WHERE'S THE BUCKET?
This is a 325L Cat Long Reach Excavator, we loaded this at the Cat dealer in Poughkeepse, New York. We were 102,300 lbs., 11'2" wide and 85 ft long, as you can see we had a 14 ft overhang. We loaded this on a Tuesday morning, Trism couldn't get us an escort right away, so the load sat on the Dealers lot until Thursday morning, we got to tour the town of Poughkeepse while we waited for our escort to get there. Now I should tell you that we saw with our owns eyes, four other excavators on their lot the same as ours, all with buckets. But the one we got didn't have a bucket on it, and they didn't send one with us.
Thursday morning came and we headed out real early, had all our permits except for Maryland, which is only a few miles worth, but we did stop in Pennsylvania to call for our permit for Maryland. They wouldn't issue us one, they didn't want it to go through their state. After hemming and hawing over it awhile, we just decided to run without one, it's only a few miles of Maryland anyway, and they don't have any Weigh-Stations. We made it just fine. We stop for the night just short of the South Carolina line, in North Carolina. You have to realize, that our permits allowed for every back country road in every state. We hardly saw an interstate on this run. This is what eats your time up on the road going from point A to point B.
Well, we started out early again on Friday, and pulled into the Bayer Manufacturing Plant in Goosecreek, South Carolina about 4:00 p.m. It was going to a crew in the back of the plant that was digging (trenching) a waste hole for their runoff. We didn't have any problems once we got there, the men were pretty nice to us, they just wanted to know why it took us so long to get there? We told them that we didn't waste anytime once we got started, and that we thought we had done pretty good time ourselves. One man looked at us and said, "You consider four days pretty good time "? That's when we found our that the Cat Dealer in Poughkeepse had called the crew and told them that we had loaded and left Tuesday morning. Of course we made sure they understood that we hadn't left the Cat Dealers lot until Thursday morning. Then one man came over to look at the excavator and said, "Where's the bucket"? Bo and I looked at each other then at him and said, "What bucket, they didn't send one with us." He got on the phone to the Cat Dealer to find out where the bucket was. They told him that they didn't have any buckets for the excavator, and that there was only 3 of these type excavators in the United States and none of them come with buckets, they have to be ordered special. Well, you can imagine how this man felt, what good is an excavator without a bucket? What I can't understand is why did they lie to him? There were four other 325L Long Reaches on their lot, all with buckets attached. None of this made any since to Bo or I, but we didn't say anything to the men, but, Bo did tell all this to our dispatcher, it wasn't right, these men paid good money for this piece of equipment, they should have been treated with better care, their money should have been as good as the next person's! Such things did happen to us out on the road, I know it isn't right, but we were paid to haul the stuff from one place to the next, not to ask why or to question a companies policies. This is sad of course but we felt fortunate enough that it didn't happen allot to us.