Beep Beep Roadrunner

This guy was an owner oper ator. I didn't finish the story very well. He dropped his trailer on the yard cross ways like and had to bobtail over to the truck stop to pick up a new pigtail and airlines. Trailer was blocking the yard for about an hour.

 

If I could go back in time I would have joined RR back in the summer of 2011 instead of 2014 based on how steller 2014 was. RR changed the contract in 2015 and things have been tighter and harder for me. They have moved to a predominanty trailer pool loading system which limits those of us left with our own trailers for T2T which wouldn't be so bad if we could book our own loads. To book a load now I have to call a RR broker/agent to do it all for me and they invariably only offer rock bottom rates. They are in effect a firewall between the original broker and the owner op. So they take their hefty percentage off the top, then RR takes theirs and what you're left with is a mega fleet rate. So I turn down alot of the broker freight and wait for the T2T which can cause a guy to sit for 2-4 days between getting reloaded.

Was home all this week, asked for a reload Thursday night, they say Seattle, fine. Spent night at terminal, they call at 0300 and say they don't have enough freight so will have to wait 24 more hours for them to try again. Fridays are their #1 best days for reload so if you run an 800 -2200 mile run over the weekend and drop on Monday or Tuesday I'll be sitting til Friday again usually otherwise take some cheap broker load, half of which they advance to you which barely pays fuel plus the 5% fee they take off.

The division I'm in is called LTL which is funny, they will never send a load less than 95% truckload out of a terminal. They would rather have the owner op sit for 2-4 days while they get more inbound freight to fill the owner op's trailer.
I applied to transfer over to their Truckload Plus program and was told they are at capacity on that and hiring no more drivers for it now. Think I will call the guy back and try to transfer over to Bruenger.

 

Well it happened again, ran 800 miles up from Livermore CA to Sumner WA, drop trailer on docks 2000 Sunday night and go to bed. 0530 walking by trailer to go to restroom, check it and it is plumb full still. Talk to broker couple hours later about looking for a load, he says corporate denied me leaving the terminal. Talked to planner Monday afternoon, they went home before calling me back so called in Tuesday morning and got the voicemail left a message. Again no call before bedtime. Now I'm really upset and start heading southbound for home 800 miles. Got to the Pilot on exit 99 I5 and took a shower and decided to cool off and give them just one more chance for Wednesday. Get the call in the afternoon (had planned to leave 0100 Thursday if I did not hear from them) that they 'forgot' about me. So I come back and drop my trailer in the dock door and check back Thursday morning (today) and the trailer is still dog emtpy. Finally got rolling this afternoon for Indianapolis/Cincinatti second stop.

Will have to make some calls and decisions in the next couple weeks.