morning when they wanted us to go back to the same place where we'd delivered on Friday to get an engine that was going up to JFK airport in New York City. It wasn't our destination of choice but of course we were willing to do it anyway. A REAL long story short.... things just began to unravel from this point. When they brought the engine to our trailer, the loaders from Delta told us there was a little issue. The engine stand that it was sitting in was apparently odd in that the wheels didn't fold up as other stands did. Nor did it have brakes. So it wouldn't be sitting flush on our trailer. I called the company to inquire how we were going to handle this situation and how we were going to be able to load this engine. Afterall, there were no dumb questions, we had been told. After some discussion, the dispatcher determined that we should go to Home Depot and get some wood to make some kind of supports to secure this engine from rolling around on our trailer. I, of course, informed him that this was NOT in our job discription and we would NOT be constructing any device. In my opinion,that was a problem to be solved between the company and the airlines, not us. After all, I reminded him... we are truck drivers- not carpenters. Even the guy from Delta got his pen and paper out and proceeded to scribble out an idea of how we should build the support for this thing. I told him we would not be taking responsibility for this huge, expensive engine to ride on supports Jorge and I built ourselves. And so when the threat was made by the dispatcher that if we couldn't do the job, they'd find a truck that would... I agreed that's exactly what they should do. It didn't take long after that for Jorge and I to realize we'd make a huge mistake in coming to this company. We did not care to work for people who first of all would treat us like that. Nor did we want to work for a company that would expect us to take responsibility for something like that. We looked at the map and figured it's not too far back to Louisville where our former company, Mercer, is headquartered. Jorge called our friend and recruiter at Mercer and they were more than happy to have us come back to work for them. So that's where we are today...going thru a short process to get reinstated. They were gracious enough to keep things exactly as they were before we left two weeks ago. Same dispatcher, same truck number, and safety bonus to boot for our first year with them. Today they took us out to lunch and welcomed us back into the fold. We should be back up and running on Thursday and Southern Pride will be a distant memory soon enough. In weighing the pros and cons between the two companies, we had decided to go with the one that would have made us the most money. Good grief! What were we thinking? The ability to pick and choose our loads, no pressure to do anything we don't want to do, and working with a good team of people that we have at Mercer should have outweighed the money difference by far! Lesson learned! We are going to be quite content here with Mercer for some time to come...