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

Johnstown? Is it the one that you have to run the hilly two lane for a long while to get to it? If so, they had onsite parking years ago.

 

Got quite in here,at the yard taking a reset,was a really good week.
Not to get political, but can say,this year has been better than anything the last 4 had to offer.

 

I can..i’m on track to make $11k more this yr thsn last

 

I’ve read through most of John Boy’s thread about Abilene. It seems as if most of the drivers have to contend with a lot of miscommunication or lack thereof each day.

How do you guys deal with that? I get the occasional miscommunication. That’s trucking. However, unless I’m misinformed, it does seem like Abilene has turned into a cluster in the past five years. It didn’t seem nearly as bad as when John Boy started this thread.

Is this because of the Knight/Swift acquisition ?

 

Well, there's two parts to that answer.

The first part is: The stuff you quoted is directly the fault of the shipper. The shipper is sending bad information to Abilene. If the shipper says "We got three loads, come pick 'em up", it's not really Abilene's fault that the shipper actually has only one load.

The second part is: Abilene has always had issues with communication, even before they were bought by Knight-Swift. I started before we were bought, and I can't say that that particular aspect has gotten worse since the acquisition. It's always been one of the sore points among the drivers. Or, to put it another way, it sucked back then, too.

Also keep in mind that we usually use this thread to grouse and vent and entertain our fellow truckers with amusing trucker stories. So this thread skews negative. I generally don't do as much posting when everything is ticking over like it should. Things have been pretty smooth for me over the past two weeks, and so I haven't had as much to say.

 

I’ve been doing this over 30 years now, when I was at Abilene 11 years ago it was by far the worst operations department I have ever dealt with.

 

I started this thread 12.5 years ago. The first thing I saw on my first dispatched was how dysfunctional operations was. I left almost 2 years ago, and I can honestly say, my last load I ever did in order to drop the truck off was a total fluster cluck. Nothing changed in the 10 years I was there. I just learned how to go with the flow. It was a joke prior to the buyout and a joke after. It was very obvious that prior management ran the company into the ground. The previous group of clowns all got fired, then the other group of clowns from Phoenix showed up one day and continued the trend.

 

I came out of the house last week to short haul from wytheville to newnan, ga then scrap bales of paper from duluth to ashland then a smyrna run yesterday a lancaster off the yard then to jersey today for a short hop to DE which Im unloading now and then ikea to norfolk after this. Put my app in with IRT, Ive I had it with vans….I normally have a just roll with it mentality but my patience is honestly worn out. Ive done food grade tank before but couldn’t get back into it when I came here almost 7 yrs ago due to being out of the seat otr wise driving locally in the oil and gas industry. I screamed at my DM before I went home over that fiasco with the family dollar load, I apologized next day though. I only stay here due to Volvos being used cuz I hate freightliners with the dt 12 tranny which most other places use.

 

The miles are there. I have a friend that use to work at Abilene that’s been there about 6 years. Shout out to @Redtwin, has every bit of detail about the job. I was approved to go there a couple years ago, but when Abilene found out they bribed me with a raise and I stayed.

 

I need to call back to see if approved, my yearly physical with the VA is coming up near the end of the month and told the recruiter Id be ready then because I can just stay out my normal five weeks after on onboarding. Been following their thread. Im too stressed out anymore here, this place makes the Marine Corps look like disneyland anymore to me, lol! We lost a lot of good loads it seems…