covenant orientation

There are many threads on this forum about Covenant...not many positive ones though! Good luck!

 

Just curious, if you are knocking out 600-700 miles per day, why in the world are you heading to Covenant? No I'm not a present or former Covenant driver, but just as bobobrazil alluded to, read the historical threads and I think you will see that idle time will be some of the lesser of your worries. You are not there yet, so you still have time to bail and run!

 

Well, let us know how covenant works for you driver

 

Make sure from now on you fight all tickets. Even if it means paying a higher fine to get it amended to something that is not a DMV reportable. I watched a judge amend "driving with suspended license" to "allowing someone with a suspended license to drive your car" once. (judge said that the man allowed himself to drive the car. lol.). Unless you do something really seriously dumb or catch a judge on a bad day, you can usually get them to do something like that.

If you want to know what covenant's written policy is on..ANYTHING, just ask me. I have their ghetto drivers handbook from last fall. The handbook is a nice perfectbound one from 2008, and theres a couple of pages stapled together that they give you with it where they re-wrote very important policies without changing the handbook. That tells me a lot about the company, but atleast they dont just leave you with a handbook thats totally BS like CRST.

Honestly, Werner is a better company than Covenant from what i hear about covenant from my friends that work there (met em in orientation but i didnt actually geta job) and my experiences working with werner. Werner ain't great either though.

But like, i know a guy that got written up for excessive qualcomm use. Come on.

Covenant has an idle chargeback policy where they actually profit from the chargeback. Come on.

Covenant complains about idling yet doesnt provide an alternative other than a webasto fuel fired bunk heater. Come on.

Werner has never complained about my qualcomm usage, and i've gotten to the point of fast paced arguing with dispatch over the qualcom in the past. When I was helping out on dollar general dedicated, we'd get fleetwides to everyone in our DC consisting of these two characters multiple times a day. And on that account, I even asked dispatch if they knew anywhere to reload my greendot card so i could pay my cell phone bill and get my phone turned back on...on the qualcom.

Hell, on my normal "regional" OTR run, i remember once when i sent a message saying the weather was bad and it was going to delay me, i got one back saying "Here to! Blowing snow and ****COLD****".

we also have a way to send messages to other trucks incase you're doing a swap and want to let the other truck know how to get to the hard to find hole in the wall truckstop you ran out of hours at...because dispatch rarely gives out drivers cell numbers to other drivers. One time i was at this truckstop that was hard to find and hard to describe how to find, but was across the street from a BP gas station that had big signs off the highway telling you how to get there. i sent him, "hey, its the marathon truck stop, just follow the signs to get to BP at this exit and its across the street"

Werner does complain about idling, they have a policy of 10 hours per day, but there isnt a chargeback, they just complain. But over half of all werner trucks have an APU, and the APU trucks are allowed the same 10 hours per day (but have a 5 minute shutdown to prevent it).

 

Rocking.... read allll the info available on this Forum. If you still go to Covenant, have enough savings to pay your bills and things for 6 months (just in case you don't make much at the beginning). Covenant doesn't pay well at all. One can run good miles during training but after that.... it all depends...

IMHO all big training cos. are the same. If you have to go with Covenant, be prepared to put up with the mandatory teaming, eletronic logs... just read the thread called "Covenant -from a wife's perspective" on good and bad companies.

The idle, your trainer may have it in the truck. During teaming, you and your partner may get a newer truck with APU.

Covenant doesn't want drivers to idle because company competes for the Smart Way Award for reduction of fuel emitions every year. They won the prize last year. And they receive federal money and other kinds of recognitions and advantages in the trucking industry. The money they charge for idling and jump starting a frozen up truck is nothing compared to what they get if they win this prize.

Good luck.

 

what emitions? lol.


Seriously though...As far as i know, the company expects you to have 10% idle time, which does not count the first 5 minutes of warm up or cool down time before/after you start/stop driving. They run Freightliners. Freightliners are insulated horribly. They have webasto heaters but mostly dont have apus. They run in the south, among other places.

When its 110 out, I don't have an APU, and I drive a Freightliner, which in the texas sun on a 100+ day will start getting unbarably hot within 5 minutes.

Hell, I've idled for air conditioning on 75 degree days. Why? the SUN. It would get too hot and humid for me to sleep inside the truck, even though the weather was PERFECT outside.......

I have 16% idle on this truck right now. I have a broken APU, its the middle of the winter (just came back from canada this morning infact), and while I have an idle shutdown, I figured out how to rough it and deal with it. When I go home this weekend im going to bring my nice sleeping bag with me, but im going to demand the APU be fixed again wtihin a couple of days of being back on the road. (i dont live near/within 200 miles of a carrier dealership sadly). Im idling an hour or two a day. Thats all you NEED, but if i had to deal with this simply because the company didnt give a #### abotu me staying warm, i wouldnt work there very long.

The reason I still went to covenant orientation is because i'd heard that supposedly you can send them a qualcom message and tell em why you're idling and that it was ok if you needed to. I have no idea how they are, but i sure remember the policy being 10%. And that's one of those thigns thats not very clear in my copy of the handbook.


And regardless, is it ok for them to MAKE MONEY off the chargeback? No.

Also theres a box you can plug into your truck, which makes the truck think its doing 60MPH when you pusha button, but is intended to disable the governor. But you could use it to idle too, truck would sit there with the odometer rolling up miles all night,qualcomm would think you're driving. I sure wonder what would happen if you used that.....