Crete Carrier Corporation - Lincoln, Ne.

Does anyone know if Shaffer closed their shop along with the terminal in New Kingstown, Pa?

 

I would question your Fleet Manager not the dispatchers. I was told the Fleet Manager has the power to get you home, whether its one or two loads or even switching with another driver, its there responsiblilty.. Switch Terminals if you have to, thats what I would do and thats what they say in orientation. That way your not fighting with different dispatchers just your so called boss. DRIVE SAFE

 

Wow, I enjoyed reading all 12 pages of this board. Got some laughs and some good tips here and there. Knoded my head a few times too.

I've been on the blue side for 8-9 months now. Have to agree that AMS bites the big weenie on maintenance. First truck I was assigned to had the mud flaps rusted off. Took them several hours to get that taken care of.
The truck also has so much water in the air lines I constantly lost pressure. Foolish me, I didn't bother checking it as I thought it was serviced before I was assigned the truck. Brakes locked up on me twice. I did drain the tank but it took several hours in nowhere Ohio.
Had constant problems with that truck and I was always late because it kept breaking down. Took it into the Illinois shop and sat there for 16 hours while 4 mechs worked on it. Not a one of them had "seen a truck with so many problems." No I used to be a mech in the military. A mech diagnosis problems. All 4 of these people (and the rest of the shops) are parts changers. Their montra is "don't work, change it out." That's not a mechanic. Oh, and don't tell AMS you know something about a truck either, you know nothing about "their" trucks.

As for home time. It's like pulling teeth. Since I have been with the company I have had 3 days off. Being out for so long is mainly by choice, but when I want to go home, I want to go home. I give a MONTHS notice with reminders at 15 days, 10 days, and 5 days. STILL they say they don't have my notice. BS!!! It's in the qualcomm. I have the day and time I sent it. Then I get home late and they want me out early.
If you work for CCC or Shaker you need to be tuff and stand up for what was promised to you when you hired on. It's a contract, you agreed to work under the terms of employment offered. Offer+Acceptance+exchange of something of value (paycheck) = Contract.

Now I will admit that since Shaker was absorbed into CCC and we are for all intent and purposes the same company. Things have gotten worse. O'le Tonny Boy is royally screwing things up while trying to save a buck. Now I will admit I hate change if it adversally affects me. I loath change that adcverslly affects me and I don't know about it till it's too late. Like my days off be cut down or I no longer have one dedicated bad dispatcher to put up with. Now I have 48 bad dispatchers to put up with. None of whom talk to each other.

Here are my last few loads. See how this works for you. This is general area just in case "others" are reading. Hey Oster, how's you?

Load from SC to CA in 8 days. I figured I could slow a little and do it in 5. Nope, BOL says no early delivery. Ok, no big deal. 2500 miles isn't a shabby week, but not great either.

Get to CA and have to dead head down a hundred miles for load to OH on Friday afternoon. Get to pick up and find out we pay for pallets. This pisses me off, that could have been included in dispatch information so I could a withdraw. Send in for ComCheck auth. Message back "contact ops for auth from now on." Just dandy, wasted an hour for that now I waste more time. Finally on the road and hit heavy L.A. Traffic. 3 hours to travel 8 miles. Pull in for night and truck stop is full. Risk a ticket for obeying HOS rules.

Make it to OH and drop. No preplan for my truck. Get a 34 hour restart and told to pick up at same place I dropped at. The trailer next to the one I just carried out empty that was running. That was the one I was now picking up. It was loaded and ready to go but took them a day to figure it out.

Took that load to IL. Dropped it. Sent my reminder message to get me home (6 day notice because of weekend) Next load to GA. I work it out and I have a 14 hour drive, I have 15 to make it in. Load picks up at 1800 and my 14 is up at 1800. Tell them I can't do it. Message back "it's loaded." Tell them to set up a repower and I'll take it. No problem.

Get to the shipper and the trailer is damaged. This sets me back. Tell them if they haven't gotten a repower set up they need to get it done because I can't make it. No response, typical. Pull in for the night, do my calculations. I'm a half hour short of making the delivery. Message again with a recomendation to repower with no response back.
Keep in mind this is a critical load. Failure to deliver on time is a service failure.
I get up and send in again that I can't do this on time. Message back "when can you deliver?" I tell them I'll be there when they open the next morning. No reply back. Next morning I get up at 2am and arrive at 5am and the receiver is closed, they don't open till 6. Send the message to that fact.
Dispatch says "keep me posted". I sit and wait until 0630 and nothing. I go back and look at the sign. Tiny print "Saturday deliveries by appointment only."
I fire off a message asking if anyone contacted this "Major Client" we have that I would be arriving on Saturday and reset my appointment. The answer was no when I was told that the CSR would be in at 0830 and he would ask.
Told them I have to be home because this is for a medical appointment. Said I would run this up to Atlanta so that someone else could bring it in. Yet, amazing enough there isn't any freight until Monday.
So here I sit with another 34 hour restart in under 2 weeks. Knowing I had to be home for over a month for a medical appointment. Yet, I am in an area with no freight.

