Temple, GA

Oh, he almost got me again. That Murphy is a persistent little bugger, but I was having none of it today.

I checked in with the shop this morning to get an idea of how much time I was going to waste today. "Should be ready by lunch. I'll call ya." Sure enough, he called around 11am and said it was ready. Knowing I had a relatively short drive to Georgia ahead of me, I grabbed lunch before heading over to get the load. Same deal: hook up, pre-trip, brake test.....still no trailer brakes. So I called the shop back, but had to leave a message. I figured I'd poke around the brakes myself while I waited for a return phone call. I couldn't tell what he had replaced, but judging from the abundance of fresh blood on the ground under the trailer, it put up a pretty good fight. When he finally shows up, he's sporting a blue latex glove on his left hand. "I didn't have time to test the trailer. I kinda had to leave in a hurry - damn near cut my thumb off." So I'm thinking maybe he went to the hospital and that's why nobody answered the first time I called. "Went back to the shop and glued it back together. I don't do all that doctor (stuff)." Guess not.

Injured thumb be damned, he got under there again and, after some troubleshooting, managed to find the problem and fix it. Granted, we had to wait almost an hour for the parts guy to show up with a new brake chamber. Now, I haven't seen detailed schematics for all the valves, air lines, etc. of the air brake system, but I have an understanding of how the system operates. How clamping the service line to one brake chamber suddenly made the other three work, I do not know. But it did, and upon replacing the faulty brake chamber, all the trailer brakes worked. That's voodoo magic. Since the mechanic was in front of me, I thought I'd ask: So, how does that fix the problem? "Air pressure." Oh dear. Please get me the hell out of Alabama.

With a complete set of functioning brakes, and before I lost any more brain cells, I hit the road. I'm about half an hour from my delivery in the morning, so all-in-all, it turned out to be a pretty decent day.