Marten Driver (currently)

My husband and I are currently with Marten as owner operators. I have seen a horrible decline in the attitude of the Marten office personnel.
Drivers are no longer treated like human's, we are just a number in a truck to move from one point to another. Dispatch can hand out service failures whenever they please without notifiying a the driver that one is going in their record. We have had this happen. We have received calls from dispatch asking us to help them out of a jam with an impossible load. But if the load doesn't make it, we were given service failures. If you refuse to help dispatch out with their impossible load, then you pull the crap loads for weeks. And for the record, team owner operators are not allowed to refuse loads.
Mileage is down for most teams, who now average about 4500 miles per week. Drop and hook for owner ops as well as companies is about 30%.

 

Throughout my 8 years as a solo company driver at Marten I've always believed that an awful lot has to do with who your fleet manager is. If you get a good one, like I fortunately did, life's pretty good...if you don't, like I unfortunately did when my regular FM spent a couple years doing other jobs at Marten, life can get rough.
When things are as they should be (which, as everyone knows, is not always the case) a fleet manager acts more like an agent representing the driver, than just a liaison between the driver and the rest of the company.

I don't know this firsthand, but my hunch is that a good fleet manager will argue on your behalf if someone else in the office tells him/her to slap a crappy load on you. One of the FM's I had during those two off years seemed to be the whipping girl of the rest of the office...I couldn't believe how often she was asking me to do ridiculously lopsided swaps.

Ridiculous (or even not-so-ridiculous) rescue requests from night or weekend dispatchers can safely be ignored...I usually don't even reply unless it's something I want to do. The repercussions -- if any -- are minimal...my fleet manager's happy enough with me while she's on duty to disregard most anything they tell her about me.

 

I'm too new to really understand if my dispatcher is trying to kill me or if that's just the way things work. Maybe somebody can analyze this for me? I would like to hear.
I picked up a load in Sherman, TX with a split delivery: one in Norman, OK, 150 miles away, one in Minot, ND. So the Norman del didn't yet have an appt. time. Dispatcher said send estimate of when I could be there once I was loaded and he'd try to arrange time. Meanwhile, though, somebody set a time - I woke up next morning and found that del would be 22 hours after I picked up - for a 3 hour drive. I'd have to lay over for 16-18 hours. So I immediately sent a message to dispatcher, followed by macro 35, followed by more messages. But they could not/would not change it. Had to spend 16 hours at a miserable little truck stop, no showers even, much less restaurant.
And that made the run to ND very tight, but I made it.

Toward the end of ND run got a dispatch with no pickup or del times set (I've got to stop accepting these jobs! Is this my first mistake, to accept a job without appt times?). It looked like 72 hours to run 1500 miles, nice and loose.
So I accepted it, but pointed out that pickup time needed to be noonish because I was delivering at 6 AM and then would need to drive 210 miles.
Some hours later was sent a "change" message to set pickup time: for 2200 that night! Now I had the problem of needing to get in 10 hours off, but it was tight, very tight. And the job had just shrunk to 62 hours.
I sort of barely got 10 hours off by driving to pickup city from delivery city then shutting down around noon. Was tormented by flies from all the livestock trucks -- had to get up 5 or 6 times to kill flies. Left for pickup just before 2100. Shippers kept me waiting till 2240 for dock then let me sit in it for an hour before loading. Luckily the remaining flies had now settled down for the night and gone to sleep, so I was able to sleep while waiting to be loaded.
Left at 12:30 midnight with load, drove until 2 in the afternoon the next day. But my body was fighting me the whole way, claiming not to have slept. Drove over 500 miles anyway, but the del site was receding on me (has anybody else had this experience?).
It's the weekend now, so the weekend dispatchers are on. I did as my dispatcher had told me, sent an estimate of when I could get to delivery site, noon or after on the 15th. But the message I got in reply was, "but the del. time has been set for 0900." Hadn't even gotten a "change" message on this one.
Immediately sent a message to say that's too tight! And it was. I drove 11 hours out of 14 and only rested 10 (or even 9 and a half) but I was late with the load, which I had 56 or fewer hours to run rather than 72.
So now I suppose my name is mud, but I feel like I was set up to fail.
What does anyone else think?

 

Your dispatcher probably isn't trying to kill you. I wondered the same thing when I very first hired with Marten...for all I knew my dispatcher could be an evil person who revels in driver misery based on the way I got dispatched my first week on the job. I'm sure they chuckle to themselves (or amongst themselves) sometimes at our predicaments (I would too if I had that job), but in general I don't think they're out to get us.

Re unusual occurrences like the ones you mentioned, well, they happen. For example, at this very moment I'm sitting at delivery #3 of my current load, at the Sysco in Poway, CA (near San Diego), waiting for them to give me a door as a work-in delivery because delivery #2 took five hours to offload about four pallets yesterday. I've been sitting here at Sysco for 19 hours now. (If only I'd lumped that load myself yesterday -- then this wouldn't have happened...)

I mostly stay busy during times like this doing hobby projects on my laptop. It's critical to have something (or someone...) along in the truck with you to stay busy if you get stuck somewhere you'd rather not be. Also, Marten doesn't throw a fit if you drive 10-15 miles out-of-route to hang out somewhere better. (I posted a message awhile back about JB Hunt screaming at me for bobtailing across the street from their terminal to get some stuff out of my storage locker ten years ago...gave them my notice a few hours later).

Re accepting a run without appointment times, my rule of thumb is to always send in the "yes" on macro 32 right away, unless it's a run I can't legally do (and one I don't want to do). If my fleet manager ever gave me crap about re-sending with a "no" afterward (they shouldn't, and good ones won't), then I'd change my rule of thumb to never send macro 32 until the appointments are known. My rules of thumb are constantly evolving based on little reviews I do of situations that happen and how I can prevent or promote them in the future.

