Pretrip your trailer!!

Only 50%?

 

Completely agree... A lot of O/O's (or whatever they call themselves) "buy" their own trucks because they have little to no interest in any of the "rules" that the industry requires of them.. They are also going to make double the money and stay home twice as long as those suckers who work for "the man"... They are at least if not worse that company drivers for neglect, ignorance and generally laziness in all the areas of their supposed craft.

 

southeast pa dump truckers. is what it is brotha. Cash cow for dumpers. So people just get on the train and shoot from the hip

 

x100

 

Just today. A newbie driver that was just hired 2 weeks ago and learning was told by the Boss’s son to grease his dump truck that he drives for him. Then he drives off to work at a construction site.

I walked over to see how the new driver is doing with the greasing.

I noticed the yoke on the power divider is is a touch loose.

“Time to fix the truck” I told the newbie. Loose yoke. No good. I’ll help.

The driver comes back after being at a construction site for the day. Sees his drive shaft disconnected.

I said it needed to be fixed. New U-joint too.

I told my boss’s son to stop being so hard on the shifter.

 

Yep, never said different.. but there is a huge difference in people, ability, desire and professionalism. I have been screwing around in this industry for over 30 years.. my last straw was working safety and training for a fleet of up to 200 drivers.. a mix of O/Os and Company drivers.. and between the two, there is little to no difference anymore between the two groups as it relates to the areas I mentioned. The abject ignorance of the drivers anymore is just rather sad and pathetic. The difference here is that the stakes are higher for those who jump to ownership.. they are jumping way to soon and well before establishing whether or not the job is even something they like. They jump with barely enough knowledge of the equipment they are supposed to be caring for.. There are far too many examples of people who are not even able to operate the equipment they supposedly own. One example is a fairly young O/O (supposedly a trainer) who complained that his students were "always getting better fuel economy than he was"... He was running around all day in 9th gear to "keep his RPM's up".. He had no idea what a the term "peak torque" was nor that he wasn't supposed to be running between 1000 - 1500 rpms rather than the 1700 - 2000 he was running.. Another O/O came thru and we checked his trucks out. (Pete).. he had no turn signals/markers on the front of his truck... He was "waiting to get to the shop".. He didn't even own a short screw driver.. we had his lights back working in about 10 minutes.. Now there is a mountain of idiotic things that the company boys do, but they usually have an army to steer them into compliance... because the company ultimately pays for their sloth and ignorance