Werner Trainer Craps Himself

To all,i guess i should apologize forth with about my experience w/ werner. Am i a bit upset? Yes i am. I gave my heart and soul to werner.werner aided in my divorce from my wife.werner put me in bancktrupsy court.essentially they ruined my life. But as the old saying goes,"u cant keep a good man down". I'm going local so i can have a life and go back to enjoying living a happy and fruitful life w/ my lady miss karen and being a better father to my daughter ,lil miss sunshine.

 

Dude, you shouldn't be driving trucks, you should be writing books....that's some well written, #### funny, true to life stuff.

 

I'm sorry to hear that the original poster had such a bad experience.

For my own part, I joined Werner out of ignorance; knowing very little about the trucking industry, I saw that they had paperless logs and I thought maybe it would be safest to start with those -- the theory being that it would be harder for dispatchers to, um, encourage me to falsify my logs if the logs were automated.

Anyway, I had two trainers over a three-month span, and believe it or not, hygiene was not at all a problem with either of them. The first guy was borderline neurotic about keeping his truck clean, and the second one wasn't much different. On average, I got to shower about once every two days, which isn't too bad considering the time constraints to which we were often subject.

Training, though, certainly did suck, and to a certain extent it's going to suck no matter where you train or who your trainer is. Living 24/7 in an ~8-foot box with a guy you barely know -- a guy who basically controls when you eat, when you sleep, when you get to take a piss, a guy who corrects (at least at first) your every move -- well, it's quite a shock, I imagine, for most anyone.

My first trainer was a really nice guy, and a really good driver from what I could see. The problem was, he was what I would call an instinctive driver. In other words, he could make the truck do almost anything, but he didn't seem capable of articulating what it was he was doing, or what it was I should do. Almost every question I asked him was met with a sardonic stare; at first I thought he was trying some sort of strange, learn-it-yourself teaching method, but eventually I came to the conclusion that he simply didn't know the answers.

In fact, I had a bit of controversy with him early on, because he kept telling me to push the clutch all the way down every time I shifted, and when I asked him, "What about the clutch brake?" He simply looked at me like I was from Mars and muttered something about stupid rookies.

Suffice to say that my shifting sucked for the next two or three days, until finally I fished the truck's manual out and found the note explaining the clutch brake. From that point on, I just ignored him whenever he told me to push the clutch to the floor, and the transmission seemed to appreciate it.

On another occasion, I was driving in Connecticut (sorry, don't remember the exact road; I try to avoid New England as much as possible), and I saw a sign saying that there was an upcoming bridge with a weight limit of 22 tons, and that trucks should use such-and-such alternate route. So I got on the alternate route. My trainer hit the roof, exclaiming, "We ain't no 22 tons!" It was my turn to look at him like he was from Mars, because at the time we were pulling 44,000 lbs of beer. "You're right," I said, "We're more like 40."

Like I said, he was an instinctive driver, not much for rules or numbers. He had an uncanny ability to remember places, though. I was often kept awake through his shifts because he demanded that I sit up with him and read/explain the directions to him when we were going somewhere new -- but if it was a place he'd visited before, even a year or more beforehand, he could get there.

LOL, I'm rambling something fierce. I could go on and on about my trainers' idiosyncracies, but the bottom line is that neither of them treated me too poorly. When they weren't in what I like to call "trainer mode" they were both really nice guys. As to "trainer mode," well, I think every new trucker just has to keep in mind that truckers are a surly bunch, when it comes to how their truck is being driven. They're not, in my mind, natural teachers. You have to have a thick skin to learn from them, and take it as a compliment when you get to the point where it seems like they're nitpicking.

God knows compliments are otherwise few and far between.

One of the main difficulties with training, I think, is that you have to balance the desire to comply with the trainer's commands with the harsh reality that you are solely responsible for any mishaps that occur when you are behind the wheel. In other words, you have to kind of sniff out what among your trainer's teachings is truth and what's BS. That's probably the main reason everyone should take PTO: if nothing else, it helps to get two different viewpoints when you're a clueless newbie. In my case, I was lucky; my first trainer taught me how to drive the truck (or allowed me to learn how, anyway), and my second trainer taught me all of the technical stuff.

In any case, I'm writing this because I, too, have my issues with Werner. One of the reasons the training process was so long for me -- apart from the fact that I took PTO halfway through -- was that Werner sent me a message when I was 15 hours from completion, asking me to stay on the truck for another 40 hours because their "terminals were full," and basically promising that if I consented to stay on the truck, I would have a shot at a regional/dedicated account.

100 hours later (dispatch was in no hurry to route us to a terminal after I finished my hours), and no dice. I was put on 48 states.

The truck to which I was assigned is only 2 years old, but it looks like it's been through world war three; dents and dings everywhere, the farings crunched, the dome light popping out and hitting me in the head every time I hit a bump in the road. What's more, when I first got the truck, one of the first things I did was an air brake test, which the truck failed. Apparently, the brain trust in the shop is supposed to do inspections on all of these trucks before they're assigned, but they missed one teensy, tiny little detail -- you know, the big freaking red light and the blaring low-air alarm, which never shuts off, because the tanks never fill beyond 60 psi?

Yeah, that.

So I was stuck at the terminal for my first week. Later I would find out that I wasn't getting paid for that time, not even the pathetic $20-per-day layover Werner offers (or whatever it is).

