I Killed Kenny... Again.

Things had been going pretty good since I got Kenny out of the shop in Cincy. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at all to tip me off that Kenny might still be sick.

Until yesterday.

I had picked up a load of paper waste to take to a Kimberly Clark plant where it would be turned into toilet paper or paper towels or something like that. The load was heavy but not anywhere near max gross weight. After being loaded I hit the road and planned to stop at the nearest scale just to make sure I'd put the tandems in the right place.

Things were going great! I was a little behind schedule, but that was because the loading took a little longer than anticipated. I arrived at a TA truck stop where I scaled out on the CAT scales and then I parked and went inside to get my ticket. Things were still going well.

It was after I got back on the road after that stop that it all went to hell. I made it less than two miles away from the truck stop when the problem that killed Kenny this time occurred.

I was pulling a slight grade and noticed that the RPM's were decreasing and that the transmission wasn't downshifting as it should. I was losing speed fast. I put on my flashers and put the auto shift into low, usually when I do that it will downshift right away. But it didn't. So I put it in manual override and tried to downshift again. At that, there was some sort of buzzer going off and the readout on my dash that tells me which gear the transmission is in was flashing between 10 and F and --, which means it was in tenth gear and faulted and unsure of what to do next. Faulted simply means that it's trying to do something but can't.

I pulled over onto the shoulder and pulled the brakes and tried once again to get the transmission to switch gears, preferably into neutral. It wouldn't budge. So I shut down and let it rest a bit. There are several different methods of "tricking" the computer to put the transmission back into neutral which I tried at this point, to no avail. Next I called emergency support. The gentleman on the other end of the line walked me through a new step which involved disconnecting the batteries. Doing this was supposed to reboot the computer and allow it to find neutral on the transmission end of things. I did what the guy told me but it didn't help either.

Kenny was like a three year old who'd just thrown tantrum and was now standing still as a statue, arms crossed, refusing to go anywhere. Screw you Kenny....

Emergency support dispatched a wrecker and I was towed to the nearest Freightliner dealership. Of course, it was after 5 on a Friday and the dealership was backed up already. Kenny won't even get checked out until Monday... so I'm stuck in a hotel for the entire weekend. I still have no idea what is really wrong this time. Won't know for a few days. Boo, Hiss Kenny.