What we've got here is failure to communicate

This is the summary of my time at Roehl Transport. I hope somebody gets something useful out of this, even if it is of tl;dr size...

Not many company drivers posting to these forums these days who have more than a year with Roehl. I was one of them. (1 of 2? And if so, I can't remember who the other is. Does bucksandducks run company?) I was planning on sticking around a good long time but now I'm gone. Have been for a month now, and I think I've finally mellowed enough now to explain.

The crux of the matter is failure to communicate. To quote a certain quotable president, "The left hand *holds up right hand* doesn't know what the right hand *holds up left hand* is doing."

For example, there were three times I told Roehl I needed to be home on a specific day for a specific reason. You know, to take care of my Life Outside the Truck, which Roehl's literature insists that they work with us on. On those days, I ended up in Owen Sound, Ontario; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Marshfield, Wisconsin. The time I was in Green Bay was moving day - back when fuel was $5 a gallon and nobody was moving freight I couldn't afford my apartment and moved home. My parents got to do all the work all by themselves. When I got back to work, my Fleet Manager asked how the move went. Well, it went great! I didn't have to lift a finger! I just drove straight to mom's house and my stuff was already there. More recently, I've needed a crown for the past six months, but I wasn't able to get home predictably enough to do this because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

We've just been talking about idle policies and anti-idle equipment. Well, this always seems to be an issue at Roehl. The bunk heaters they use are prone to failure and trying to get them fixed is an ordeal. Mine was broken for two months. This includes three days of idling at Gary waiting for maintenance while I was on a load before finally the dispatcher told me to go. A few weeks later, it still hadn't been fixed and I threatened to quit. At what kind of company do you have to say "fix my equipment or I'm leaving?" The kind of company where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

I did not quit after this, but eventually the dispatcher's supervisor (what do they call them now that they aren't Fleet Managers anymore?) noticed I scored 50% idle and 5mpg for December '08 and called me into the office to ask why, and I told him it was embarrassing to be at a company where it takes two months between the time a problem starts and anybody who can do anything asks about it. I thought talk like that would get me a cab ride home. What I got was a new bunk heater. So I found it was quite an ordeal to get your anti-idle equipment repaired when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Don't forget about Opti-Stop, every driver's favorite computer program. It doesn't realize that you're idling, so it may well route you to a fuel stop you could only make if you weren't burning 10 gallons a night just to sleep. A phone call to dispatch to say "I can't make this fuel stop because you can't seem to arrange to get my truck fixed" will fix this, but after eight or nine times that process got to be very annoying.

There was an incident where my Fleet Manager, as they were now calling them, told me to come back to work one day and punched the day before that into the computer, and nobody noticed until about 5:30pm as I was about to go to bed for an early start the next day when the run I'd been assigned turned up late. For one thing, nobody noticed that this load wasn't moving until the customer called and asked where it was, a full 9 hours after it was assigned. The phone conversation that resulted included an overnight dispatcher saying I should check in on every off day and me telling him the company was hypocritical to expect me to be at work at an exact time when they won't even tell me what that time is. I know that's not what hypocritical means but that's what I said in the heat of verbal battle and maybe it was on my mind for a reason. After that incident, my Fleet Manager always asked when I planned on coming back out, and I always responded according to what Roehl's hometime chart was. This isn't necessary if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

Then I had an accident, where I was backing up and didn't think anyone was behind me and someone was. A really stupid incident altogether, embarrassing and unacceptable from someone who is trying to make this a career. Anywho, on the cover of Roehl's logbooks it says "report all accidents immediately to" and some phone number which I forget. Inside my permit book was a card that said the exact same thing. I called them. Two weeks later my dispatcher calls and asks if I'd had an accident and wants to know why I didn't call them. I said "what part of report all accidents immediately to this number here wasn't clear? I called that number, and that's all it says to do." They accepted this answer but still, the left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is supposed to do in an accident.

So, on to the highlight. Late last year, I got assigned to a different truck: A Freightliner with no APU, electrical problems, and super singles. When I got it, it had no battery power left and I had to wait for a jumpstart just to run it the first time, and it was basically downhill from there. In the three months I was driving it, I got towed four times and jumpstarted eight times. Every time I went home, I would come back to find the truck either just barely alive or in need of a jump, and if nobody else was there that meant waiting for a service guy to get there. If you have an APU this isn't a problem, because you can just run it and it will recharge the batteries. But I didn't have one in this truck, and about half the company trucks don't. During a PM in Gary I wrote this problem up and they replaced one battery out of a possible four. I still had the same problem afterwards. In fact, during the scheduling fiasco I described earlier, I hurried on over to St. Paul Park to find that my truck wouldn't start after all and got to wait in my car for two hours for a jump so I could pick up a load that I had been startled at home to go get. This can only happen if the left hand didn't know what the right hand is doing, and perhaps this is why the word 'hypocritical' came to mind. Their attempts to save money by not swapping out all the batteries or by buying cheaper tires resulted in extra jumpstarts and tows. It cost $100 to jumpstart a Freightliner from a service truck and right around $425 to pull it out of a hole with a tow truck, according to the Comchecks I had to write for those amounts.

The tows were necessary because that truck had super singles - six tires instead of ten - and kept getting stuck. I ran the whole winter of 08/09 in an International with ten tires when I was fresh out of school and I never got stuck, but in a Freightliner with only six tires and a year's experience it was a different story. I would attempt to drop a trailer at the company lot in St. Paul Park and be unable to move my truck away from that spot. Gee, that only happened twice. I got stuck at Menard's headquarters trying to hook to a trailer, got towed out of that spot, and called it a night and went to the truck stop and got stuck in an iced-over puddle in their parking lot. Fortunately, I don't believe anybody took pictures of this. A bobtail stuck in the middle of the truck stop parking lot with your company name on it would be Swift-level publicity.

The next morning, I called the Fleet Manager and told him something needed to change or else I'd get stuck again. He said he'd do something about it. I was in Eau Claire on my run home, so I went and had hometime and then came back out to work again. I didn't get sent in the direction of headquarters as I probably would've if they had decided to fix this problem. Then on the way home, I was routed right down 90/94/39 from Rockford to Stillwater and could've easily run over to Marshfield and swapped trucks or gotten tire chains or something. I'm sure if a long, complicated process was required then this load could've been relayed off or a different one could've been assigned in the first place. It's not like they're trying to get me home on a specific day. But they did nothing, which must've been what they decided to do about my situation. And I'm not willing to gamble my life on whether I'm going to get stuck again, this time in the middle of nowhere with twenty gallons left and hope I can hold on - if my truck starts, that is.

So, after a year and a half, I took my hometime and instead of resting up for another round, I spent it looking for other jobs, and was accepted to J&R Schugel. The mechanical problems I've had were addressed right away. There is a book of acceptable fuel stops and it's my responsibility to make sure I'm fueled, while I can go right past one if it frequently takes an hour to get through there and there's another good one in the route. I have actually met my dispatcher. Everything I've been told so far has been exactly right. Sure, I have a year and a half's experience to thank for getting me this job, but that's all you can get out of Roehl. I'm not the first person to say this: Get your experience and leave. They will continue to have high turnover so long as the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

 

That's by far the lowest amount of experience required that I've seen by any company that doesn't hire rookies. In fact, until I looked at them specifically I hadn't seen anywhere that required less than 2 years. Bay and Bay out of... um, somewhere around here and Transport Designs out of Savage for example.

You have to learn from somebody. And it's not like every day is horrendous; I just unloaded a year and a half's worth of issues in maybe two pages. It's doable. I'd still do it again as opposed to joining Werner, Swift, or Schneider.