CRETE - A Year in Review

Besides us drivers, does anyone know what other dept is taking a paycut to help save the company money?

...and evertruckerr, great read as always! Normally long posts are a boring run-on sentence. Yours are anything but! BTW, I think I went through some remanents of that storm just north of Cinci on I71. It had the 4wheelers going nuts as usual!

 

FYI, there is parking in the cul-de-sac across the street from Quiet Flex in Houston.

 

longbed, that was them canning most of shaffers dispatch / making the shops close down at night.

im averaging 19 % idle and 4 hours of sleep a night this week

wonder why they dont shut the a/c off in all cretes buildings from noon to three every day, surely that would save on electricity ? thats when the old a/c units work the hardest.

anyone getting alot of loads that either cant be picked up or delivered on time, or both? im averaging 2 out of 3 loads in that state propably.

and theyre still "looking in to" the rest of the money they owe me.

 

A correction to my post about my idle counter. Before my truck was turned down it use to only count idle time when parked. Now, its just like yours, if the tires aren't moving, it's counted as idle time. Also my truck has another hiccup. Between 55 and 62, on cruise, it acts like the computer has to think for a second, I get a momentary skip, as if the data bus is busy and it forgets to fire just 1 injector. It doesn't do it all the time, but often enough to rule out junk in the fuel. It use to do this on my other truck once they did the 9th gear reduction. This one never did it until they turned it down.

Plus, did they turn down the allowable idle time without opti idle? My truck use to idle for 5 minutes before it would shut down. I use to try to get my logbook finished for the day before it would shut down. Now its only 3 minutes and it shuts down. I have to hurry when hooking to a trailer to keep it from shutting down before I get everything hooked up, locked up and gear up.

To update as to how things are on my end:
I think ops is trying to see how healthy I am now. In 15 days, I ran 7300+ (including a 34 hr). They must read this thread and know who I am. I mentioned a while back that I hardly ever ran the logbook into the ground and took a 34, now I am running the wheels off of it. Came back on the road the 18 of June. I had only run 4004 miles as of then, ran 70 out in 7 days, took a 34, and ran another 70 in 7. By the 30th I was over 10000. Now it's 7/2. I just finished off a 1362mi load. I ran another good week, and waiting for my 35th hour to start running again. I hope this keeps up. Feels good to be tired from working for a change.

It does take some getting use to in order to plan your trips in a 62 mph truck. They say only 3 mph, but at the end of the week it adds up. But it does seem to pull better, and I stay very close to 7 mpg. I even pulled a load across I-68 in MD and it felt a lot better.

 

Payroll screwups here are very rare. I've been here 4.5 yrs, and only had 2. One of those was my own fault. Although it did take a couple of weeks to trace down why the 2nd one happened, and to get it fixed.

 

Keep up the positivity - it suits you

I just finished orientation today in Marietta; gotta go to Kingsport, TN tomorrow to get a truck. Signed up for SE Regional - even if the miles are quite a bit shorter than the National fleet, it's worth it to not be running the northeast

 

Snackbar: My truck has some hiccups too. They are mostly in 10th gear around 12-1300 RPM light throttle. I see a shot of black smoke go beside the trailer(if the wind is blowing just right)in the mirror after it hiccups. It still runs fine though and has just turned 582K, so I guess its normal.
Anyone know at what mileage trucks are turned in?

 

Every detroit motor with egr I've driven...4 total has had this same problem.

 

I started reading this thread when my spouse was looking to work for Crete, and can't stop reading, although he isn't going to be working for them. Evertruckerr, your & other's comments are very helpful.

Glad to read about your good health and being back in business!