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

Im at 450k now, but the problem has been there for a while. I found 4 shop tickets just from 2018 where I raised the issue, but its much older than that.

 

Increase the Wytheville fleet by 100?. I didnt think there was that much load increase company wide much less just out of Wytheville. Considering how long drivers are sitting waiting to be assigned loads now, another 100 trucks would just prolong that wait time.

Adding more trucks isnt going to solve the bottleneck in dispatch/load planning.

 

I was just curious. Maybe they're trying to decide if they want the Knight logo or the Swift logo on the new trucks.

 

Here's no.2 now on the yard. They are taking over.

 

100 more trucks by the end of the year according to Keith (recruiter in wytheville office). Want to double the loads for Gatorade. When more room is needed, they will dig out the bank and expand the lot.
* I was told all of this in orientation 7/2
The wytheville office is going to get big like Richmond. You know they do orientation in wytheville now correct? If not, yea they do. I was in the first one.
We going to be, big timing super trucker company now lol...j/k

 

K.S.A. transport lol

 

I took the advice you gave me a long time ago. Took a job pulling containers.

 

My California adventures continue!

When last we left our intrepid hero, he had been told to drive 2.5 hours from Redding to Woodland to pick up an unspecified load. Which then went poof, leaving our hero in a Pilot in Woodland with nothing to show for his driving day except 2.5 hours of drive time with no load.

HQ's solution to this problem was to give me a deadhead from Redding to Colton, which accounted for my drive from Redding to Woodland since Woodland was on the route from Redding to Colton. So that problem was solved.

Unfortunately, they gave me the deadhead move too late in the day to give me a chance of making it to Colton before my hours ran out. So I spent the night at the TA in Buttonwillow, and let me tell you folks, if you find yourself in or near Buttonwillow, you owe it to yourself to stop by the Willow Ranch restaurant (conveniently located next to the TA) and get a Plow Boy sandwich with a side of garlic fries. Holy poot. Roast beef, pastrami, bacon, onion rings, grilled jalapenos, and provolone cheese, all on a sub roll. It is amazing.

Anyhow, got up this morning 3.5 hours away from Colton and headed in. Rolled in at 12:30 Richmond time, 9:30 local. Dropped my reefer as per the 'DMT' instructions on my deadhead move and bobtailed over to the 7-11 for my free slurpee.

Couple hours go by, and then they give me a load assignment: Grab the reefer you just dropped on the Colton yard, drive to Leprino Foods in Lemoore, CA, and grab some stuff going back to Richmond. No appointment time. First come, first serve, anytime today, 7/11/18.

First we note that I drove past Lemoore on my way from Redding to Colton. Lemoore is about halfway between the two. So I spent the afternoon driving back along the exact route I just came down, hauling the same empty reefer I'd just hauled down that route. I am bemused.

Arrive at Leprino Foods with 3 hours to go on my 14, and it's ticking down. If you've never been to Leprino Foods, they're a dairy plant and their shipping office is up on the third floor, with the only access for drivers being the stairs on the outside of the building. I mount the stairs and make my way to the shipping office.

Nobody there.

So I wait. And I wait. And I wait some more. Nothing happened, and lots of it.

After half an hour of waiting, I walked a quarter-mile back to the security shack at the entrance to see if they could get ahold of a real, live human being in the shipping department. They did, and I walked another quarter-mile back to the stairs.

At which point I discovered that (A) the pick-up number on my load assignment is wrong; and (B) even if it was the right shipping number, they don't have any scheduled shipments today. So nothing is ready to be shipped. This guy is literally the only human being there in the shipping department at 5:00pm local on a Wednesday, and he hasn't heard anything about any shipments going to Richmond.

I make a phone call to dispatch. I tell them we need a different pick-up number. Starts with a "5". Dispatch gives me a number that starts with "5". It's 10-digits long. It is not the pick-up number. It's the phone number to the shipping office where I am now standing.

Dispatch suggests that I should call the number and get the pick-up number from whoever answers the phone. I inform dispatch that if I were to call the number, the guy who would answer the phone is the guy I'm currently talking to face-to-face at the window, and we've already established that he has no idea what load I need. Dispatch says that all he can do is send an email to the after-hours team and see what they say.

Guy at the shipping office says that the next full shift where they have shipments planned starts tomorrow at 7:00am local, i.e. 10:00am by my clock. So I am now parked in a rinky-dink truck stop in Hanford, and we will see what tomorrow has in store.

 

I don’t miss the complete dis function of Abilene dispatch. You would think a company that size could get their preverbal poop together.

 

Eh. 95% of the time everything goes smoothly. Instances like these are the exception in my experience.

The days where I get a Gatorade run from Wytheville to Indy are much more common, but don't make for nearly as many amusing trucker anecdotes.