Linehaul drivers. How many hours a night do you spend waiting?

I used to haul Alpo out of Allentown.

The warehouse is full of it. Literally a acre or two of Alpo wall to wall yea high on pallets.

What do they do? Shove 48 pallets double stacked 9 high onto my trailer.

What does the stupid reciever do? Throw down small wood and make me stack 5 high. That takes a certain amount of time.

You would think Alpo will load the #### things 4 high 5 layers on small wood and airbag the whole thing sides and center all the way down. But nooo.... /table pounding rant.

 

As long as you put up with it, it stays the same or gets worse. There's a line haul job here that works you on the docks while waiting for the backhaul. Yeah it's still open.

 

Mine wasn't super tedious .. just excessively time consuming. It was a run that no P&D driver wanted to do, so they usually pawned it on the last line driver in. You go to the local talc plant with an empty 48 ft trailer and pick up 44k lbs of product.

It wasn't a terrible run IF you were the only one there. But usually when I showed up at 8 AM during their prime time. Six trucks ahead of me times 30-45 minutes to load per truck, divided by two forklift drivers if you were lucky. Three hour waits were common. What was asinine was that my house was literally three blocks away.

This was one of the few only times where I used my second logbook to falsify my hours just to get out of that run.

 

We always without fail tried to preload cement late in the day because 3 am rolls around awful quick and we need to be there at 2 am to crank the rigs and get em warm.

 

Is just part of the game really if your doing deliveries to big warehousing centres like Walmart, Cosco, Albertsons the only way around it is try tanker, pneumatic and possibly flat bed. Switching companies and doing the same thing will only leave you with the same issues with just a different colored hood.

 

I've always been local so the idea of sitting at a shipper/receiver without pay is foreign to me. How are they NOT paying you guys?

 

I’ve heard everything from “it takes time to bill the customer for the time” or “well we didn’t see in and out times signed on the bills to confirm it” etc etc. I’ve even had them signed and sent and they still came up with an excuse.

 

The stupid plant where I pick up from. I once filled out the "time in" spot just for personal reference on how long I was gonna sit there. The person working the dock scribbled it out and said those times are no longer mandatory for their paperwork.

I never figured it out or could care less since I was being paid regardless. Then I noticed a big sign stating detention would not be paid if those blocks weren't filled out on the original BoL.

The time block is the last thing you fill out. Some of their staff members will hold on to the BoL as you are signing it and then yank it out from underneath you before you can fill in the time slots. Either they are very scheißty or they are telling the truth about detention times being paid automatically and the blocks no longer required to be filled out.

 

We company drivers get bupkis. Nothing. The company probably gets it alllll.

One holiday christmas came around. They preposition my flatbed near Texarkana. Nothing much going on. They issued me so much money it was about twice my normal income for my trouble and a hotel room to boot.

It was a strange time. The whole country shut down in that area for the holidays. I kept my tractor trailer in a very old truckstop in town on the Texas side and I think the staff were more than happy to serve one, two or three of us all day or half the night. nothing moved. The fuel line was dead quiet. I probably spent a few dozen dollars in quarters in the old coin op arcade games there.

A very profitable week.

Now. Arrive at a meat plant with a reefer. You have a 2000 mile run waiting soon they load. Because it's a custom order into 550+ boxes to the floor in -20 trailer chop chop chop off the kill floor, pack pack pack it will be the third day before you are called to come get the trailer. By then you should be fully rested and bright eyed and bushy tailed to GO.

Pay for waiting!? HA. Non. Git.

Pull into a walmart warehouse DC say Denver. Sit 14 hours waiting for a dock. finally get one. Decline to pay the gouging 70 dollars for the lumper. (Late 90's) wait 9 more hours finally unloaded. Since you sat in the small break room with 20 other unwashed drivers all that time you are too exhuasted to drive or anything.

Pay? HA. You should give thanks you saved your Bosses 70 dollars in costs. You already got whatever it is paying by mile to get there. Stop complaining.

Americold, Arlington Texas. Drop trailer. Go somewhere in Dallas bobtail. Find yourself some entertainment followed by a hotel stay. Qualcomm will tell you you are loaded and ready, go get it. Maybe sometime next day.

Pay? nope.

Detention? HAHAHAHAHA!

It costs nothing to wait, wait some more and sleep when you are tired of waiting so you can get up and wait some more. wait wait wait.

You learn patience of Job in this life. and pretty much get raped financially when you consider a 1000 mile work week compared to a nice 3500 mile no waiting week you had the week before last.

 

But the question was for LTL linehaul drivers...

I'm waiting right now, but it's because the government says I need a half hour break. Other than that, my current bid has very little waiting. I've been on bids that averaged and hour or more waiting per night, and been an open bid driver where it varies between running hard with no wait time to up to 2 hours occasionally. Luckily we can go on the dock after a half hour and get paid if we so choose.