70h and almost home

I'm a former driver who is now a fleet manager for a small fleet. I still have my CDL. There's been several times where one of my drivers has run into a similar situation (even if they'd just have to take a 10 an hour from home) and I've driven my personal vehicle out to meet them, then let them drive it to the yard while I drive the truck in (I'm also on the active driver roster and in the random drug test pool). Any company that won't make accommodations for you in that situation is not worth working for.

 

Uber

 

We were team with FFE, a husband wife one. We had three missions Nationwide, one of the biggest was rescuing late loads off solos who essentially failed to do their jobs in many cases. And then hope to get that trailer into the angry account within some random deadline tossed by telephone to our dispatchers.

We have not had a load that failed to get to a angry customer on time deadline so to speak. It leads to a series of really crazy days working very hard to get that trailer in there to save the entire account. So we did good with that particular mission.

We always preferred to be in extreme trucking such as CA to NJ and return in 6 days and change because it is what we did best. But there was another mission that involved constant and never ending overnights from Memphis anywhere east of the rockies with medicine loads, maybe pain meds, cancer meds and so on so forth that were very high value and cannot be late at all. Period.

This was for us a happy time in trucking because the work was there, the payroll took care of itself generally and it did not always have a happy ending when we discover the late solos being fired sometimes.

Anyway, Im sure you are all aware of that kind of running and it's just a excellent use of a team that can get it done.

We always enjoy hearing "From the other side" points of views and experiences from same, even though I have a history of crossing swords with dispatch now and then.