A new chapter begins and a new home for the Morehouse/fcc orphans

You can always patrol the roads for any unlucky critter that met their fate and make your own— it’s cheaper that way and at least you eliminate the mystery meat factor

 

That’s still mystery meat. Mystery why someone would eat it.

 

I'm glad you said that lol because I was thinking it.

 

End of 2.5 weeks at stans Inc observations.
Pros .
Very good equipment! Well maintained and get truck washed at blue beacon every other week .
No routeing or fuel solutions and the only thing needed at the pump is your truck number that's it !
No inward cameras .
All trucks are kw t680s no less than 4 years old with espar heaters , electric apu and optimized idle , arctic fox fuel heaters and high end interiors with fridge and dinette table and 360 degree passenger seat ..lots of storage and no prison mattress .
Top speed based on mpg and idle time runs from 67 mph to 72 mph and very easy to stay at 70 mph .
Dam good pay and benefits and they will keep you busy with most of it being drop and hook at jack links plants whare stans has priority.
If you live near a Jack links plant you'll be home every 5 to 7 days with 2 to 3 days off .
CON s ...
You are on your own for a place to keep the truck when home .
Forget about that getting paid for downtime for bad roads because they will weasel out of it saying no other trucks were shut down in that area ...even though ya got off before things became a problem.and couldn't find a place to park .
Dispatch here isn't communicative with a reactive rather than proactive approach to things ...juvenile dispatch that's never run the road .
Dam good job with unbeatable benefits if ya can deal with the negatives .
I'll stay and hope dispatch gets better .

 

Oh and merry Christmas everyone !

 

Merry Christmas to you too Brad! Glad the new gig is working out for you.

 

Thank you !

 

####, I guess the next 5 days are gonna be killer!

 

I know I'm late in response to you, but thank you for answering this. I read your post but didn't have time to respond to it, but I actually thought of your post last week, last Thursday night I think it was. Where that big snow storm hit Minnesota and North Dakota and it was one of those storms that started during the early evening hours in North Dakota and kept going until the early afternoon the next day. But the storm was hitting basically the whole state of North Dakota and most of Minnesota as well and was just going to rage all night long.

I was coming from Minnesota on I94 trying to head up to Grand Forks. I made it 20 miles east of Fargo and the roads got very bad, very quickly with terrible visibility. Inside the city limits of Fargo things didn't really get better either. I don't know if I even saw a single plow truck out and about, the winds were blowing snow everywhere onto the road too. I was running it at 35 MPH for the last 20 miles with the 4 ways on, and the cars weren't passing me either (some trucks did, they weren't going much faster than me though). This was around 10pm at night.

I knew right away when the roads changed quickly from good to bad 20 miles east of Fargo that I wasn't attempting to make it to Grand Forks, so I knew I just had to make it to Fargo to park for the night, appointments be ###### we could just reschedule no problem. But sure enough I saw those poor XPO guys running, and I'm 99% sure none of them were driving to find a safe place to park because the storm has just recently started and XPO management knew #### well that the storm was going to continue all night long into the early afternoon hours the next day. Why would you even have you guys come into work and start driving when you knew #### well #### was going to get bad?

And by the way the temps got into the negative digits that night before windchill, -8 before windchill was the lowest it got I think. How long does it for a driver to freeze to death in rural and spread out North Dakota (yes even on I94 and I29 it's still rural and still very spread out) in -8 temps before windchill if the truck crashes due to the roads and inclement weather and the engine cuts off in the Middle of Nowhere North Dakota?

#### XPO management for putting their drivers lives in danger, if they're making the drivers run against their will. That's incredibly stupid to drive all night long during those big Upper Midwest snowstorms that last 12 - 36 hours straight and cover basically the entire states during the duration of the snowstorms. There's no way to even drive out of those storms, you're just putting lives in danger and equipment at heavy risk for no reason (well, I guess management has to worry about their bonuses or something, human lives be ######, pieces of ####). And yes, I drive the Upper Midwest and out West all the time, I know all about snow and how to drive in winter conditions. There's a fine line between freight has to move during the winter in these snowy northern states and just being plain reckless.

I used to work at Estes doing local work, I had to explain the difference between a pre trip and a trip plan to the P&D manager. The manager asked me why I would usually take 5 minutes to sit in the truck whenever I came back to the terminal to drop off a loaded trailer and pick up an empty (or a preloaded) trailer for my next trip. I told him because I had to trip plan. He said but you're supposed to do your pre trip before you start your day? I told him:

"I didn't say pre trip, I said TRIP PLAN. There's a difference."

Moron looked at me all confused and I had to explain to him, my boss lol, what the difference was between pre tripping, and trip planning was. I didn't know my way around the city yet and had not memorized the truck restrictions on the highways and roads, so for each new place that they were sending me to I had to reference my atlas and then use google maps satellite view/google maps warehouse reviews to find the correct entrances/final mile directions to the warehouse.

The moron expected me to follow my truckers GPS blindly around the city without verifying correct truck routes and entrances BEFORE I started driving. He literally said to me "Why do you need an atlas and why do you need to verify final mile directions, when you have a truckers GPS?" And again, this was my boss.......... And of course the guy didn't have his CDL and had never so much as stepped foot into a truck in his life. He had some college degree that supposedly made him more qualified to do his job than people who had actually driven trucks before.

I tell this story because, if I had to guess it's probably management morons like I just described above who are sending their XPO drivers out to drive during their linehaul runs during the bad snowstorms against their will. Probably using the logic "Well DOT hasn't closed the roads down yet, you're good to run". The competent LTL managers all probably go to great companies like Old Dominion the first chance they get, lol.