So.....whose trailer is it?

Empty trailers make some drivers crazy. More than once I’ve dropped off an empty trailer with an issue, brakes or tires or whatever, wrote it up for the shop, put a red tag in it, and came back the next day to find that one of my coworkers had ripped the red tag off and taken it.

As for the situation in the OP, it’s my trailer until a supervisor tells me otherwise. Maybe, if the other driver is a friend of mine AND asks really nicely, I might let him take it… but even then, probably not. To alter the old saying to fit the circumstance, “A failure to find your own empty trailer is not my problem.”

 

If you have a loaded line up that’s where I would drop it as well put glad hand lock on plus a padlock on doors ..

 

Plus, under Locke's labor theory of property, since you cleaned it out, it's yours until after the next load.

 

I mean it's technically the company's lol but given that you were under dispatch and just parked for the night, yeah you should keep it. Now if you weren't and didn't know how long you'd be in the shop, that's a different story. I hate the drivers that go home for the weekend and stay hooked to an empty. I haul reefer so if I want to drop and bobtail to like Walmart while at a terminal, I'll turn the reefer on and throw a seal on the door.

 

Sounds like a bunch of big company driver fun to me. Better you’re having it than me.

 

Red tagging them always worked for me, cause it seemed like nobody ever wanted to take their own valuable time to get a trailer repaired. I've picked up many trailers that were dropped at a shippers to unload with flat tires, missing tail lights, etc. that should have been fixed before they were dropped cause the shipper is going to reload them to go right back out. Hell, one time way up in the sticks of MA picked up a loaded trailer going to Texas and noticed right away it didn't have any brakes, 41k load on it! Wasn't leaking any air and not missing any brake pods. Went to adjust them and the adjuster wouldn't turn in! Some yahoo had them turned in way past too tight and just left them there, along with an inside front axle tire that was flat. That 50' air hose I carried sure was worth the money I spent on it! Some people!
My personal policy was that if it needed fixed, it would get fixed saving me the DOT worries, let alone the safety of the general public.

 

If the yahoo adjusted them way past too tight. Your brakes would be locked up. But you said they didn’t work.

Sounds like the adjusters were froze up instead.

If the brakes were way past too tight. Not only would they lock up. They'd be touching the rims.

When brakes don't work. It's usually because they're out of adjustment so far You're going to have a pretty measurable gap.

Either you were turning the adjuster the wrong way or they're froze up so the brakes can't adjust. And they gap away from the drum.