Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

And you can really tell it here lately. One thing, and I will reiterate before I say it, is that @JohnBoy experience and experiences here are also not one size fits all. I give him props for his career and what he has here. Not sure if I’ll be driving until I’m retirement age. The fun has mostly gone out of it for me with all the Abilene changes that weren’t going to happen and with being local and doing the SSDD routine.
Currently, I’m sitting at a customer with a loaded trailer that the doors won’t close because there is something bent. I don’t know who dropped this trailer here, but I want to throttle them. And this is AFTER being told I have to pull the loaded trailer off the door and then drop my mty one in same spot. I mean, they only have 3 doors to choose from. WTH! I’ve been on hold trying to reach breakdown for 20 minutes (yes, the new number).

 

Did you try a big hammer on it?

 

At Central Transport, we used to close some trailer doors with a forklift.....

 

Sometime, oh, back in August I guess, maybe September, I got a phone call from my DM. Right about 5:30pm, around the time my DM is leaving for the day.

Me: "Hey."
DM: "Hey."
Me: "What's up?"
DM: "How's it going with that load?"
Me: "Fine."
DM: "You need anything?"
Me: "Nope."
DM: "Okay, well, talk to you later. Drive safe."

Was a very puzzling phone call. Load I was on was in absolutely no danger of being late. And while I can't claim JohnBoy's record of never being late, you can count on one hand the number of times I've been late where it was my own fault, and you'd have fingers left over. If I am given a load where it is possible to make on-time delivery without requiring wings and a jet engine on this bucket or otherwise violating the laws of physics, I will make on-time delivery. And if something comes up like a mechanical failure which makes it impossible for me to make on-time delivery, I am on the phone and on the qualcomm letting HQ know so they can make whatever arrangements they need to make.

I'm not the world's greatest trucker by any stretch, but I handle my business like a grown-up and I do what they pay me to do.

So I was very puzzled by that phone call. I'm not a screw-up. I don't need handholding. I can go weeks without talking to anybody at the home office. It just seemed...odd.

Next day, right around 5:30pm, I get another phone call from my DM. The conversation went roughly the same. Just a quick check in to see how I was doing. To quote the famed philosopher Han Solo, "We're fine. Everything is fine here. How are you?"

Next day, third day in a row, I get a phone call from my DM at 5:30pm. And finally my curiosity compelled me to ask.

"Why are you alla sudden calling me every day? You know I handle my business and if there was a problem, you wouldn't need to call me because I would've already called you."

At which point he explained to me that as part of a new initiative handed down from above -- an initiative designed with the purpose in mind of "building a better relationship between the driver and the driver manager" -- the DMs were now required to call their drivers once a day to check in.

I'm a cynical #######, so I figured that would go over like a lead balloon with most truckers. There are a lot of dudes doing this job because they can't stand anybody telling them what to do. And sure enough, he did mention that he had to pretend he was calling for some other reason with most of his drivers because they would get a little shirty with him otherwise.

Well, he's got a boss that's telling him what to do, so I didn't see much point in getting a case of the redass about it and ruin HIS day. He said I was the last one he called every day before he walked out the door because he knew the conversation would be short and he wouldn't get yelled at.

That initiative apparently lasted about 10 days because the phone calls stopped after that.

 

Yep. And moving the trailer to different spots.

 

Ya know, sometimes it just strikes me. So you know we’ve all been told make sure trailer is level when trying to shut doors. That didn’t work, but putting it in a spot that was higher on the right side and sliding the tandems all the way back did. Hallelujah! And I figured it out all by myself after I chilled for a minute. Now on hold with breakdown again (15 minutes so far) to tell them I don’t need them.

 

I do want to take a moment and give kuddos to the driver (no idea who they are) that just came out of our training program and was given a brand new truck AND a brand new virgin trailer and decided he needed more training before going out on his own.