Help with Saftey scorees

Make sure your truck and logs are good.
You can't use PC for repairs I'm pretty sure.

 

I'm guessing that the inspecting officer said that you should have been
"on-duty" while replacing the batteries because you were working on the truck.
To avoid this situation in the future stop using personal conveyance. If you do not use it there cannot be any questions or it cannot be misinterpreted by an inspecting officer. As for the other things you are getting cited for it's up to you to correct these issues and make sure your equipment is in proper working order as well as you as the driver. Make sure your logs are correct and up-to-date. Medical card. Insurance. Truck and trailer inspections. Tires. Wheels. Brakes. Maintenance.

If you pay more attention to detail then you will get good inspections. Keep all of your legal stuff up-to-date. Do what is necessary to remain in compliance and it will be easy to keep a good safety score.

 

You broke the law, my friend. Take responsibility for your actions. Keep your equipment in good repair. Inspect it regularly and have other mechanics do it too to help catch what you miss and you won't be getting dinged by DOT.

You really need to have better understanding of the HOS laws if you're going to operate commercially. If you're doing ANYTHING work/business related then your are ON DUTY and need to log it accordingly.

Why did you have to make a note as to what you were doing during the duty status change? Is that some new law or something? I rarely make notes about what I'm doing on changes. The law only states you have to input the location (city, state, mile marker etc etc) at the change of duty status. No need to add what you were doing per se as far as I know.

 

Quoting for context, not picking on you specifically.

Anything that furthers the business of the carrier cannot be logged as PC or off-duty. Driving to a shop for a battery replacement, is furthering the business. Technically, should be logged entirely on lines 3 and 4, on duty or driving.

Yes, never using PC will certainly avoid any interpretation mishaps with law enforcement. You could say the same about YM and the various exceptions such as adverse conditions. My opinion is: you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. That is, giving up too much for too little benefit. A better strategy is: use these things lawfully and carefully annotate them when you do. Also don't get carried away with them. Be the low blade of grass under the DOT lawn mower. Crime fighters look for patterns of behavior. If you use PC once in a while, it probably won't be looked at too closely. If there's several every day, or even over the course of a week, you can expect it to get their attention and they will find a violation whether it's real or not.

Any further options would be discussing logbook falsification, and that's frowned upon here. So I won't discuss the potential gray areas of "what is valid PC." It's covered in some great depth on the FMCSA website, and been discussed at length here over and over.

 

Stay out of trouble. Safety record is a 30 month revolving record. I wouldn’t worry too much yet. It’ll clear up. Good passing inspections will help to cancel out the bad ones. More failed inspections will only cause more inspections. At that point, it will go one way or another. The truth shall prevail. Got to try you’re best to not give them any reason at all.

 

Got my 1st level 2 inspection today after over 2 yrs as an O/O….Corinth MS eastbound scale this morning….was nervous as hell running paper after not using paper logs for over 6yrs and really only a couple months ever using paper…..she checked everything and I passed….knew it was coming with the run I’ve been doing this week but I expected it at the MO scale house on 155….that place is always fn busy lol

 

PC to get batteries cannot be PC by the simplest logic. Even going to the mechanic in a personal vehicle to see how the repair is going is on Duty, except that it is not logged by eld automatically.
Perfect PC example is when you park at a truck stop to take 10 hour break and there's Walmart 3 miles away, so you go there to do some shopping - but never buy things truck or job related like oil, tools, windshield washer - and then come back to the very same truck stop and ideally spend at least 7 hours in the sleeper.