What is important to you

1. The opportunity and freight to advance my skills as a driver. You can train a monkey to haul sticks and bricks. Tossing 12 straps over a square load of lumber is frankly monotonous and boring.

2. No handholding. Period. Give me the resources to get the job done and let me do it.
Did you know at Maverick the driver is never allowed to call the customer. Ridiculous.
Where I'm at now is much more my style. We don't have a night or weekend dispatcher. We have customers personal cell phone numbers. We can use and schedule our own pilot cars. We schedule our own repairs. We are treated like adults.
Why would a company want a multimillion dollar oversize load going down the road with pilot cars the driver is not comfortable with?

3.home time/productivity. If I'm on the road I need to be making money not sitting in a truck stop. The few times a year I schedule home time I need to be home. It's that simple.

 

In case you guys are curious as to what's going on, he's one of Commander McBragg's fanboys.

I wonder if the King, looked out into the audience, and among the thousands of screaming girls, he saw a fanboy screaming and panting...

What would Elvis do?

 

Excellent post BTW.

We've gone the exact opposite. Seems like every day, there's more of an effort to handhold. Worse thing you can do in OSOW. When we cross into Florida, we get a message on the QC about closing the trailer axles. One guy crosses into Florida, and gets a ticket at the scale for bridge law. His argument? He didn't receive the little QC alert for Florida.

 

I worked at one place for two weeks give or take. I was told to leave the spread axles spread open and to leave them aired up even if I was dropping the trailer. I asked why. The manager said it's easier to dumb it down so everybody does it the same way all the time. Pretty hard to get an overweight ticket with them spread open.

I asked why not just hire smarter drivers....

 

I can't think of any way NOT being able to call the customer would be a good thing. I try to match up what I think are good directions, then call them and see what they say, and if I'm even close. And every once in a while you get "well X street is closed, so the truck route is now such and such." Or even "oh yea we're at a lull now and/or need what you have, soon as you can get here we'll unload you."

 

Ban chewing gum from the workplace and suddenly, all the people who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time qualify for the job.

And the most amazing thing of all? The 'can't walk and chew gum' crowd will all believe that they are your equal.

 

Never heard of her!

 

My dad told me that as lead driver he got the odd penny per mile. The other driver asked him why he was considered lead. My dad explained that he was responsible for the truck getting there. The other driver claimed he could do it, so my dad told him have at it.

In the morning, hauling produce from California, my dad woke up to see the sunrise in the mirror. I think he deserved more than a penny more per mile!

 

Ha! I think you're right. It reminds me of Dumb and Dumber when they start going the wrong way and they're in Kansas or something and think they're in Colorado. "Huh.. I thought the Rocky Mountains would be a lot rockier than this...that John Denver is full of $&@%."