It wasn't until two weeks later, when dispatch had failed to send me home on time (at this point, counting training and my layover at the terminal, I'd been away from home for almost two months), and I hadn't had a shower in four days because they kept giving me such tight deadlines that I was forced to sleep either at the shipper/consignee, or in random parking lots -- and dispatch wouldn't let me drive 15 miles to take a shower during the remaining two hours of my split break for that morning -- that I flew into a bit of a fit, and Werner threw me some cash for the week I'd spent in terminal purgatory.

That, by the way, is the big downside to electronic logs. It isn't that I want to cheat so much; it's just that there's very little leeway even to drive five miles from a consignee at the end of your 14 to the nearest truckstop. About the most you can do is take advantage of the system's rounding (IE. If you stop somewhere and leave at 8 minutes past the quarter hour, then you're effectively stealing 7 minutes of drive time).

I've had to do that countless times, because dispatch keeps giving me very tight assignments, despite that supposedly they can see my hours. Things like a 400 mile load assigned late at night which has to be there in the morning, when I only have 6 hours left on my 11 (for all you speedsters out there, keep in mind Werner's trucks are governed). For whatever reason, I haven't been late yet, even under the circumstances, but I keep saying that when Winter comes, they're not going to be able to assume a 65 MPH average when they assign me trips. We'll see how that pans out.

Right now, I'm sitting in a tiny little truckstop in Wisconsin, when I was supposed to be home (in PA) yesterday. My next load? A delivery picking up in Minnesota on Monday and going to Chicago on Tuesday. Chicago is ... not home, and Tuesday is ... not the previous Friday. But meh.

All of that said, and I'd be greatly surprised if anyone read this far, I don't think Werner is a terrible place to get your initial experience. The wireless logs are a PITA, but the one upside about them is that you learn #### quick all the ins-and-outs of the federal hours-of-service regulations. Plus, you get to make sarcastic remarks over the qualcomm to the Logs Dept when the computer has a hiccough. I enjoy that part of it, when I can.

The pay is crap, though they do (with the notable exception, for me, of today) generally keep you running if you demonstrate that you understand the log system and aren't -- as half the Werner drivers I see seem to be -- perpetually serving or under the threat of serving a suspension for log violations.

Werner also seems to be on a real push to cut costs, which is understandable in the current economic climate, but there's a point after which frugality becomes greed*. Yesterday, they decided to implement a new policy; from now on, if you go more than 8% out-of-route, you get written up. Fine and dandy. One problem: their computer system is bugged.

No sooner had I read the initial message announcing the new policy, than I got another message demanding to know why I was out-of-route. I happened to be following their silly computer-generated directions to the letter last night, so I called Dispatch to say WTF. It turns out, their computer system told almost every single Werner driver last night that he/she was out of route. I don't know why, but I suspect it's because some genius programmed the thing to calculate the out-of-route tolerance based on paid miles, not on assigned routing.

Whatever the case may be, their computer-generated directions are often idiotically inefficient, so I don't (and won't) follow them verbatim for every trip; as I told dispatch, if the choice is between delivering on time and slavishly following the computer's recommendation to do things like take back roads all the way across freaking Indiana, then it's no choice at all. The most direct route isn't always necessarily the most fuel-efficient, and it's often not the fastest or the safest, either.

And frankly, I'm already shivering in my sleep because of their no-idle policy, so I think I'm doing my part in the name of fuel efficiency.

On the other hand, if you assume a 7 MPG average, and a cost per gallon of ~$3.50, then I'm actually getting paid less than half of what the fuel costs (and I know Werner gets discounts, but whatever). It's no wonder Werner's so anal about fuel; fuel's worth twice as much as their drivers are.

I'm outta here as soon as I find another job. I've already been nosing around a bit in my off time, and I may put out some apps if and when I finally get home. No company will be paradise, but there's a reason that, out of the hundreds of Werner drivers I've met, I can count on my fingers the number of drivers who've been with Werner for more than three years.

* - I wanted to link to Werner's Third Quarter earnings with the word "greed," but I don't have enough posts.

 

Sorry about your experience ... BUT ... the post was well written ... and I did have to laugh

 

wow!....#### werner....

 

You don't need to waste your tyime driving w/them clowns..

You may have a promising career as a comedy writer!

Good post,confirms what I have often thought about that company.I was once at a truck stop where about 5-6 Werner drivers were lined up to order food at the Wendy's..What a effing collection of mutants!

W.e
E.mploy
R.etards
N.o
E.xperience
R.equired

I give them a wide berth on the highway too.You are never safe whern one of them is within a mile of you.They will do anything.

Whenever I see one of their trucks,I go into a state of hyper-awareness!

Good luck to you..

 

later dude and trucked up are both pretty good writers.

 

AFTERSHOCK,i go out of my way to read your posts,u always entertain and am straight-forward w/ your replies.YOU tell it like it is.I have a new HERO.

 

Really?!
I'm flattered.
YeS I am.
I just hope you don't go out of route,
too far.

Well, ...... SOMEtimes I beat around the bush, ....... just a tad.

YuP!
But if I can't,
I make it up.

WhO?!
I think I'm jealous.

 

LAUGH while u can folks.Because u'll all be getting old soon and the only laughing u'll do then is when u float that fart and mess ur khaki's. Me i'm going to laugh until i fall dead.