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

No sir. Have a Merry Christmas and a healthy, prosperous New Year.

 

Hope everyone had an enjoyable Christmas. My hometime is done, now I start my vacation. Of course it’s going to be extended by 2 days because I have one more drop on this trailer that I need to come out for. So, fair is fair, interrupt my vacation week, I’ll make it up x’s 2.

Meanwhile, I get a phone call this morning from my last trainee whose done an absolutely outstanding job here since going solo in July. He offered to come out on Christmas Day to swap a driver in OKC and take his load to Reno. This morning he gets a phone call from dispatch telling him they’re swapping him out right there in Santa Rosa with a driver that had a Boars Head load with 3 drops going to Santa Barbara, Sacramento and Long Beach, in that order. Come to find out, the reason for the swap is because this “driver” doesn’t want to drive in, thru, and around California. Yet again I find fault with this. I fault dispatch for giving him this load, I fault operations for not enforcing the forced dispatch policy, and I fault the company who hires these drivers that can’t play like the rest of us. I get it, but at the point of explaining where we run, the forced issue, and working with one of our biggest, most important customers, a new driver doesn’t agree with any part of this, they shouldn’t be hired. Some drivers go where the freight takes them with no issues, others, want to control the issue and dictate to the company where they want to run. It’s wrong, based solely on the fact that we are a forced dispatch company. Please Abilene, grow some balls and enforce your policies, if you can’t, then I want to put in my demand of never running in ice and snow from November to March. I demand to run I-10 from the Louisiana line to El Paso all winter.

 

I get it. The simple thing to do is not hire these drivers. There’s other companies that can and will not send drivers to areas they don’t want to drive into. It’s not just a northeast thing, it’s California, Wyoming, snow. Jeez, I was talking to a driver who doesn’t run to Florida. It’s not fair to the rest of us that runs where the freight takes them. Last time I checked, this was a training company.

 

Yeppers.