Backing incident. Utterly sick with myself.

Because the back of the box is wider than cars are. You know you can't see what's directly behind you in the mirrors for a few feet unless you already saw it and you know it's there. I was in a tight place and didn't have enough swing to get the entire circus out without backing. The dip in the car was cutting through. He had nothing to do with Thermoking.

I'm not sure what you mean. When I left job#1, I had 90 days commercial experience. It was a seasonal hire and they did not have another position for me to jump to. I went OTR with job#2 because that was the quickest solution. No one wanted to hire me for local stuff even though I just got done at a complicated driving job. Jon was supposed to be partner #1 but he flaked and split like a loser. So job#2 became job#3 when I jumped over to Mayfield Express. At job#3, I started off solo, but wound up with three codrivers over the course of 2014. #1 was a senile nasty old bat who lied to get the job, pretended she was lead driver, was rude on the dock, refused to use mirrors and was a Swift washout from the Corsicana program. We finally got rid of her in July. #2 had a bipolar rage thing going on. I kicked him off the truck in under a week. Then things were fine. I had several weeks of Canada runs, then someone decided I simply must codrive with a former school shortbus driver, child rapist and overall failure at life. He is now being held in Knox County, TN. I felt pressured by management to keep that guy on the truck but I tried to quit twice to get away from him. I seriously doubt any background checks were going on at Panther or I wouldn't have been on a truck with any of those folks.

Once I finally lost contestant #3, things went downhill again because Management jumped into a snit with Panther and started pulling trucks off the fleet. Then Panther got vindictive and brokered loads out instead of sending them to any of our trucks. When that didn't work, they stopped paying. I worked till nearly February without getting any pay for any work performed after December 21, 2014. I sat in Memphis for 5 days, scraped together my last $200 for an Amtrak ticket home and grabbed a load to Michigan. Once that was delivered, I ran the rest of the fuel out of the tanks getting the truck back to Ohio. I parked it at the office around Midnight, took a cab to Amtrak and went home.

I tried temping with UPS while at home, but they kept not hiring me and that was frustrating. Then I was offered job#5 which was OTR again. That was independent contracting for XPO under another family business. Things started off fine, but the company was losing money and they started clearing off their expense column right around June. After that, they were aggressive about moving all the drivers over to lease-purchase. I didn't want to lease because I wasn't getting enough miles to pay a lease. I also destroyed one of their sales pitches by asking what 'priority dispatch' means when ALL your trucks are leased or bought. Those are just meaningless words.

I stuck it out with them until the middle of October. Once again, sitting near Memphis, I sent in a letter of resignation. My reasons included no Canada for seven months after being promised I could have a whole summer of border bonuses, company kept dragging their feet on things which shouldn't take a month to push through. I also fell into a dispatch pattern of weekend load, then shorty, then sit for three or four days, then get another weekend load which I can't put on the same paycheck. How many boards do they get loads from? Why are the kids in the office telling me they don't bid on anything overnight? If they're not going to do their job, why are they there? Wanna' know why your company is losing money? It's isn't because I'm an independent contractor.

Suddenly I get the kinds of runs I was supposed to get after that resignation letter. Mucky mucks mucky mucked and I kept moving until I turned the truck in the day before Halloween.

 

Hahaha. I had one person try to help me one time who congratulated himself on his good job, when I wound up completely relying on my walk-back. His directions made no sense.