Central Refrigerated Truck Stop

i say he needs to get a job at mickey d's cause somebodys gotta make the french fries.......

 

Ahh.. Yall are mean.. Sure we all know how to drive.. But come on.. Nah.. I'm just kidding... Why the hell does our profession seem so inviting to the strangest people.. I'm pretty sure its a fake tho... Some 15 year old that's board and messin with us.. Because this en can't be for real...

 

Not even sure the service could straighten Lupe's course out. I can just see it is 1645 in class......oooh oooh, Mr. Instructor....I have another question.

 

I had a rollover in may of 09, as a result central terminated my lease and my employment, was just wondering if they will rehire after a certain amount of time.

 

Lets not use the word I so much and things will get better down the road.
But I feel your pain.

 

The odds of a rehire are pretty slim. you might try about 5 years after the accident, but I don't think they'd rehire. They get so many newbies in training that will leave before their year is up, that they'd probably rather have a complete newbie in the truck than an experienced driver with an accident.

 

There is no good average. The fastest your truck will do as a company driver is 62 mph. therefore, at 28 cpm you'd see $17.36 an hour, max. You won't see that much most weeks.

With the questions about back problems, hearing, average pay per hour, etc, you should go to the Newbie driver's forum. The questions you ask are universal to all driving jobs, not just Central.

Here's examples of things that belong: Will I be rehired by Central after a rollover? Can I get a non smoking trainer? Does Central only pull 53' trailers? Is the Grill at the WVC yard any good? How often do the elogs mess up?

See a theme? It's about Central, not about driving in general. Those belong in the newbie forum, where a lot of answers like that are already posted.

 

My vote is for D: No, he should find some other work. I think college would come with too many questions.

 

He has asked a bazillion question all over the forum. All of which seem like he wants to be talked out of it.

So what are the answers to those questions, other than the rollover one

 

We have a dispatcher now. We had a planner for about a year, but then the planners lost all their trucks, and we ended up bouncing through 3 or 4 dispatchers. The guy we have now is #11.

It's not as much out dispatcher, as it is the freight, and the fact we're not leasing. I should dig up one of my trip books; one week we had 3300 miles, and it was 6 loads + deadhead. I kid you not, there were 4 loads in row where the paid mileage wasn't over 500 miles.

Freight's gone weird lately. We got one of those daily messages no one cares about this summer that summed freight up: Central is getting a lot of regional freight. Apparently that's all they're getting from shippers. So, it's not uncommon to haul Freddie's out of Portland, to Boise, go to Ontario, load up with frozen goods, go back to Portland, then another FM load to Boise, then back to Ontario, and then on to Salt Lake. All of that is a huge pain as a team.

We just got out of the shop; dispatcher put us on a local load, then a 1700 mile load to the midwest that delivered monday. As we're at home, packing bags, night dispatch calls us up, and begs us to take a load that couldn't get picked up, and has to deliver the next morning. So, since the guy asking is someone we like, we take it. It's 100 miles of deadhead, and a 500 mile load. We get the load, and make the required deliveries in time to save it, and we're done by 1500 on Friday.

At that point, we sit for 12 hours, waiting on a load to show up. By the time we delivered at 1500, the load (350 miles away) had not even started being pu on the trailer. So, as a team, we had 12 hours of downtime to get this load. The load, by the way, delivers MONDAY 500 miles away. We got it at 3am on Saturday, and they set up a drop for us.

So, we took off with out dinky load, and a halfway decent load comes across, 850 miles, delivers Monday. We accept it. Then a couple hours later, they pull that load, and give us a 500 mile load that picks up Monday, and delivers Wednesday night.

After an hour of arguing on the Qualcomm and calling the planner for the day, we find out there's nothing in the area, and our halfway decent 850 mile load was pulled and given to another team. So, now we're going to be sitting somewhere, anywhere, until they find us a load that doesn't give us 36 hours of downtime.

And this is a great example of what happens to us all the time. And it's not just the night and weekend guys, it's the day planners too. They will make us run catfish to the east coast to get us home (we live on the west coast), or if we're withing 500 miles of mississippi, then they'll give us 4-5 short runs to position us perfectly for catfish... so we're stuck with no sleep for 4-5 days of short loads, loading and unloading, and then we have to run like clockwork to get the fish delivered.