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

The scale ticket left with the load was over 80k gross.

 

In my case the load was picked up by an OTR tractor. It's easy to figure that out as the day cabs have a different tractor number sequence. Could have been a local driver using an OTR tractor if no day cabs were available.

 

Quite possible. I know when I took the paperwork into dispatch someone at the window started looking to see where the scales were and calculating fuel burn etc. A waste of time as I had no intention of pulling it. There should have no doubt at all. That trailer had one destination and that was back to the shipper.

I dont think even a day cab could have pulled it legally as it was a few thousand over on the tandems and I doubt moving them back beyond the VA legal length would have made the tandems legal.

 

You must be union.

 

Why? is it strange that you would want to be paid for work that you do? why should you spend uncompensated time doing work that will make the driver that picks it up money? If you picked it up and ran with it that time would count against your 14, so why should a person work and not be paid?

 

I agree, but unfortunately in the industry, the norm,is not to paid for things such as this unless your union or drive for a private fleet or LTL freight company

 

This is why I put in for detention whenever I have to get a load re-worked.

 

I guess I just see it differently. Ensuring a load is legal is part of my job that I am paid for. If I have to get a load reworked 10 times it's still part of my job.

Now if truck drivers were not responsible for load weight and that was usually handled by someone else with a different job title and I was asked to get a load reworked to help out then I would expect compensation as that would be outside of the job function I was hired and paid for.

Next we are going to have drivers saying they are paid to drive a truck, not check fluids and tire pressures etc as that isn't "driving" and if the boss wants that stuff done he should pay extra for it.

 

Here's how I look at it:

I go to a shipper. They have two hours to get me loaded. If they take longer than that, I can put in for detention, right?

To me, "loaded" doesn't mean "throw crap in the trailer until it hits the doors". Otherwise they could just throw 58k in the trailer and leave me to deal with it. "Loaded" to me means "I am ready to legally roll down the road." I have my job, they have their job, and part of their job includes knowing how much freight they're putting on my trailer.

So the shipper has two hours to get my load legal.

If they get me loaded in an hour, and I'm overweight, they've got an hour left to fix it. And if it takes me 30 minutes to get to a scale, find out I'm overweight, and get back to the shipper, then they've got 30 minutes left to fix it. If they can get it fixed within 30 minutes, then they made it within the two hour limit and I'm rolling.

If it takes 'em longer than that? Then I'm putting in for detention, same as I would for any other shipper that took longer than 2 hours to get me loaded, and I'm not even gonna feel a little bit bad about it.

And if it's a pre-load? That two-hour limit has long expired as far as I'm concerned. Clock starts ticking as soon as I hook the trailer. Pre-load means I should be able to hook and roll. Last time I had to get a pre-loaded trailer reworked, it took me over 3 hours in the dock. I shoulda been in Nitro after three hours, but instead I was still sitting at the Gatorade plant waiting for them to pull their thumb outta their backside.

Abilene will at least try to pass on the detention costs to the shipper. So if enough drivers cost the shippers enough money, maybe the shippers will figure it's better in the long run to get it legal the first time. Which is a win-win for everybody.