Clarification on doing nothing OTR

I never sat pulling reefers without being paid detention.

 

I've never heard of a month with 34 days... I'm guessing this poster was maybe exaggerating a bit, or maybe he/she was just an idiot. Either way, that scenario is unlikely to happen to anyone who works for a decent company and is willing to work. That means being willing to take the freight that no one else wants without complaint. You know the expression, "the squeaky wheel gets the grease?" Not in trucking. In trucking, the squeaky wheel just gets thrown out and replaced.

That said, if you are waiting for a load, you will be sitting in your truck. Unless you choose to put yourself in a hotel. But if you are not on scheduled home time, and you have hours to run, then you better be in your truck. If you are getting repairs that take more than a day, then company will likely either get you a spare truck or put you in a hotel. Most repair facilities will not allow you to sleep in the truck while they work on it, for insurance reasons. Many company terminals have bunk rooms for this reason.

As suggested by @Chinatown, you should never sit for days without getting paid detention. If you sit for ten days without getting paid, something is wrong.

 

Actually, I just had that argument that that might be a smart thing to do at our company when we switch over to eLogs. I see it being entirely possible our drivers running out of hours inside of an hour from the office. I thought it might be an idea that once a month one driver gets half pay to be on standby.

He never said it was sequential.

 

There are times you sit between loads. It happens and it's boring. Usually a good company spots you layover day pay.

However, to take the original example, that Swift driver ran for 24 days. If he had to sit in order to set up good 600+ mile a day loads, he ran 14,000+ miles. Should make any driver happy for the month. If he didn't get good loads, might be time to move on.

Keep your eye on the big picture.

 

Sometimes you might get unlucky and go from place to place that has little freight, and so sit a day before they can get you going again.
It happens sometimes.

It sounds like that driver just had a string of bad luck, or he wasn't doing his job very well and was let sit on purpose.

 

When I started at the worst part of the recession Michigan and Florida were notorious for being places you'd go and not be able to get back from.

Florida is still something of a net importer. Food, construction materials, hard goods, material goes in. What comes out? Oranges? Most companies would make you sit in Jacksonville for a few days until they found a load in Alabama or Georgia worth the deadhead back up.

 

I've had a Deadhead from South Florida to Arkansas, over 800 miles. Some companies may let their drivers sit, others will deadhead to where ever there is freight. I've never sat because of no loads.