Millis OTR journal

Dang, Peggi is ignoring me or something. Trying to gather documents to verify my last three years of employment, a really difficult thing when you are self-employed in China. Guess the trucking industry will just assume I'm hiding a prison term. Despite lots of evidence to the contrary, just not sparkly government forms.

@MIT Yeah, I have no idea how that will work, but I've heard that quite a bit, that more flexibility will just be exploited by the companies, but I would think it would be a good thing to figure out a way to return to when drivers had more control over their time so they weren't forced to drive when they didn't feel safe (once that 14 starts you can't reset unless you stop and rest for another 10, not very flexible if you wake up, get going, deliver, and then just need a couple hour nap, but that is a couple hours burning through your 14). But I don't know anything yet, just someone looking in from the outside trying to learn as much as I can before hopefully getting in at MTI.

 

This makes me think of my current employer, the daughter of the owner and her husband, they're so unbelievably tight with money when it comes to taking care of their employees it's unbelievable. The way they reward themselves is ridiculous though, you guys should see it. Week long vacations in Vegas, Cancun, the Bahamas, deep sea fishing off the east coast, big game hunting in Newfoundland (that all happened last year) a hunting property in southern Ohio (with gas rights that probably pay for all of it), a lake house that wasn't nice enough so they built a new one (same year), property on a fairway in Florida, two more houses in Ohio, oceanfront property in North Carolina... it goes on and on. I've trained dozens of temps who knew that if they stuck with it they had a full time job, just to have them not show up Monday, or the following day, or following lunch! Whaddya know nobody wants to carry steel for a living, especially for their wages! Unfortunately the parts don't toss themselves onto a pallet after the plasma machines cut them. Cheap, cheap, cheap. They're in for a rude awakening when their 16 year employee (me) hands them a 2 weeks notice as soon Millis gives me a new date to start in Trenton. They're going to wonder why they can't keep an operator, well maybe cut the ridiculous excess spending the slightest bit and maybe divert like 1/10 of 1% to the laborers who make you that money lol!

 

Well they sure as hell don't regulate trucking over here. Trucks tipping over, barely moving at crawling speed, doing whatever the hell they want. I have a driver's license here, too. And yeah, everything is pretty loose here. Not much in the way of paperwork that would be helpful to an American truck company.

 

What have they done that has you so upset at them? What has changed? I've heard more than one story about O/Os that start with Landstar, get their own authority, run like that for awhile only to go back to Landstar. Or the ones that bounce back and forth between Landstar and Mercer.

 

Attitude

 

To hear a lot of these drivers. talk, they'd love it to be like that here. Zero regulation. Unsafe trucks. Unsafe drivers. No HOS rules. No anything that might keep somebody from making a dollar. Because it would be totally wise(and safe) to have a couple million 80,000 pound trucks and their driver doing whatever the hell they wanted over here. If they eve manage to achieve that here that's when I'll go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere and have everything shipped via Amazon to me so that I don't have to risk dying.