What’s your biggest boneheaded mistake?

I’ll start by saying this is far and away my most boneheaded mistake and honestly I’m LUCKY I didn’t kill myself or someone else. I made this error once and literally never again.

I was supposed to pull an empty unit from Detroit to Hamilton, ON. I hooked up and pre-tripped but failed to do one last pre-trip step. I did not check the inside of the trailer. I assumed it was empty because dispatch said so, I hadn’t been sleeping well I was a midnights driver, my neighbor had been keeping me up with BS yard work.

Anyway I drive the 5 hours out to Hamilton. Slip seat and am driving my load back no issues get a call from Dispatch. “Did you take trailer 260393?”

“Yeah that’s what Midnight dispatch name assigned me”

“Did you pretrip it?”

“yeah”

“Your sure?”

Now I’m thinking no I’m not sure at this point else why you asking. “I completed my walk around per SOP”

“Did you look inside?”

“No I didn’t” I answered honestly a pit forming in my stomach knowing where this was going

“Did the empty trailer feel a little heavy to you while hauling”

“Honestly no but I was in unit Unit number for biggest POS slug of a tractor in the fleet that feels like it’s under a 100,000 pound load no matter what so it’s sluggish anyway why?”

“Well JD you are one of the luckiest drivers I’ve ever met. There were 2 40,000 pound aluminum coils on that deck with 0 securement, *Receiver reported it empty but hadn’t actually offloaded yet.”

I nearly shit my own pants. They sent me for a random wrote me up and sent me on my way. I never made that mistake again. Always always always pretrip thoroughly and don’t drive tired. Didn’t sleep? Call off. It can happen to any of us. I had just celebrated 11 years of driving and just shy of 1million accident free miles. Vet or greenhorn it can get us all.