Now here is the kicker to all of this. I normally run 2700 to 3200 miles a week. More if I get a carry over on the weekend. I run hard (legally) and rarely take time off. I just like driving and it's a personal choice. I have no problems staying out 3 or 4 months at a time. This is a good company if you can stand being out that long.

Now even with all it's flaws. Maintenance, strict log rules, lack of communication from the company down to us, lack of getting us home on time. It's still a decent company if you know how to play the game. You simply have to get a hold of someone in upper management so they can 3-2-1 (3 doctors, 2 hours, to remove 1 boot) the people giving you problems. I've done it before and problem was solved. Now I will have to do it again to resolve this problem.

I don't like doing it because it's not supposed to be my job to make sure I get home on time. I did my part, I told them and even reminded them. It's their job to make sure it happens.

Here's how I see it. We as drivers have to make sure the company does what it says it's going to do per the hiring contract. If we don't then the company says to themselves they can walk all over us. E.g. CR England, Swift, and the rest. If we want a good company we have to make them uphold their end of the bargain. Document everything and hold them to it. You back down and soon we have only have worse companies to choose from.

 

What these companies apparently do not realize is that in order to do our jobs proficiently, we need the support and backing of the company or delivery is jeopardized. Instead, we seem to be shut out as if we are some sort of a nuisance whenever we need something out here on the road.

A professional race car driver cannot finish a race if not for a reliable pit crew… meanwhile our maintenance shops are scratching their heads wondering why the tire is flat only on the bottom of the wheel! Dispatch doesn’t want you making phone calls because they claim that they can’t take the time to answer individual calls from drivers… yet, when you send in a message via/qual-comm it takes several hours and sometimes not until the next day to get an answer.

Communication is the worse that I have ever seen in any industry.

 

Yep company's get these big fleets rolling but don't want to pay to hire the right people to operate them or enough of them.

In most cases they just want the driver to do as they are told and Federal HOS rules were between you and safety and not to interrupted them from their bull session with the other office workers who are as ill equipped to do anything more then send emails back and forth on a computer as they were.

I once got a msg from the fleet at IDC to use the qualcomms only because there was to many phone calls and then got a lecture about the cost of long qualcomm msgs and not to send so many. Yet if you used the abbreviations they had in the drivers manual the DM would say they could not understand your msgs.

 

Are there any thoughts on Hunt Transportation..Crete's flatbed division?

 

Not that I know of. They need to, that shop is a good waste of parking space!! I don't think they closed the terminal either. I think that's where they run the NE regional...Only the National fleet moved to Lincoln, I think...
(something I try not to do much, don't want to wear out what few functioning brain cells I have left)

 

The only thing I know about Hunt, they are going through the same freight slow-down that everyone else is going through at the 'Crete' family of companies. I know they don't pay as good as the van/reefer division, but at least they aren't dispatched out of the Lincoln office like Crete/Shaffer are now. They handle all of their own dispatch through Omaha (I think that is where their office is)

 

I read through the majority of this thread and thought that most of the comments were honest and forthright. I questioned the ones that painted Crete as "the devil in disguise" and, I equally questioned the ones that painted Crete as "the land of milk and honey".
I worked for Crete for 2 years and had a mixed experience with them.

The Good: Crete was an improvement over my former company. As soon as I started running with Crete, my paychecks improved dramatically. During the time I was with Crete, they usually kept me running steady... very little downtime. Most of the time, I was paid detention for delays at shippers and customers... depending on who the shipper or customer was.

The bad: While Crete may be better than many of the other big trucking companies, make no mistake, they are still a big trucking company with a "profit by any means" mindset. The dispatchers are pressured to manipulate the drivers and the terminal managers care about whether your truck is moving or not... period. The company pays plenty of lip service in regard to driver safety, quality of life, and hometime, but the rhetoric of the company rarely reflected the reality. Getting hometime was often like pulling teeth and I, for the most part, did NOT feel like a valued employee as much as a piece of meat. I have long since accepted that the trucking life is a demanding and challenging one, and that there are no "perfect" companies out there. But contrary to some of the posts I've read on this thread, I wanted to point out that anyone who goes to Crete expecting a "blissful liberation" is going to be in for a rude awakening.

The Ugly: At least a couple of Crete's terminal shops are in major need of a purging and cleansing. Marietta, GA and Wilmer, TX were the two worst in my experience. The quality of work and length of waiting time in the shops there were downright unacceptable. I left Crete in December of '07, and it appears that many of their trucks need to be retired and replaced. I heard increasing grumbling among many drivers about the condition of their equipment. I, ultimately, left Crete because I went through 4 trucks in the space of a year. Each one seemed to be worse than the last.

I realize that my experience with Crete won't reflect that of all former and current drivers, but I thought I'd give an honest account of my view from the cab. Crete is not a terrible company, but I'd take any post which paints them as "great" with a grain of salt.