USA? or Heartland?

yea. They got rid of the guy that bunked with me. He couldnt understand why they wouldnt hire a convicted burglar.

 

Thats ok, when I went to orientation there was a guy that was forced to leave on Monday or Tuesday (can't remember which). He smoked weed the Friday/Saturday before orientation... I mean how stupid can you be???

 

Mitt? Mitt Romney? Is that you?

Looks like there is political seepage going on here.....

 

he prolly figured he could say that he figured if he was going to be getting a job he will smoke his last fatty before he did something that was so much less important than getting hi

 

Well unfortunately, not all are stupid drivers get culled out in orientation. Two notable ones that come to mind are as follows.

1. Was in Houston not long ago waiting to get loaded with a garbage load (recycled materials haha) and another USA driver and I were chatting. He told me that the reason the trucks were so slow was that USA Truck was too cheap to purchase powerful trucks. Being that they only had 400HP engines then they would likely top out around 65MPH if they were tuned right. Then he told me that he was saving money to buy a tuner to "tweak" the shift points and torque so that his truck would be able to achieve 65 instead of 62/63. I tried to explain to him about the governors which might as well have been ancient Egyptian. Not only did he not understand what I was talking about, he refused to accept it.

2. About 4 months ago I was in W. Memphis waiting on repairs and sitting at the smoking table with a few other drivers. One of the drivers there was fuming mad because he said he had been laughed out of the shop for telling the mechanics he wanted his truck converted from autoshift to manual. See, according to him, somebody had told him that there was a conversion kit for that and that all it required was cutting a hole in the floor for the stick, adding the clutch pedal, and a few other odds and ends. He had even offered to go to the Peterbilt store and pick up whatever parts were needed if W. Memphis would send over the PO for it.

There have been countless others that have come to mind but those are my two favorite on memory of our drivers.

 

Lol sorry to hear that. My first truck (1486) had ICON. It never worked right. Nobody could ever seem to fix it either. If you set it EXACTLY like the instructions said, no matter what temperature you put it at it would idle constantly. The rear vents blew lukewarm air no matter what so I was forced to leave the curtains open so that the front vents would blow AC to the rear. I had fuel economy QCing me on a weekly basis about my idle time. The only way I could get it to turn itself off was if I didn't turn on the thermostat in the sleeper, just set the ICON with the cruise. Then it would run for about 5-7 minutes, shut off, and never restart.

As far as miles go, yes theyve been pretty steady. Payroll has been messing up things again lately so I'm preparing to do battle with them over the phone tomorrow. For example, last pay period was for 3148 paid miles. My settlement was $465.00. I keep hearing folks gripe about miles but mine haven't dropped. The only thing hurting my mileage is that with the holidays and my planned home time it keeps breaking up my pay weeks. Part of what has helped is I've had an unusually large amount of multi-stop trips and hazmat loads lately. Many drivers tell me that hazmat is too much of a PITA to deal with but honestly, the $100 and some change that I paid 10 months ago to get the HAZMAT endorsement has paid for itself numerous times over. I'm never left sitting at Laredo either. Both times I've been down here in the last 2 weeks, I've either come in or left out with a hazmat load while everybody else is hanging out waiting and griping.