200+ and counting walk out from Wiley Sanders Truck lines

Wow...lesson learned

 

No truer words have been said about a Company than these.. Its like a Venus Fly trap.. You get to close and your career will end with them if your not smart enough to get away fast..

 

Well they hit the big low with a no paycheck week... And its a wasteland disaster there now!! Ill never go back, I believe they are in severe financial trouble.

 

I started out with Wiley Sanders in 1991, fresh out of school. I trained 8 weeks with a trainer who filled me up with a lotta bad information, and 11 years later I got fired. Since then, they have refused to let me come back, although I do intend to do so, eventually.

What went wrong? That's easy. Thanks to my trainer, I believed that a driver who ran the extra mile, the driver who got the load there in bad weather, the driver who overcame obstacles like the DOT, the logbook, the aggravations of shippers and receivers WOULD BE PROTECTED AND PROMOTED by the company.

Well, I did have some evidence that what I was told was true. My trainer had been involved in an accident in which a pedestrian was killed, and the Company stood by him during the trial, and kept him as a driver. Another driver was driving over the speed limit and killed a motorist and wound up being the station manager in Mobile. Even Wiley Himself was praised (by my trainer and his friends) as having gotten more DUI tickets in a big truck than any other fleet owner in history!

I was filled with confidence that, as long as I pulled through and got the load there no matter what the difficulty, I would always be protected. So, when I picked up a ticket here or there, and when I had a fender-bender here and there, I didn't worry. They always knew they could count on "the Doc" to get that load through in a pinch. They always knew that Cyrus was itching for the next New York City run, and Canada was my favourite destination!!!

Yeah, maybe I got a little big for my britches. I developed an attitude toward Safety because I saw them as the enemy. I saw Safety keeping the Qualcomm and forcing us to match our logs to the Qualcomm position history, when other companies didn't do it...


Something to consider....I worked for several other companies besides Wiley, and during the time I was employed by them, I didn't get tickets and I very rarely got into any fender-benders, because I was free to run MY WAY...

What finally got me was the logbook and the matching to the Qualcomm.

Every 15 minutes had to equal to 15 miles. Every 60 minutes had to equal to 60 miles. Getting caught on a 2 lane road meant that I lost time, which meant that I wasted more time making less money. I discovered a trick that let me speed up the truck quite a bit beyond the 70mph that the limiter allowed, and I played it for all it was worth, because I COULD NOT ALLOW MYSELF TO RUN LOW OF HOURS!!!!

That struggle between me and the logbook caused me to become dangerous, to myself and the company and the general driving public, and looking back on it, I'm satisfied that Wiley did the right thing to fire me, because I would have eventually hurt somebody if I hadn't had a wake-up call.

During the next few years I had a wake-up call, sure enough. I completely lost the desire to fight the logbook, and discovered that driving a big truck could be a joyful thing. I worked locally for a while, but when I went back on the road, I went back with a new attitude.

And I can honestly say, the ONLY ticket I have had since 2003 was in my pickup, driving with expired insurance. That includes quite a few thousand miles, east and west coast, New York City and Miami and Los Angeles and Washington state and Maine, with three different companies pulling dry van and reefer trailers.

I'm proud of my clean MVR, and although I've quit driving (I got hurt unloading a trailer in 2011 and had to file for disability) I still have my CDL, and I could very easily get my Haz-Mat and the other cards needed to go back to driving.

And I can honestly say, driving 100% legal appeals to me. Eleven hours a day is a good day, a bit over seven hundred miles, and ten hours is a reasonable rest period. I apologize for the lengthy letter here, but I wanted to say, Wiley wasn't and probably ISN'T perfect, but right now, I believe that, if I felt physically able to return to driving, I would go, hat in hand, to Wiley and ask him to take a chance on me...

Cyrus C*******
Marion Junction, Alabama
retired since 2012

 

FYI - This thread is 4 years old.

 

Is Wiley sanders even still around? I don’t see a lot of their trucks around....

 

I got stuck behind one doing 10-15 under last night.