Volumes & categories.
The journal has been running long enough to have a spine. Volume I was a single long document I kept in a legal pad. Volumes II–IV live here. Each volume is roughly a year of dispatching and about thirty to forty posts.
Volume IV 2024 — in progress
The ELD mandate is five years behind us, the spot market is doing something strange with snowbird lanes, and I have written more this year about claims paperwork than I intended to. That's probably the market telling me something.
- BOL discipline is the only thing standing between you and a $4,200 paint claim new
- Open vs. enclosed: stop selling the wrong one
- The load board is a market, not a menu
- The three documents I read before I dispatch a carrier I haven't used
- Loading a non-running car without a winch: what to say no to
- Contingent cargo, and why it should never be your first call
- The I-80 corridor in August: heat, tires, and brake fade on the grades
- What a good dispatcher's end-of-day log looks like
Volume III 2023
The year I stopped taking auction runs on volume and the year I started keeping the carrier binder properly. Not a coincidence.
- Year-end review: the twelve loads I would re-dispatch differently
- Snowbird season starts earlier every year — a ten-year lane imbalance chart
- Hotshot vs. standard nine-car: when the wedge is actually cheaper
- Reading an MCS-150 like a detective, not a clerk
- The cargo policy declarations page, annotated line by line
- Soft-side vs. hard-side enclosed: the price gap and what it buys
- Dealer trade dispatch: terminal pickups vs. lot-to-lot
Volume II 2022
The first year of public writing. The posts are rougher and the categorizations are inconsistent. I've left them as they were.
- Why I stopped quoting same-day pickup on lanes I haven't run in 90 days
- Loading top-deck first: the physics argument for the obvious rule
- The twenty-minute carrier vet that catches eighty percent of problems
- Broker-carrier rate confirmation: the four clauses that matter
- Estate vehicles: working with executors who have never shipped a car
- Why I quote in transit days, not delivery dates
By category
Operations
The daily mechanics: dispatching, pickup coordination, driver communication, end-of-day reconciliation. 12 posts.
Equipment
Open vs. enclosed, hard-side vs. soft-side, hotshot wedges, liftgates, and why trailer age matters more than it should. 8 posts.
Rates & market
Pricing, load board arithmetic, seasonal lane imbalance, fuel, and the margin math that keeps the desk solvent. 7 posts.
Carrier vetting
MC authority, insurance certificates, inspection history, and the declarations page that nobody reads. 6 posts.
Inoperables
Non-running vehicles, rolls-and-steers definitions, winches, flatbed-to-yard workflows, and when to say no. 4 posts.
Claims & paperwork
BOL discipline, the Carmack Amendment, cargo policy vs. contingent, claim letters, subrogation. 9 posts.