An old man's career goes flat, Snackbar moves to open deck

Well I’ll give a quick update for anyone that cares. There have been a few changes over the last few months, with more to come I’m sure.

Now if you get a HOS violation on samsara, they shut you down (I assume without pay) for 8 days. They are taking no chances of that violation being found during a roadside inspection. Not really sure how I feel about that.

They recently announced we are going with the red white and blue colors on the new trucks, as are all the other TFI trucks. Still going with kenworths and the first 6 have the X15 Cummins. Two of them are even manuals, they are going to our glass divisions.

We have a new operations manager from Fargo. It’s supposed to be temporary but the man she replaced is very sick. The big C hit him like a ton of bricks.

The first few changes she made is no more paid parking, except for pre approved circumstances (major city deliveries, od loads). All reimbursement expenses need to be pre approved and the FM will issue a code to put on the receipt to get reimbursed.

They are tightening the belt. I hear they are also trying to clamp down on drivers buying securement gear on the road. Which looking at all the gear on the shelves in Arlington, that’s somewhat understandable. We have, without exaggeration, probably 300 2” hand ratchets on a shelf. There is a whole wall of equipment that should be distributed to drivers in need.

As for me personally I’m about as busy as one can be. I was home for 5 days around the end of April. They did a whole bunch of recall work on my truck while I was off. Injectors, connecting rod bolts, abs recall, ect.

I came out of the house and ran a wing to Canada. On the way back I got rerouted to Pa and eventually to NJ to pickup a 15’ tall container after a driver accepted the load then flaked the afternoon before pickup. Now I’m in Washington and I’ll turn and burn to Cape Canaveral, FL with a 12’9” wide waterjet machine.

 

How strict is that? Down to the second, down to the minute, down to 5 minutes?

Seems kind of ridiculous for a company to shut a driver down for 8 days if they go over their 11 hour drive time by 5 minutes or less every once in a while.

 

I’m going to bet it’s down to the second. I know they shut a driver down in Alaska when he was on his way to meet a customer. That customer was going to give him the power only trailer and fly home. They shut the driver down and that customer was rightly pissed. We won’t be seeing any more of those loads ever again.

 

I feel like theyre going to have a lot of drivers only driving like 10hrs. See how long they keep it when they start having late deliveries.

 

Glad things are working out for you, the log rule is ridiculous but hey drivers like yourself shouldn't be impacted.

You definitely got one of the better T680's, mine had numerous injector issues so you're doing well. Thanks for sharing what's going on there with us.

 

#### old habits die hard. I drove 10:53 yesterday. I was stressing that last hour once I went past Huntington. I made it to Baker City and was able to go grocery shopping. With no PC I wasn’t able to restock on my reset.

 

I've seen a couple of the red white and blue trucks for COTC . They don't look half bad to me.. saw one today pulling a maxi flatbed , nice t680 with stacks and the red white blue stripes.. I think it looks better than their old green/gray trucks or whatever they call that color