Beware of WEL companies

For a lot of trucking companies going to the northeast is a part of the job. I went up there back and forth from the southeast for 10 years and hated every trip but I did it. When you tell a company a list of what sorts of things you will and won't do expect to get crapped on. There's drivers that do the job every day without complaint. They don't have time to babysit you they're running a business.

 

They can find freight, but they’re probably not gonna haul cheap freight. No way I’d deadhead 200 miles to get a 45k pound load paying $1.30/mile going thru the mountains burning up fuel & tearing up equipment.

 

Freight goes where in goes and in the trucking business companies go after the money. The east coast is densely populated and a lot of good paying freight goes into there. Maybe you could narrow your search to companies that avoid that area? Whatever you do don't go in somewhere telling them how great a driver you are and all the things you won't do. Immediately they know you're gonna be a headache and they won't be sad to see you leave either. You're there to work and whatever or wherever that entails. They're not your travel agency. You can always finance your own truck and do it your way. Good luck.

 

I'm currently a WEL driver, started training about two weeks before OP made their post. Currently I echo most of their complaints, but I feel a bit stuck here for a couple more months, since I'm green to the CDL side of this industry (but have driven box trucks for years for Penske, but apparently that doesn't count). I currently plan to get a year under my belt, and then search for other pastures, since i'm literally at this company due to throwing like 30 job applications a day at a wall for weeks while working a construction gig, and they were the only Mega who actually got the ball rolling with me.

But since being here for about 7 months, I've experienced crappy equipment, crappier load planning, a DM screaming at me through the phone in front of my mom and grandmother (over trivial things), and being stuck in the truck over several weekends, especially holiday weekends. They also are particularly bad at adhering to their two weeks on the road, two days home promise. I've also never got their $1250 guarantee either, my checks have been averaging $700 a week, which gets exhausted quickly with food, a car payment, insurance for said car, and my phone and internet bill.

I've had loads where they make the delivery timeline too big and you sit for days because a lot of shippers won't unload you early, I've had loads where the only way to make the delivery on time was to run down to the minute on your 11 hr clock, I've been given LTL loads that don't give you time for a rest after hammering down, and LTL loads so tight, that a slight hiccup at a shipper ruins the whole itinerary and your next preplan (Thanks, Spartan-Nash and UNFI). Also, running your recap is expected if you dont get stuck somewhere, even if that puts you in awkward situations, like only having 5-6 hours of drive time per day, but needing to go from Atlanta to Grand Rapids in two days. I've also been sent on fetch quests several times to go to shippers retrieve empty trailers and bring them elsewhere, or to track down a reefer low on fuel, take it to a Pilot to fuel it, and then take it back, since apparently having me do these quests is cheaper than calling Jacobus to put fuel in the trailer. Often, i'm lucky to hit 2000 miles in a week, but I still have only got 1 paycheck in the last 7 months where I actually took home $1000.

On the equipment side, i've been in 4 trucks before getting in my own, and each one had issues. My trainer's truck had a bent axle and was chewing up tires, but he never had an opportunity to get it fixed because he was getting ran to death on loads, so we had very little downtime to go a shop. Then, my first truck as a C-Team with another trainee had alignment issues and a non-functional bunk heater (which is not optimal in the winter in Wisconsin)(this truck went to auction), the next truck had been in several accidents, and made very concerning sounds while driving unless you put cetane in the tanks (I was swapped out of that truck when my partner at that time was fired), the next truck had a blown heater core, so it had no A/C, and when you turn on the climate control, water started pouring out of the dash (i was swapped out of this truck too, a LP driver has it now), and my last C-Team truck which was my favorite because it had a Cummins in it and pulled like a dream had no working rear climate control and a broken APU.

My current truck now that i'm solo, a 2020 579 with a Paccar MX-13 ( ) was given to me filthy, with broken interior switches, a broken knob on the rear climate control, extensive damage to the catwalk and an APU that failed the first week out. My APU had chewed up an Alternator, and even though i had spent an night diagnosing it, they tried to fix everything except the Alternator until I had basically went home for a day since I wasn't going to attempt to sleep or potentially die in a hot truck. Now, they have disabled the idle shutdown on the truck and have worked on the apu multiple times, but it still randomly shuts off, or gives me the error "Check APU Engine", and they can't seem to replicate it.

I'm grateful that they gave me a chance here, but I'm perplexed on how people stay for years with subpar equipment, subpar load planning, and below industry pay.

 

How'd that teaming with another student for 25k miles each go? Take a few months on that?

They send you to Florida for orientation?

 

Yeah, spent two and a half weeks in Winter Haven, FL before being flown out to Oklahoma to meet my trainer. I was teaming from mid-April until July. most of my teammates were okay, though I was first paired up with an old guy who could barely see at night, but insisted on driving mostly at night. He also couldn't straight-back to save his life, so I dont even know how he got off the lot in Winter Haven. He ended up quitting a week in because his dad got sick, but not before crumpling both cab fairings on the truck (which is grounds for termination). My next C-Team partner was doing good, and was local but our dispatcher gave him bad information when I went home for a weekend, and he got terminated because he got caught advancing a load without me (they gave us a fetch quest, and he wanted to do it himself to save us time, got caught because he forgot to switch drivers and did the run as me, and called it in for them to fix). I later saw him at a truck stop in Connecticut, he now droves box trucks. The next C-Team partner I had was an older motivated dude who was fighting some drug-related demons, but otherwise could drive. My only gripe with him was he kept having preventable incidents, like high-siding trailers from not checking if they were dropped too high. I reached my 25K while paired with him, and when I got put in my own truck, he was switched to C-Team with another guy he was friends with, but about a week later was terminated for high-siding and slamming the reefer into the back of the cab. He really wasn't much of a get-out-and-look type guy. . . .

 

The time in Winter Haven is double bunk right?

I imagine that sucked as well.

 

Double bunk hotel rooms with mold and bugs yup. And one company car that up to 14 people have to figure out how to share, or buddy up with someone who drove to Winter Haven in order to get to and from the hotel and the lot.