Ptl....don't do it !!!

It says volumes about a company that hires people all the while counting on others to quit so they will have trucks to put them in...or not.

30 cpm, a strict zero idle policy, hiring drivers in droves knowing they will last a week if they even wait around long enough for a truck? Sounds like a top notch outfit.

 

I signed on with PTL in 2004 and for the first year and a half it was a great job: they only hired experienced truckers back then and pretty much left you alone. The load planning was excellent (still was when I left), I was never assigned a load that could not be done legally. PTL offered plenty of miles yet I never went without sleep or exercise.

Home time was never an issue, it never took me more than two weeks to get home and it usually took me no more than a week. Cons? The runs were almost always short, and the attitude of the crowd at the Murray terminal was not so great, but as long as you didn't have much contact with them (I was dispatched from Texas) it was fine. No New York or New England (unless you wanted it), and no Canada.

PTL began to get really nasty in 2006. The safety department began to be referred to as "sadistic" even by the meanest desk warmers at Murray. I was shut down three times -- once while trying to deliver a hot load on time -- and forced to fax back detailed reports about my one accident with PTL (I hit an owl at three am and cracked the windshield.) I was once called while on home time and told to go to the terminal and drive the truck across the street for maintenance. I told them I was on a ski trip several hundred miles away with my family (which was true and which they were previously aware of.) I was instructed to, "Do what you are ##&%$ing told to do or you are fired."

I decided to quit in 2008, when the treatment of drivers became even worse. PTL began leaving their highest paid drivers sitting in truck stops for as much as a week at a time without compensation nor permission to idle at all. The last time I saw Murray I was shocked at the treatment drivers received, for example, I was literally screamed at for bringing my truck in for a scheduled PM (and received worse treatment shortly thereafter.)

What really surprised me was the appearance of the drivers, the place looked like it was overrun by criminals. On a hunch I called recruiting and pretended to be a driver with a few legal problems (as recently as 2006 they wouldn't let you apply if you had one of the more serious misdemeanors.)

The recruiter told me if you had a felony conviction it had to be more than five years old, unless it was murder, then it had to be more than twenty years old. I was shocked and continued to press for more information, when the recruiter reluctantly told me that child molestation convictions had to be more than twenty five years old.

I figured the old hands were being replaced by people who could be more easily exploited, and I didn't want to be known as a driver for a company who hired such people, so I took the hint and moved on.

BTW, my first post here, thanks for this resource, Mat