Roehl Anyone have anything POSITIVE to say?

JoeDuno I want one of those local runs... and skunk truck is right, alot of egos out here that the FM's have to deal with, most of the time its a driver demanding something

 

Yeah, demanding to go home after they have been out longer than the driver is scheduled. 11-3 Out 15 days....Uh...I am supposed to go home.

 

Satellite- Some of us do expect to get home on time that's why we are on the hometime fleet. We know we are sacrificing some miles to get home on a somewhat predictable schedule. I get frosted when I get home late more often than ontime and all I get are excuses. Man up and take some responsibility instead of blaming everyone, but yourself. As for drivers that are a pain and never happy, I got to see that firsthand.

I was driving local and had broken my hand on the job so I was on light duty for six weeks. We used the phone instead of a qcomm so I saw the dispatch side. Most drivers showed up on-time, did their job and went home. If they called during the day it was usually something simple and solved easily such as the rock shop was out of lime and not grinding anymore that day. Solution-go to a different quarry. However...there was that 10% of drivers who were screw-ups and wanted to blame dispatch. I remember one guy that walked off the job. The reason...he got in trouble for showing up consistently at 7:00 everyday. The problem with that was that we all knew the trucks were supposed to be off the lot by 6:00. The dispatcher even gave the guy another chance and got hung up on for his trouble. As Gene said, don't mistake kindness for weakness, that driver was gone.

The moral of this is that responsibility is a two-way street. It is not ethical, moral or even intelligent for a company to treat employees as a commodity and when the employee complains tell them "don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out." Maybe you have nothing to go home to, but some of us do. My wife and daughter don't even like that I'm gone seven days, we couldn't imagine only being home seventy-two hours every three weeks.

 

i go to the home time fleet starting on the 15th .... my 2 main issues have been addressed .... per diem which i opted out of and home time ......

 

grc56- This quote from a post on the previous page I think sums it up

FMs will still try to redifine hometime to keep you out as much as possible, but overall the hometime fleets give you about the most predictable schedule you can get in otr driving. As aggrevated as I get with my fms I will admit that at least I get my hometime even if I don't get home till Sunday instead of Friday.

 

I take it rhoel doesnt have APUs on any of their trucks??

 

I read somewhere here that they do have APU's on some trucks and are continuing to install them, mostly on the newer trucks first.

 

They've got APUs on lots of tractors, and are continuing to install them on the new ones that come into service out of mothballs.

I drive a beater Freightliner with over 500K, and so I won't be getting one on this unit. The older tractors get cycled out for resale as the market dictates, and don't get expensive upgrades.

APUs are nice except that for company policy reasons your tractor ECM will be programmed to shut the engine down after five minutes or so idling if an APU is installed. This is no problem unless the APU breaks, like one did on me last February in North Dakota at minus five. Then it would have been nice to have a truck that would idle.

Sometimes you can set different combinations of brakes or other work arounds to trick the ECM and let the truck idle, but apparently the trucks differ.

 

Just met another driver at a truck stop yesterday. He has a newer Frieghtliner than I do, with an APU. He said that he can trick the computer into letting him idle his truck in an emergency by disconnecting a fused wire under the dash on the far left side. He showed me a loose gray wire about as thick as a 10-gauge stranded conductor stuffed up almost out of sight. He said it had an inline fuse.

 

Roehl in my opinion is a good company i get home every time im suposed to be. It has been close some times but i always made it. I run national van 11/3 i belive where u live is a big factor.