Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

Maybe we should set up a Go Fund Me account. I’ll match your $350 contribution.

 

Just a week ago I picked up a new trailer,that had a long scratch on it,looked fresh to.

Home till Monday,than I have to get up to the yard for a new windshield,mine developed a case of the runs.

 

Got the second half loaded yesterday and it took a whole 15 minutes to get the 11 pallets of giant bags of seed put on....chuckled to myself, told you so mr load planner that it would be fast and still at the convention center early, lol! Only done this job a total of 18 yrs but know nothing though.....I hate fear mongering, especially in management cuz then they try to micromanage and make ppl do stupid things all so they can be comfortable in their heads.....

 

I hate to be the happy ray of sunshine amid all these tales of doom and gloom, but I gotta throw in my own two cents on this never-ending train of posts about what a terrible horrible nightmare it must be to work for a hellhole like Abilene.

I only give a $#!+ about two things: How Abilene treats me and how much Abilene pays me.

The latter category, how much Abilene pays me, could of course always be better. Abilene pays less than what we might call "industry standard", and I could probably go somewhere else and make $5k-$10k more per year.

The reason I don't is because of that former category, how Abilene treats me. And Abilene treats me pretty well, all things considered. I read posts here on this forum, and I read posts elsewhere on the Internet, and one thing that has become apparent to me is that if I did go somewhere else to make that extra $5k-$10k a year, I'd have to put up with a lot of headaches and hassle that I don't have to put up with here.

In the six years I've been driving for Abilene, they have never asked me to run overweight. There have been two or three times in the past six years where I have been given a load off the yard that put me over 80k. No way to get legal outside of a rework. And since these were coming off the yard, there wasn't any way to go back to the shipper for a rework. I called up my DM and said "I ain't running this load because I can't get legal on it."

And they said "Okay".

No pushback, no "Trucking is trucking and sometimes you gotta run overweight", nothing. Just..."Okay". And they gave me another load assignment.

There have been a few times over the past six years where I have been given a load assignment for a trailer without a license plate. The first time it happened, I was told it was fine because I had the trailer registration. I was pulled over by the Ohio State Police anyways. They didn't give me a ticket for it, but said it was up to the discretion of the officer.

The second time it happened, I called my DM and told them I wasn't going to run it because the trailer didn't have a license plate and I'd been pulled over for it before. They said "Okay". No pushback, no "Trucking is trucking so just run with it and hope for the best". Just..."Okay". And they gave me another load assignment.

The last time it happened, I called my DM and told him I wasn't going to run a trailer with no plates, and he said "Hang on, we have the new plates for that trailer in the shop".

Any time I have ever had to get truck or trailer repairs that would cause me to be late with a delivery, they've said "Okay, keep us posted". Sometimes they've rescheduled the delivery. Sometimes they've swapped the load onto another driver. Sometimes they just ate the late fee. But they've never asked me to just keep rolling on faulty equipment in order to make on-time delivery.

On the rare occasions that they've given me overnight loads, I have endeavored to make on-time delivery. Most of the time I can pull it off and muscle through with a healthy supply of Monster Energy Coffee, and I make the delivery just fine. But there have been a few times where I couldn't. Times where I was literally blacking out behind the wheel. When that happens, I call Abilene and say "This load is going to be late because I can't stay awake any longer. So I am pulling over and going to sleep." And when that happens, Abilene has always, without exception, said "Okay. Get some sleep, and get it there safely when you can."

And from what I can see, both on this forum and elsewhere on the internet, that's uncommon. I see drivers all the time talking about how dispatch asked them to drive when they were too sleepy to drive, or to drive on bald tires, or to drive on equipment with cracked suspensions, or to drive overweight and just avoid the weigh stations, or to do other things that would put the driver's health and/or CDL at risk. Abilene doesn't do that.

And when it comes to family emergencies? Abilene is solid gold. My neighbor's kid is basically my adopted daughter in everything but the legal sense. When I go home for hometime with my kids, she moves in for the weekend. I bought her her own bed so she wouldn't have to sleep on the floor.

Last year she attempted suicide.

All it took was a single phone call to HQ to get my truck turned around. And she's not even my own flesh and blood. Just a kid belonging to someone else that I happen to treat like my own. And there was no questions asked by HQ, no attempts to get me to make delivery and then they'll see what they can do, no "Well if it was your real daughter we'd work with you, but this is just your neighbor, right?" Just "Okay, start heading back this way and we'll find someone to swap with you." And they did exactly that.

I know that I like to post Amusing Trucker Stories here full of mirth and woe about how this thing happened or that thing happened and wow can you believe all this craziness that goes on? But the reality is that most of the time I get enough work to keep me rolling and everything goes smoothly and without incident. Most of the time, I get the load assignment, I can make it to the shipper on time, I can make it to the receiver on time, and the trailer passes a pre-trip without me needing to fix something the last guy didn't fix. Most of the time I can drop the empty and hook the loaded trailer (or drop the loaded trailer and hook the empty) and everything is fine. For every Amusing Trucker Story I post where I had to deal with someone else's epic screw-up, there's 20-30 loads or more that were just boring, plain old everyday load assignments that aren't worth talking about in any way, so I don't bother posting about 'em here.

No place is perfect, and there are certainly areas where Abilene could stand some improvement. But I get the miles out of Abilene that I want to get. I get the days off from Abilene that I want to get. I get detention when I ask for it. I get layover when I ask for it. I even get loads out west to see my Dad when I ask for it. And for the most part they treat me like a grownup, which is something I value highly. And as long as that continues to be true, I will continue to drive for them.

 

Uh-oh. They got him mid-sentence!