Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

I am getting a 56 on this run, won't need a 34 for a while.

 

If it's one thing we don't have to deal with here, it's office people. Can't even get them to answer the phone sometimes. A few days ago I was wondering if the company had folded and noone bothered to tell me as multiple calls went unanswered.

 

If I never pull another reefer it will be too soon. Those guys that prefer reefer just ain't right...or they get hourly pay.

 

Maybe I've just been lucky, but I haven't really noticed much of a difference between running reefer vs. dry van. Neither one seems to be particularly much of a hassle vs. the other.

 

The delays in getting loaded/unloaded are always greater with reefer in my experience, and I am not just talking about broker BS. I have had long delays with our regular reefer customers too.

Just recently I had a hook load that wasn't ready until 11hrs after the appt time. Not being the sort of person who can sleep on command when not tired I was awake for the whole day then had to run overnight to make the delivery appt time. Making my next load pickup on time meant staying awake for 30hrs straight. That kind of thing has never happened with dry loads.

 

Give it time, it's not if it's gonna happen it's when.

 

Yeah, but that's WalMart for you. We can request detention pay after two hours...except Wally World loads, which are allowed four hours. And they're pretty good about milking the entire four. Almost every time I wind up at a WalMart refrigerated DC, my official "time out" timestamp on the paperwork is 3:58 after my "time in".

Whenever I've run reefer to non-WalMart shippers and/or receivers, they got me loaded/unloaded just as quickly as anybody else.

I can tell you've not made many runs to the kitty litter plant in King William. Twice now I've gone there to hook a pre-loaded trailer, only to be told that it wasn't ready and it wouldn't be ready for another 12-18 hours.

 

It wasn't a Wal-Mart load, I've only had one reefer load for them and I was unloaded quickly.

I forgot about the kitty litter place, even so, my longest delay there was 6 hrs while the longest reefer was 14hrs. I don't know why we keep getting kitty litter dispatched as a drop hook. I've never known anyone from our company not have it turn into a live load.