Random LTL Rants (all are welcomed)

Doesn't make much of a difference. You're fingerprinting them all just the same.

Tonight I have 10 stops. One pallet will be chicken, since raw chicken has to be segregated. I'll likely have three more pallets for the cooler section, quite possible to have up to six stops on one pallet. Probably 4 or five pallets of frozen, with some stops taking very little and one that will take a pallet and a half. The rest will be dry. Dry goods rarely have more than two stops on them, unless it's very small stops.

Liftgate routes are loaded by stop, and even with cooler and dry combined and the use of half pallets some pallets aren't loaded very high. It's a rather wasteful way to load a trailer, when many of your pallets are only half way to the roof. The way things are now they can load them straight up to the roof, and you can get a trailer really loaded properly.


When I move I may look into ltl instead of working the way I do right now, but I have little to no interest in line haul and p &d seems to be a bit of a pay cut from where I'm at right now with most ltl companies.

 

Out of curiosity what don't you like about linehaul?

 

You could have been me driving a UPS package car delivering the last 25 stops in the board and then punching out and delivering them off the clock to avoid hos problems lol. God I did some dumb #### in my younger years lol. 17 hour days, 475 stops, shuttle would have to reload me 3 times a day in a p1300 lol.

 

475 stops?! With no helper?

 

I would take a helper for the min 4 hours. They cost you too much money to keep on the truck 99% of the time.

 

I did otr/regional for a couple years. The sitting and driving is so unhealthy. I'd have a hard time doing a job like that for more than ten hours a day, I would need the time to get some exercise in. I won't let this job put me in an early grave.

Also, I've been around other drivers enough to understand the problems that get dropped in your lap. I don't have scales in my routes, many linehaul positions do, and I imagine it's a constant parade of trailers where you have to decide whether to run the trailer in it's current condition and write it up when you drop it, risking the ticket and the bad record, or standing your ground and waiting to get it fixed, putting everything behind schedule.

 

Does a helper really help all that much on a package car? I imagine most of those stops don't take you more than one trip, and most are probably a single package?

 

It help when you make them run so you can sort while they are out of the truck, that's about it.

 

I do food service at nights.

Schedule sucks but not a deal breaker.