Am I making a mistake leaving Werner?

He drank the kool-aid. You generally have to, in order to be allowed to train. They run you through a class, where they feed you all the bull-puckey that you are supposed to feed to the students, and then test you to see if it took. Then they tell you that they may send test students out with you to see if you are teaching them properly, and they try to get students to snitch you out, if they didn't like being on the truck with you. Most trainers don't last very long at it, before something gets them kicked out of the program, and if you want that extra money, you shut up and do what you're told.

They really don't have enough drivers with enough experience to be trainers. I believe that 3 to 5 years is probably enough experience to train, if it's the right experience, but most guys who are qualified, don't particularly want to put their lives in the hands of a desperate young person, trying to make it in the world, with a license that's still shiny. Trainers don't get to pick their students, and if you've put up with the bull-puckey long enough to know how to teach others to do so, then the last thing you want is to have to take some guy fresh off the boat from Cameroon onto your truck, and teach him to shift when he can't even understand half of what you are saying, and is probably too young and headstrong to listen to the other half.

As a rule, they can't get enough good trainers, and they can't even keep drivers, because they treat us like wear items on the truck. It's starting to whine? Throw it away, like an old brake pad!

So "training" is conducted by the coerced, not the qualified, and it's more of a testing period - a trial by fire - than a teaching exercise. And that isn't going to change until the industry starts having to abide by some minimum standard of decency, in the way that it treats drivers. And before that happens, they will take the drivers out of the truck. Automated trucks will rule the highways, and some Pakistani will drive the truck like a drone, by remote control, once it leaves the highway, for $0.50 an hour. It is what it is, and it will only get worse, from here. Sorry to be so depressing, but happiness, sunshine, and lollipops are not the future of trucking. Automation and outsourcing are.

 

I didn't even bother to read the other posts .
Werner is an embarrassing black eye on those of us in Omaha that truck and they couldn't give a tinkers dam less about a driver .

 

So... you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip, and most new people entering the trucking business are already broke and pretty desperate, or they'd be doing something else. So it's not like you can really hurt their credit... They would try to get money out of the fired, but seriously, who are we kidding? Eventually, they would determine that it wasn't worth throwing good money after bad, to pursue, put it on their credit report, bad-mouth them on their DAC report (which only matters if they still want to drive a truck), and move on to the next victim.

As an owner-operator, it's nice to take pride in your equipment, but each of those decisions comes with a cost. Older trucks that you can actually get, usually require careful maintenance, to keep them running. They are more likely to suffer from mechanical failures, and finding parts can be a serious problem. The cost of these things isn't just the repair itself, but also the downtime, during which you can't make money, and you are probably living in a hotel and eating at a restaurant. It also costs you the late delivery, which may mean fines, if that's in your contract, or you may have to let someone else finish the run, and they will want to be paid. Some brokers or owner-operator carriers won't let you run their freight in trucks over a certain age, so it can also cost you opportunities. And some of those trucks are too large, or don't meet emissions standards, to drive in certain places, so you can't take runs that go there. Some are too heavy to weigh out legally with the loads that customers want you to pull.

Fuel used to cost a lot less, at one time, so many of the trucks with "balls", cost more to operate, making it harder to make a profit on the runs that you do. Chrome costs money, too, and it is expensive to keep it clean and looking sharp - so you have to weigh your pride of ownership against it's cost. You may find that you prefer cash to pride... Especially if you find yourself having to finance your pride on your credit...

Just saying. Not to diminish your intent, but practicality has a place in business, and if you're an owner-operator, your business is moving freight - not necessarily looking like a million bucks...

 

That is our future, yes. The worthwhile jobs (which remain a matter of opinion) are being outsourced to countries where labor is much less expensive, and the rest are being automated. And yes, despite the relative simplicity of highway driving, people will die, and the solutions that will be proposed will all involve enabling automated traffic by developing transportation lines that exclude non-automated traffic. People's desire to travel freely will be sublimated to industry's desire for cheap transportation of it's products. Freedom is not the same thing as "free", and you will see your right to liberty further infringed upon by the imposition of additional economic and regulatory barriers to travel. We already see this in air traffic, where drones and automated flight are already a reality. It won't take decades. It will infiltrate over time, but the speed of it will be surprising. There is too much money at stake, and the overwhelming majority of it is on the side of automation and drones. I mean really... when was the last time that individual freedom won out over money or technology? The same argument took place when machines started to replace horses. Seen any horses on the highway, lately? How much longer before the horse becomes an endangered species?

It's not good news, but as a guy who has been pushed out of two previous middle-class careers, I can say with some authority that this is what's coming. Adapt or die.

 

You mean a "Train"?

We already have that in dedicated transportation lines.

Again, 100%-driver-free is just flight of fantasy. This horse continues to be beaten to death, yet again, seems it just wont die.

 

You can call it what you like, but automated-only highways are coming. And the train did do a number on the horse, despite arguments that train routes were not as flexible as horse-ridden travel. People migrated to the train routes, because those not on a train route, suffered, economically.

And yes, 100% automated trucks are not likely to be a thing any time soon, but most of our time (and earnings) come from the highway driving that will be the 97% that gets automated. The other 3% will be done remotely, like a ground drone vehicle, by someone in Pakistan, for a small fraction of the legal minimum wage in the United States. All of the necessary cameras and equipment will already be on the truck, for the automated portion of it's run, anyway - and one Pakistani driver can easily drive 20 trucks, this way, for a 20th of what it costs for one American driver to drive one regular truck, now.

Money is on the side of this kind of change, gentlemen. Resist it, argue or pretend that it won't or can't happen, or bury your heads in the sand; but this solves a lot or regulatory problems, and it costs a lot less than what we do, now. Even if you put an end to developing the technology in this country, there are 800 million Indian engineers, chomping at the bit (more horse analogy), to develop it, there - and as soon as it starts working, anywhere, that success will almost immediately be copied, everywhere. It's not going away, and there is too much momentum behind it, to seriously stop, derail, or change it's direction. There is a freight train with tires, rolling directly at our industry, gentlemen, and it's time we faced it, and started getting out of its way, or it will roll over us, just as happened with the manufacturing sector in this country.

Start learning to change old people diapers, because that's the next "good job", for people with no unique and in-demand skills, talents, or training. And that's us, like it or not.

 

Poor gal can't cook either.
Burns the #### out of everything; always setting alarms off at home.
I think she's more successful as a man.
@pattyj.

Oh yeeeeeeeeeah!

'No'. Two letters; one syllable.
They can force dispatch but #### near nothing else. Teams, dedicated, temp positions, O/O or L/O.... drop that 'No' on 'em.... add a 'thanks tho' if you're feeling gracious that particular day.
Sure, the nagging will continue, but it's so easy to skirt.

Class?
Test?

The class was a PowerPoint. Little waddly fellow said about 35 words thru two days. Everything else was CBT (computer based training) - and was just about ####ing useless.

The only real test was the one where you had to mostly fill a cup.

No offense taken for my jaded history by yours truly, Zing.