THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE - DFO gets a truck and hops on Schneider's IC Choice Program

No one has said anything about that to me yet.

 

Late this morning I filled up with as much fuel as I could squeeze in the tanks and then scaled my tractor. I have to provide Schneider with this scale ticket, it is used to determine the responsibility of the driver or SNI when it comes to a load being overweight.

The first situation is the bad one - I get to the shipper and find that the load is overweight. Schneider looks at the bobtail scale ticket that I originally provided them with, and if its determined that my tractor, according to that bobtail scale ticket (regardless of what else I have put in the tractor that has increased the weight of it) could handle the load, I am charged $500 in order for someone else to deal with the load.

The other situation is the OK one - I get to the shipper and again find that the load is overweight. Schneider looks at the bobtail ticket and sees that the load would have been too heavy for my tractor to begin with - then its not my fault.

That is why we are told to scale HEAVY. Luckily, it sounds like I will need to turn my ticket in to my ICA in Charlotte. This will give me time to swing by the house and load up the extra gear that I didn't bring with me (tools, etc.) so that I can give myself some headroom. With full fuel and the APU I'm not exactly rolling around on a lightweight truck to begin with, lol, so I will have to watch this carefully for a bit. However, with the exception of one or two loads I always had 2k lbs leeway with my company Cascadia, so I should be OK overall.

After that I headed over to the OC and me and the other SNI company to IC transfer driver met with a SFI rep who sat down with us and just went over a lot of what we had talked about briefly in the past couple days in a lot more detail. She answered a ton of questions that I had and offered some very helpful advice. I left that meeting again feeling like I really do have people that are going to have my back and really want to help me succeed.

Tomorrow is the final day of training where we go over the actual load board, and after that we will be on our own! Hopefully I get sent to a good location on an empty trailer search and can set myself up for several really good loads to finish off this short week with.

I have a few things I will go over with the shop about my tractor - I am missing the flip-down cover for the slide-out drawer that turns into a little table, and am missing a bracket to secure my CB in the area where the sunglasses pocket on the company Cascadias is located. If they don't have these no big deal, but I figure it won't hurt to ask. Otherwise a trip to the Freightliner dealership will be in order at some point, I gotta have the table to make my peanut butter sandwiches on LOL.

The one thing I do want to get checked is I noticed that my temperature gauges for my transmission and both rear ends are not moving from their "cold" resting positions. It could be that I am not generating enough heat just bobtailing around to get anything to register on the gauges. But, just in case I will ask about it because like I said earlier, any problems that I fine before I'm pushed out into the O/O world on my own will be covered by SFI at no cost to me.

I also got it confirmed that my truck had a complete PM performed before it was handed over to me, so I have a good baseline to start my maintenance schedule on. They have a sheet with some basic recommended maintenance intervals on it, however I will probably talk with the shop that performed the work as they should have more complete records about what kind of work was done during the "reconditioning" process.

Again, everyone I dealt with today were as professional and helpful as could be. I have nothing against the Charlotte group, but one thing I noticed during my company driver orientation that sometimes included IC's as part of the group, when someone asked a somewhat difficult question, several of them would skirt around the question and try to answer it but not really. Maybe it's just my attitude has changed and they can tell from the way I ask question that I know when I am being fed BS or not, but so far everyone up here has been extremely straightforward and honest with me. I really appreciate that.

I'm excited (maybe just a little nervous, but mostly excited) to get moving tomorrow. That $650 of fuel I put in the tractor today isn't going to pay for itself!!

My first goal is going to be to save up $20k in my own personal maintenance account. I am about 1/4 of the way there now. I feel that this will be a good amount to have on hand to cover any major repairs that may show up while the engine/trans/rears are still under warranty. When the warranty expires, if I'm still in this same truck and want to keep it rolling, I will probably add another $10-15k on there. Complete rebuilds/reman replacements of these newer engines aren't cheap!! If it really came down to that much money though, I'd probably try to have an older pre-emissions engine stuffed in there assuming it would be legal, lol. ANYWAY...

After that is saved up, it will be SAVE SAVE SAVE as much as possible to put towards the buyout of this truck at the end of the lease. I am going to run hard this first year. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to take some hometime and breaks as I don't want to burn myself out. However, the rule I have set for myself is that before I take any home time, or slow down in general, I will have money saved up and set aside to cover my complete truck payment for that time off. Talking with the SFI rep today I asked about making payments from my own personal savings - she said this is no problem, that I will just need to get in touch with my ICA in Charlotte each time I want to do this and we can set it up. Rather than taking off 5 days at once like I did as a company driver, I will probably try to aim to swing by home more often, but just for much shorter periods - I have a feeling being able to do some laundry, sleep in my own bed for a night, and eat a real home-cooked meal will be all the refreshment I need before heading back out for a week or so.

One of the biggest expenses in which I basically take money out of my wallet and deposit it in the toilet at the truckstop right now is food. In my company truck I was terrible about this - every time I would head off home, after a week of PB&J and cold lunchmeat I would get sick of it and run into whatever restaurant (if you can call a McD's that) the truck stop had and eat dinner there. Usually lunch too. Not only was it unhealthy and made me feel like crap, it adds up so quick its not even funny. Being able to have an inverter large enough to power a microwave in my truck will be a godsend. Now I just need to find a tiny microwave to fit in the little cabinet midway up on the drivers side - I think I found one that may fit!

Hopefully tomorrows report will be as good as the past several days and I'll be underway with or very close to picking up my first load!