As far as hours go, I make sure my fueling times match my logs (as well as my bols when they're time-stamped), in order to keep the safety department happy when they do their monthly audits. To keep the DOT happy, well, the first rule of thumb is to get Prepass -- it's an indispensible tool of the trade these days -- well worth the monthly $9 or $10 fee.

I'll leave you with a quote my excellent trainer (Bruce, if you're out there, thanks!) left me with when I first started driving over at Schneider (tanker) back in 1994 and my training period was done. He pulled out a log book, pointed to it repeatedly, and said "You see this? This is your money. Always remember that."

 

What is their home time policy like?

 

The official allowance is one off for every five days on. However, and they don't say this, but I would assume you can take as many days off as you want if you drive at least 30,000 miles per quarter, which they pay a $500 quarterly bonus for.

 

As a solo driver, you may not be aware of how Martens dispatchers work for the teams. We do not have a choice of dispatchers, we have a team board with 3 dispatchers. We have a dispatcher that handles loads in the east, one for the west, and the third dispatcher floats. Team drivers do not have the opportunity to "fire" their dispatcher and request another if things aren't working between them, because we don't have a specific dispatcher we are assigned to. I think this is part of the problem with Marten, sometimes we don't know who we are dealing with on the other end...

 

I've heard bits and pieces about team dispatching but wasn't aware of this particular aspect. I agree, that would be a huge drawback. I prefer to have my regular fleet manager around to take care of me.

This is sort of off-topic, but it's something I've been thinking about lately -- it's on my wish list -- that could be a major improvement for drivers (and companies!) if it ever got established. If anyone's got an opinion or firsthand knowledge about the feasibility...

Years ago (decades, actually), if I was about to do a long car trip I would post a message on a "rider board" (a bulletin board for rides offered and rides wanted, usually at a college or university) to get someone to come along and help pay for gas.

Let's face it, Qualcomm is unbearably limited -- it's like something out of the '60s. (Weren't they using it for the Apollo missions? lol) With more and more drivers carrying laptops around and using the internet, wouldn't it be nice if drivers at large companies like Marten had an online "rider board" (a better name would be "swapping board") where they could notify each other of loads they'd like to get rid of, or be able to just monitor what's out there, in case there's an available load they'd rather have?

The idea is that with everyone having cell phones nowadays, drivers could communicate directly amongst themselves to negotiate their own swaps -- for free! The company wouldn't have to pay for any fleet manager time. The old way would still be used -- it would never go away entirely, of course.

A potential drawback is if companies prefer to minimize swapping. But it seems to me that computers should be able to handle any volume of swaps. Qualcomm macros could be set up so swaps could be done without any fleet manager time at all -- if both drivers send in a macro of consent, the swap's a done deal.

I don't keep up on this stuff in the news, so maybe this sort of thing is already in the works at some companies.

 

What an interesting idea. My recent experiences with them is that they're too bureaucratic to do any such thing. And maybe it would be a nightmare for FMs to keep track of?
Another idea of my trainer's was that drivers should automatically be offered any load going through their home town every five or six weeks. That and that all Wal-Mart loads should be drop and hook. Wouldn't that help?
Why don't you put your idea on one of the general posts here and see if other companies are doing it? Prob. only Martens read this one. I'd be interested to know too.

 

Wal-Mart fortunately has several drop locations already, but I agree, they should all be drop locations.

I've sometimes wondered whether Marten intentionally tries to get us by the house every so often, because mine (Laughlin, NV) happens to be on a couple fairly well traveled routes (I-40 to/from CA and any non-I-15 N-S routes through Las Vegas -- post-9/11 anyway) so I get by the house quite a bit. My guess is they normally don't pay any attention to this either way -- too busy to bother. Some drivers have told me they think they deliberately try to keep us away from the house in order to avoid late deliveries, but again, I doubt that's true either.

Thanks for your feedback on my idea. I ran it past my fleet manager a few weeks ago and her response was what you predicted: she said she didn't expect to see anything like that in her lifetime. But she said she'd try and route me to a terminal the next time they have one of those driver-management meetings so I can bring it up. If nothing else it gives me a good excuse to go to one -- I've never been to one before.

A less, but still potentially useful idea along these lines also comes to mind: there need not be any company involvement at all beyond merely agreeing to swaps that drivers come up with on their own, because, for instance, this very website itself could set up an entirely new discussion area with separate sections for separate (large) companies, for the sole purpose of letting drivers post what load they've got and what sort of load they'd like instead...in the past whenever I've met up with another Marten driver who agrees to a swap with me (it's only happened a few times I'll admit), the company has always given it their blessing and switched our loads on the computer without any hassle.

One slight hitch is that if I recall correctly, there are restrictions on posting contact info like your cell # on this site...it would complicate things in a big way if you were limited to just posting back and forth instead of being able to talk on the phone.

The biggest hitch, probably, is that a certain "critical mass" of drivers would need to participate for this to be of much use (probably many more Marten drivers than are currently using this website at all in the first place). It would be infinitely better for the company to get directly involved by posting a comprehensive list of loads that are out there. They've already got a username/password system set up to view settlements, so any security issues would seem to be taken care of already.

I'll check with Cybergal on the more limited idea. Maybe someone's already suggested it and she (or someone she can refer me to) will tell me why they never set it up.

There's also the thought of starting an entirely new vBulletin (the relatively inexpensive bulletin board software this site uses) website for the purpose, but geez, that'd be a lot of work!