Smith Transport inc

This is the pay plan a recruiter from Smith Transport recently told me about, for eastern and midwest regional OTR, $1800/week, 2 weeks on, 2 days off, rinse, repeat.

 

Well... I had my first day of orientation at Smith Transport (Roaring Spring) today. We have about twelve in orientation.

Today we had road tests, and backing test, just had to back and park a trailer between two other trailers.

Paperwork, payroll, etc, some familiarization with macros and had some homework to watch some additional videos.

So far I'm pretty impressed with this place.

The safety and training guys are definitely top-notch; beautiful trucks as far as I'm concerned, and the facility is fantastic.

They have us staying in a hotel in a few miles away from the terminal. It's not the Ritz-Carlton but it's a nice, decent place, even if not fancy, and they're providing all of our meals while we're in orientation.

We'll have two and a half days of orientation, and then either home time or go haul loads, I'll probably skip sometime, as I'll most likely be getting home every 2 weeks.

I'm impressed. Heavy focus on safety, which pleases me greatly.

 

Day 2 of orientation was spent on benefits and other HR related stuff, and more safety stuff, macros, Omni Tracs, meet and greets with some managers, that sort of stuff.

Still quite favorably impressed.

 

So Thursday was third and final day of orientation. It was tractor assignments, finishing up for any that still had training videos to complete, meeting driver managers.

Irony: my tractor is the same one in which I, and a few others, took our road tests on Monday. It's an Int'l LT with 400K miles. It's in surprising good shape for the mileage, definitely "good" condition, and well maintained.

Smith tractors have APU, fridge, inverter. The APU is a GoGreen APU, and so far, I really like it.

(The Smith Transport black livery makes any tractor look good.)

I am now under load. I had a couple extra days in the load schedule to get home, get settled into the tractor, (load all my plentiful pack Rat stuff into it, ) and spend a little time with the wife, then deliver on Mississippi first thing Monday.

I'm impressed with my DM. He's a cool guy, and we hit it off immediately, I don't foresee any real problems, other than I just have to stay on top of the depression.

I mean, it's trucking, so crap is ***going to*** happen, but...

That's Trucking.

 

Good luck, keep us updated!

 

At the risk of sounding redundant everything is just going super smooth.

My dispatch is excellent, the communication is very good.

I'm on a what's called flex fleet, we're the guys are going take the T call if a driver doesn't have enough time to finish a JIT load, stuff like that.

For example today, soon after I loaded my 2nd load, which was a drop and hook, I got a call from my manager saying that he needed me to change my plans.

I'm over here in Kentucky now, waiting to do a T call with another driver in the morning, because he didn't have time on his clock to finish a JIT load.

I can see how that might frustrate some people, but me? I'm perfectly OK with it.

This is what I was expecting, this is what I was told to expect, and it works for me: the money's good.

I look at it I look at it this way… the company is paying me good money to drive their truck where when and how they tell me to drive it.

I don't see a problem with that, it's like what's it called again?

I'm supposed to do, oh yeah, my job.

 

So yesterday was a pretty short day but I made up for it today; I only had literally minutes left on my 14-hour clock by time I got scaled and shut down.

I started the day swapping a T call load with another driver and then I delivered that load, it was a drop n hook and then I picked up a live load.

Whew.

 

I'm supposed to be starting there at the beginning of next month. So how are you liking it now? That's the real test.