Fleet Owner horror stories

That sounds about right. He would actually bend over backwards to help some of these people out when he hired them. All he ended up with was more headaches.

 

Certified bad*** what ended up happening to him?

 

No doubt ! I'm still laughing.

 

Flew him home after a few days, used the return of my ticket flying out there. His wife said no more driving for him. Cab took me to the truck in the middle of the night, said i shouldn't be in that area at night. When he dropped me off i asked for him to stay until the truck started. As soon as i was out he took off and of course the truck wouldn't even turn over. Hid in the bunk, sweating my ### off listening to people wandering around and sirens.

 

Had one that said he would only drive a pete. That's all i had at the time, put him in a brand new 359. Called me up cussing that it kept burning out the mechanical flasher. Told him to jump it with a paper clip and blink it by hand. Called back and said he did that and still didn't work. I asked if it blew the breaker. He asked where the breakers were. Two rows of white buttons on the dash, and any popped out? Never called back. But he only drove pete's. LOL

 

Can you drivers tell me how the hell do you miss a fifth wheel trailer crossing the road?

you can guess what happened, film at 11.

 

That's old school stuff there. Lol.
I worked for a couple of places like that years ago.
Always something exciting happening.

 

OK I guess if I'm a trainer for a starter company, it's still technically a fleet, just not my own. So here goes one.

You might know May as some of the slowest trucks on the road, governed at 61 in my day. Every once in a blue moon we would get to pass a Prime EcoFleet, and that's usually about it. So I'm riding with a new hire cruising up i84 from SLC into Idaho, and getting up near the scalehouse. We're coming up on a Schneider who is doing about 59-60, which is odd, so I mention to the new hire it's probably an owner op milking the fuel surcharge, since the company trucks never go that slow.

Anyway, we get up next to him, see it really is an o/o, say yup to each other, and I go back to my device or daydream or whatever. But as my student is cutting back into the right lane, I think "hmm that seemed kinda soon" but by the time I look around, we're all the way over, and I don't see any evidence of a crime, so I let it go.

Few miles later, the scalehouse is pulling everyone in, so we go thru and I'm explaining the economy of stopping for a wizz now since we already slowed down for the scale, so we're parked in the scalehouse parking talking. Meanwhile the Schneider guy came thru the scale behind us, has the same idea so he parks past us, gets out and starts walking back by us toward the scale house for a wizz too. But he stops at our door.

My student opens the window and the guy says "You almost took my fender off back there with that lane change." My student says "did I? I'm just a trainee." And the guy is like "Yeah that's what I figured when I seen the two of you in the truck," and walks off to the scalehouse washroom.

Before I can say anything, my trainee turns to me and says "I don't know what the #### that guy was complaining about. I was watching real careful to make sure I gave him at least this much room," as he's holding his hands twelve inches apart.

 

This one from the What were you thinking department. Back in the early 80's I was working for a flatbed company and we would routinely run up to Winipeg Canada and load lumber and bring it back to the states to deliver. One of our drivers went up and when he came back to customs, they did a random search of him and the truck. They took him into a room and told him to empty his pockets and remove his boots and roll up his pant legs a few inches. He asked them, what if I have a gun in my boot? They walked over and took the gun out of his boot and arrested him. He went to jail, the truck sat cold in subzero weather. I was assigned to recover the load and took another driver with me to recover the tractor. We had to get a wrecker to pull the tractor out from under the load and take it to a shop to warm it up and get it running, which took over night. When we drove 25 miles to the jail house to get the keys for the truck, the driver thought it was real funny that he was sitting in jail. I left there shaking my head and wondering where they found guys like that. A few months later, I ran into that guy down in Texarkana. They didn't fire him, which surprised me, he was sitting in the truck smoking pot, I asked him how his jail time turned out...he was really upset because they didn't give him his gun back.