CRETE - A Year in Review

For no reason, here's Captain Zoom! <Catchy theme music plays> Thank yew, thank yew! <Applause>

 

FULTON?????? what in the blue blazes are you bringing to fulton??? there's nothing there. trust me, i know. i lived there for 35 years. Nestles.... closed.
Miller Brewery.... closed.
Birdseye.... closed.
Armstrong Tile... closed

And they tell me i can't go home to Baldwinsville, NY because they don't have any freight going that way. What the (( the following string of obscenities has been removed due to decorum. But trust us, when we repeated them at the local bar, all the Marines held their ears and made a b-line for the nearest confessional.))

Add to that, that i'm sitting in a ((expletive deleted)) hotel room in (( expletive deleted)) Carlisle, PA because the ((don't make me wash your mouth out with soap.)) truck won't start and the batteries won't hold a charge. I'm now in a day cab again, which makes truck number 5 in the 2 months i've worked for this company. Ackley Maintenance is just this side of worthless. " It'll be 3 days before we can give you a new mattress in that truck you just recovered." "We don't know how to fix your truck, so we're sending it to the dealer." "We didn't send your truck to the dealer like we told you we were going to, 3 days ago." "We don't do B services here, you'll need to go to Petro." "What do you mean you need a day cab, no one told us you were coming."

The last quote was tonight from the guy in the shop, after i spoke to the fleet manager and she said she'd make sure they held the keys for me. I trust Linda and Julie with what they tell me as being 100% true. The guys from AMS..... How can you expect me to trust a shop that would light a trailer full of toilet paper on fire, by welding on the kingpin?

 

I need to do something like that. I had a notebook with all my locations, mileages, and gallons of fuel that I was going to transfer to a spreadsheet. The only time I take it out of the truck is to punch my odometer into the fueling card reader. But a few weeks ago I was in one of those odd fuel lanes where the card reader is on the passenger side. I had set my notebook on the passenger side steps and then forgot all about it. So I lost all my data, lol.

 

That is so true! When i'm just doing the normal routine (load to load to load) I tend to get some pretty crappy stuff. Like today I emptied out around 2pm, so they give me a 300 mile load that won't be ready until midnight and live unloads at 8pm the next night! Yet when some crisis happens like when they sent me to pickup at a business that was closed, they switched me within seconds to an 1100 mile primo load. That has happened to me several times where the best loads I've gotten were obviously ones they were just holding in their back pockets.

 

When I told them to shove the truck and trailer up there ###es while parked in the Columbus Yard, it took them a week to get me back to Phoenix to turn in my truck. And after I delivered that load in Phoenix they sent me a load because they were sure I was just kidding and would never quit Crete.....

 

How long ago was that, and did you check your DAC? Considering how some of these companies jack with the drivers, it wouldn't surprise me if they put a "quit under dispatch" on your record.

 

There is a plant north of town that makes big rolls of gasket material(water pump gasket, valve cover gasket, head gasket...etc). I'm picking up a t'called load from Otrawa. The driver that dropped it said it was some kind of talcum powder out of Montana...yea, I said the same thing...Montana is that big state up north west between that state next to MN (I forget the name of it....wait, it's on the tip of my tongue...never mind, that was just my chicken fried rice...oh South Dakota)and those other northwest states most of us never get to see unless there's 3 or 4 feet of snow coming.

I've picked up there a couple of times, but I've never delivered. The last time I picked up there, I went to Phoenix. Maybe they have a load out of there like that again...I had better deliver early...that way I'm not tying up the dock for another Crete driver coming in pick it up.

As far as your assesment of AMS...well...pretty much right. New Kingstown has always been not only the worst shop I've ever been to as far as speed, accuracy of work, and total 'chip on the shoulder' attitude...but...it's New Kingstown. They use to make all the red trucks sit until they fixed all the blue trucks. But now that we're a mixed bag of company colors, they can't. That and the rumor was Mr. Acklie came in posing as a Crete driver and when he was told he had to wait because there were Shaffer trucks getting fixed before any Crete trucks(and who's drivers were home on hometime). I hear that he fired every one of them on the spot. It only took a couple months, and the new guys were just screwing everyone instead of just the red truck's drivers.

That is also the terminal where I tore my soleus muscle in my left leg. And I was made to stand at the front counter and call the injury claims dept. The f'g safety witch wouldn't even let me sit in her office and use the phone. This is why I sent a lawyer after them when they baulked at paying my claim.

 

That was in 2010 and my DAC is fine.

 

Talked with these folks a few times recently and though .41 per mile sounds good, when you factor in a 400 watt plug in inverter limitation. no apu, etc. Having no fridge, hotplate, micro wave, coffee maker, etc to cook with, the good mileage pay looks less attractive when more of your pay is needed to eat what I consider junk food "fast food".