From another thread posted in the Forums

Originally Posted by Cocky

As far as me leaving TMC: Well I honestly hesitate to post this, but I guess it has to be said sometime or another. TMC is probably a great company for a lot of drivers. Flatbedding aside, they have excellent equipment and great pay to compliment that

However the expectations that they put on their drivers is far beyond what is humanly and legally possible. Day one in the orientation, and I wsa told that my goal should be to complete five loads a week. Sounds simple, right? It sure did to me.

Once I got to my trainer, I was told on the first day with him that in order to succeed in this business, I would have to learn how to cheat my logs. Now I did not know any better, so I bit and played along with it. I figured this guy knew a hell of a lot more than me and he was only introducing me to the real world.

As a result of this practice, I found myself waking up at roughly 6AM and driving and dealing with the load all the way up until 2AM. This would go on everyday. Needless to say I was tired pretty quickly, and it eventually caught up with me.

The first time it nearly bit me hard was when I was on a scale in Missouri. My trainer was sound asleep in the back, and to make a long story short, I screwed up thus leading the scale operator to think that something was fishy with me. He had me pull over and bring in my logs and all of the other paperwork.

In my hurry to "fix" my logs, I cut myself one hour short on my break, and was facing an out of service charge. Luckily the DOT man had not seen my trainer's logs yet, so quickly I went out to the truck, woke my trainer, told him the deal, and we "fixed" his logs so that it looked like I just drew a line in the wrong place. I got lucky, but I never should have been in that position.

The second time I almost got caught was driving on a backroad in Kentucky. I was dead tired, but still had a long ways to go on my load. Unfortunately I nearly fell asleep at the wheel and merged over into the oncoming lane thus running several other motorists off of the road. Eventually the police caught up with me, and pulled me over.

I woke my trainer again, and he and I were able to BS our way out of an out of service charge once more.


Now once i got out on my own, I figured things would get better since I could sleep when I wanted to sleep. Unfortunately doing flatbed work with a very large majority of your loads requiring tarps along with the fleet managers griping about your five loads a week deal eventually puts a toll on your body.

My week would start on Sunday night every night. I would drive to a customer with the load that was on my trailer from the previous Friday and spend the night there. I would wake up in the morning around 6 or 7am, untarp and unstrap/unchain, and then wait for the forklift guy to unload me.

Sometime around 10 or 11am, that would be done and I would get my next load assignment. So I would face a bounce of roughly anywhere from 50-150 miles to the next shipper. I could get there anywhere between noon and 2pm. Once there, I have to wait to be loaded, secure and tarp my load. That would put me at 5pm or so and I would face anywhere from 300-500 miles to drive to get to the consignee so that it could be unloaded first thing the next morning.

Now if you add all of that up, you will find that there is absolutely no way to do all of that and get your required 10 hr break in. I basically was expected to work for 8 hours before driving 8 hours every single night. Hardly any of my loads ever made it on time, and I was under constant pressure from my manager to step up my progress.

Needless to say, I was ready to quit trucking already. Everyone I talked to at TMC told me that I was doing things the right way, but that it just took time before my body would get used to the rigors of truck driving. I was constantly told that because of these efforts, TMC drivers were making more money than anyone else on the road and that I would be more miserable anywhere else.

All of that changed when I talked to a friend of mine from driving school. She was a professor at Ohio State University before deciding to try her hand at truck driving. While in driving school, she and I became great friends since I also had a lot of college under my belt and was a tutor in English Composition during my time at the University of South Carolina.

She wanted to go with TMC, but they refused to hire her due to the fact that she was female. (Yes she got the recruiting department to admit that over the phone.) So she went with Transport America. After sharing some road stories back and forth, we came to the topic of pay and work conditions. I found out that she was making the same amount of money as I was, doing a hell of a lot less work, and was not expected to break the law in order to do that work.

After giving it some thought, I decided that TMC was not for me.