My honest, no BS, opinion of P.A.M.

My question(s) are for the Drivers that have been with PAM for a while. I am an experienced driver that is going back on the road through thier refresher program. Is there anyone reading the thread that has, or is going with PAM, by this route?
I see a lot of PAM traffic lately in Newnan, GA. (Home), so that gets me to thinking that there is a dedicated route to be had. I also read that Central Transport is sending PAM some line haul business. Central is advertising linehaul jobs on the 'net. BIG question. Should I take the plunge with PAM or is Central Big enough to buy them out?

 

what all happens in oreintation for those 2 days in tonitown, ar for pam i mean what do you have to do

 

I am an experienced driver but haven't been behind the wheel for two years. PAM at least, was one company to offer me a position based on my lack of recent experience. I like the fact the their refresher training is only two weeks.
To experienced drivers out there, is this my best case scenario at this time?

 

At approx. 3pm I had a trainer call me. I was just pulling into a Walmart parking lot in my Ram 2500. I needed ALL my attention for the bubbas and bubbettes.
At 5:30pm I call him back.

Now I do not have a trainer.

He sounded like a cool dude too.

 

I will say I just quit pam after 2 weeks of being on the road. We were running illegal from the second day on. I didn't really like the whole 4-5 hours of sleep a day if you were lucky. That company was a joke. I can say that be careful what you do out there. I will take the 6k hit instead of a 1500$ hit everytime your logs are off which ours were ALWAYS off, like when I was in the sleeper, signing the shipping papers and so forth. Amazing how you can do that. Or my alcoholic pot head trainer.

 

I'll call the safety department and have the *** of any trainer who does that to me.

If I know nothing else I know about log book!

 

Honestly, no trainer should ever do that to you. My husband had an excellent trainer. I have heard some say their trainers were horrible, but many of them requested a new trainer and got one that did not run them illegal and taught them everything they needed to know. All you had to do was call Pam and let them know what was going on and they would've helped. Did you ever consider doing that? You can't really judge the whole company by 1 person. There are some wonderful trainers with this company and calling the company a joke based by 1 person is an insult to all the good drivers and trainers that do work for Pam.

 

All you would have needed to do was call your dispatcher and explain things. There are many drivers that have to switch trainers. And just how were you running illegal running teams? The only way its really possible is if you dont know how to figure your hours and/or dont switch drivers when your time is out.

And how were you getting 1500 dollar tickets. If your logs were that far off when you got DOT-ed, you would have been shut down, and your trainer or the both of you would prolly have been terminated. No trucking company would put up with drivers racking up those kind of fines.

 

Never said I got DOTed. I said I would rather pay the school price than the price of it if I ever did get DOT'd. How can you be running illegal? Being in sleeper or off duty and having a fuel ticket showing I was fueling, or same for when we were delivering and I'm the one signing the papers when I'm off duty. Running with a trainer is not running TEAMS. Your trainer is supposed to be up when you are. Our problem was, showing up at 4am deliver at 7 getting an hour or so of sleep before delivery, then doing backing maneuvers all day, then going back to driving without sleeping, while showing I was in the sleeper the whole time. I was probably wrong to say the whole company was like that, but I met a lot of trainers that said they do the same thing. So I would rather just get out and do another company.

 

Here's hoping I get a trainer tomorrow and he doesn't suck.

I can get up at 5am or so and drive into daylight. But by about 10pm I'm SLEEPY.

Trainer just ain't gonna change that.