Can a company mandate using sleeper status during 10 Hour Break

Not at all. Your scenario is covered by the following:

This has been posted by various LEO members on here as being an adequate response to the issue of brief interruptions of sleeper-berth/off-duty status as the same principle applies.

 

Besides if you are on paper anything under 7 minutes and you don't have to change duty status.

 

Incorrect. For anything under 15 minutes you still have to show the change of duty status, but you just "flag" it. That means you still draw the vertical line then make a note in remarks for location and time spent, i.e., Chicago, Il 9 minutes.

In theory, a driver should add those up during the day and make sure they're accounted for in their 11/14/70, but I doubt anyone does. I never did.

 

Huh, I have been doing that w/o even knowing I was supposed to. It just makes sense, but I have never gave those 'flags' any time value. It would have to in 3 minutes increments, or the math would get too complicated. '0.05' for every three minutes.

 

Who are these people that drive a truck and not know how to log?

 

What I have always done in these cases is log the activity that took up the greatest amount of time during that period and simply flagged and annotated the other. For instance I'm driving along and stop to do a load check then use the restroom. The load check took 5 minutes and the restroom break took 8. So I log 15 minutes off duty and annotate the 5 minute load check on the flag line. The way the DOT has it written it sounds like they want you to log the entire thing as driving still and simply flag both activities but that makes no sense to me since you only spend 2 minutes of that 15 minute block actually driving. *shrug* At any rate the guidance does use the word "may" before all the important verbiage which suggests that it isn't required to ONLY flag short stops like this, so it does leave some wiggle room for the driver. But then it also leaves it for the DOT to nail you for form/manner or falsification too.