Joe & Tow's new trucking adventures/ex GTI thread

Michigan is no problem... we have a lot of freight up there. As a matter of fact..skooter is up there now

 

Choice of loads!?

Too bad I've never seen a SEC truck anywhere near my homebase. Oh well, they probably don't pay as good as Crete anyway...not many do. But the micromanagement here is getting old, and now with this news about DriveCams coming... oy.

 

Crete is like heartland.. they pay a high cpm but you don't get enough miles to get a decent paycheck..

I have been to illinois already with these guys. . Outside st.louis.

 

STL is 4 hours south of where my residence is. Moline is right on the Iowa border, between I-80 and I-280, I-74 runs right through downtown just before it crosses the river into Iowa.

I have been on a daily call-in program with my terminal manager to keep her posted and she coaches me on communicating with dispatch... I am relatively inexperienced after all. Ever since this started, my miles have gone way up. She says she's had drivers go from averaging 7-8k per month to over 11 doing this... and at this rate I'll believe her. I ran 3035 miles last week, and 2700 miles the week before, up from between 1800-2200 most weeks.

The stuff I'm getting sick of is mainly the forced dispatch and forced fueling...but especially the forced fueling. All the places they send us to for fuel are always a charlie foxtrot. Not being allowed to have an inverter bigger than 400w also pisses me off... and no APUs here. And if DriveCams come... in a nutshell, #### that. To say the least, I'm open to a change. For the moment I will stay the course and see how things go, but come October 20th, I'll have a solid 2 years of experience... no tickets and only a very minor inexperience-related preventable a month after I got out of training. By that point I'm going to start taking a serious look at other opportunities.

 

I will never drive for a company that puts driver facing cameras in my truck or a camera that i cant control.

I know where moline is but i would suggest you start looking for companies with 150 to 300 trucks. All of the mega carriers are being run by their insurance companies now. Mainly due to their high turnover rate and a higher percentage of inexperienced drivers. I dont really get the driver cams though. It wont negate the companies responsiblity by proving their driver screwed up. After all they hired him and that makes them responsible for whatever he does. Why provide the lawyers with more ammo against them.

I also will not drive for a company who will not provide some form of climate control in my truck that allows me to decide when it is too hot or too cold.

We use the freightliner park smart system which is working fine. We are also allowed to idle if we need to.

 

The bigger companies certainly do have a tendency to micro manage....with Holland my QC has gone off maybe 3 times in the past 4 days. Although I am hoping it will go off today....need a load when I am done!!!

 

Crete used to have that system in all their Cascadias, but the new ones have just an espar heater and opti-idle.

The Internationals still have that type of system, but I am tall enough that I can only stand up in the very back of a ProStar mid-roof.

 

Darn it all. Wrong answer....apparently, I am a glutton for self-induced pain and agony....