Adventures of a Flatbedder at Roehl

Well, I did place some duck tape over the blinking lights. Man those things are irritating at night!

 

Get a Relay load out of Oak Creek at 2 PM. Bobtail down to pick it up from Neenah. Load is going to Utica, MI. Needs to be there at 10AM next morning. Uh, ya.
So I tell FM, getting there won't be an issue, but delivering it at 10 AM might be. Need to have a 10 hour break somewhere in there. He says CS is working on it. So I take off. I decide to go straight there. Get to consignee at 2 AM. Look around for a safe, out of the way, place to park. Find a spot and go to sleep. Wake up at 9 AM, just in case, but alarm was set for 9:30 Check messages, appt time changed to 1300. Great! Back to sleep. Get up at noon, drive around the corner, was sitting on other side of consignee complex, and get unloaded.
Next load picks up in Delta, OH, 110 mile deadhead for 5:30 appt. Get there about 20 mins early. Back into the dock, getting palletized coils. Another Roehl driver is in one dock, me in the other. About 30 minutes later another Roehl driver shows up. We sit and BS for HOURS!!! The first driver had 4:30, I had 5:30 and last driver had 6:30 appointments. First driver didn't leave until near 8 PM, I didn't leave until 9:30PM and will never know when the unfortunate last driver left. He was out of hours too. Made it to gary at midnight and shutdown. Gonna be a long weekend. This load should give me Detention and LAYOVER on the same load. oh well....

And on a sad note, when I was in Neenah a driver was let go for clipping a fence at a consignee. No damage, no one saw it, but he self reported it. Long story short, he was a man of integrity and had self reported himself for the 3rd time. 3rd time was a charm and Roehl let him go. He had no accidents, tickets, etc, but he had 3 minor incidence with no damage or claims that he self reported in a year and he is now gone. Now, in trucker talk you can't believe everything you hear, but the one thing I will say is that Roehl did take care of him getting home. He boxed up his stuff for Roehl to ship home and got a bus ticket home. Not too shabby for being let go in comparison to the horror stories we read here and on other sites about companies firing a driver and then leaving them stranded somewhere. (Now if they take it out of his pay, I will never know, but he wasn't too worried about it and said he would still recommend the company to anyone who asked. Strong statement there!)

On a good note for me, he gave me all of his can goods! Food for weeks baby!!

 

There is always 3 stories, the drivers, what safety thinks, and the truth. I would say the first issue was self reporting. No damage or anything else, did it actually happen or did he think he hit the fence? We will never know.