Is this typical for dispatchers?

Okay. Here's the deal. I have been wanting to post here and ask about this for some time. My other half is is an O/O of 30 years. He signed on with a company back in June. Recruiter sold him. Agency for the company has dedicated run, drop and hook from 2 miles from home, round trip to indy.(about 265 miles R/T) Round trip can be made in one day. Great pay. Turns out that often times, there is no load going out of the home base, but the pick up has to be made in indy. So they broker him a load to get down there. Usually heavy loads and sometimes crappy pay. Sometimes lots of headaches sitting in docks for many hours which in turn makes him late for his pick up on the dedicated and inevetibley late for delivery. Anyway, as time goes on, they send him on this dedicated run less and less. We think that they may have lost some of the business with this company. I have a few issues with the way he is being dispatched and would welcome any input from you all.

1) they sometimes send him on runs that have over100 miles of D/H to then drive only 180 miles to unload. Once this happened with a load that needed to be delivered by 10pm and was not dispatched in time to physically be able to get there by 10PM. Dispatch had no idea that it needed to be delivered by 10pm so when he gets to the gate at 10:05, they tell him he has to come back tomorrow. Meanwhile he has a pick up that he will be late for because of this. Is that normal?

2)They pay no attention to hours of service. They will run him and run him and make it very difficult to "log it legal" so to speak. Mostly because the runs are short and there is way too much time sitting in docks. when he tells his dispatcher that he hasn't slept and needs a break (and is way over legal hours) he gets a call from a supervisor saying "hey man, I really need you to take this load tonight. I need you to work with me here". Is this normal?

3) The agency recently acquired a new dedicated run. Pays awesome. So they put him on it. It leaves point A on Thursday morning and is due somewhere in NY on Friday night. It's 680 miles. Well, problem is the agency is in the office M-F from 9-5. Our dispatcher usually wants to leave long before then. Sometimes 2pm. and we have no back haul. He sends a text to dispatcher letting her know he's unloaded. She says "okay, Ill call you Monday sometime and let you know what I find". So now he has to sit until Monday morning and then wait until the dispatcher finds him a load out of there which didn't happen until Tuesday morning and didn't deliver until Wednesday night. and of course the load out on Tuesday is barley covering fuel from point a to point b. So it turns out this "awesome" run is tying his truck up for most of the week. Why don't they get that? If he's not moving, they aren't making money either right? They did this to him twice in the last two weeks. The only reason he did it a second time was that the supervisor called him and asked him to do it and said they had a back haul for him. Well.. surprise!! ... He gets a call 100 miles from delivery and is told the back haul cancelled. BS!! I don't buy it.

Now... I don't have any experience in dispatch but I do know first hand what's really going on out there on the road. So many times I see how something could have been done differently. It seems they don't see the bigger picture sometimes. They don't think ahead and move accordingly.
For example, they have this 265 mile R/T dedicated that I mentioned earlier. They know the prior week what the schedule is for the run. sometimes there is 3-5 days of down time until its pick up date. But for some reason they still run him brokered freight back and forth from home base to indy during that 3-5 days. WHY OH WHY wouldn't they send him on longer hauls in the interim, that have him back to the pick up when needed?

Anyway, what I think I am seeing is that it's not really a benefit to work with a 9-5, M-F dispatcher.

Please, any and all, tell me what you think of this agency's M/O.

~BridgettAnn

 

yeah. We are thinking about moving to Landstar. That way I can dispatch him myself. I take care of all of the business end of things anyway. So landstar might be a really good deal for us.

~BridgettAnn

 

Chris,
Thanks for the info. And I sent you a PM.

~BridgettAnn