Day by day adventures of a new solo OTR driver

Contrary to the company driver side of things I've heard a lot of positive feedback from owner/ops that are leasing through Schneider from talking with them in person and reading here on the forum. Like I've said before, overall I think Schneider is a decent company with decent benefits and some good people, but if you are a company driver the location you are based out of and your DBL will either make your experience with the company a great one or a terrible one... and ya'll know how mine has been so far, lol.

And to update yesterdays post:

So, after finally calling the DBL back, she says tells me to wait because the systems have been down for the box planner as well (yeah right, I've been waiting since 1100 for a new empty assignment and the phones were only down for 30-45 minutes starting in early afternoon). Finally, I get a message from her with 6 trailer numbers and her telling me that all of these are available in the yard and that I "should take another look around the yard". Remember, its now around 1400 and I'm just now getting this reply for an issue that I brought up about 1100.

I'm glad I wasn't in a really bad mood that day as the message I considered sending back probably would have got me fired.

Just for the heck of it I wrote down all these trailer number and drove all over this yard for the 4th or 5th time. 2 of the trailers were sealed. As I saw earlier. 2 of the trailers had other Schneider trucks parked in front of them, probably so no one would "steal" their good empty. As I saw earlier. The other 2 were crap trailers, one which I had to use a sledgehammer to bang open the door handles and had bad tires, the other had bad tires as well, was badly rusted and not in any shape to take a 41,000lb load on a 900 mile trip, which is WHY I SENT THE REQUEST FOR ANOTHER EMPTY 2 AND HALF HOURS AGO.

Then, my day finally gets better. As I'm literally about to hook up to the better of the 2 crap trailers and hope to God that it makes it out of the yard without losing the recaps, another driver shows up with a newer trailer, and to make things even better it was the one that I had just brought up to the potato chip place about 2 days ago. THANK YOU JESUS. I looked closely as he drove by, no seal, jumped out of my truck and flagged him down to ask if it was empty, sure enough it was, asked him if he'd just drop it right there in the middle of the yard and I'd grab it off him, and I was finally out of there.

I barely made it to my pickup on time, but somehow managed and headed on my way.

Today was a decent day for miles, got about 515 miles and had to stop because the Schneider routing didn't want me on any the tolled sections of I-90 around Cleveland, and the last rest stop I could find was on 20. I was frustrated about not being able to stay on 90 all the way here, but I'm sure as heck not going to pay out of my pocket for tolls if they decided to say that I wasn't following the route they wanted me to. So tomorrow I'll have another small-town adventure in the morning cutting around the toll roads and then should finally get back on the interstates towards my delivery in a town outside of Chicago. My DBL says she is going to try to route me through the Gary, IN OC to get my safety training done. We'll see how that goes.

Until next time...

 

Every day just gets better and better. Here's how today went:

So, I start out thinking I'm going to have a nice ride on the interstates all the way in to my delivery. That is until I look closer at the company routing, where it shoots me on to the 2-lane highways in order to avoid the tolled sections of the interstates through Ohio and Indiana. So yeah, needless to say 150 stop lights, traffic backups, 1000 gear changes and small towns later I arrive in Hammond, IN for my delivery. Construction everywhere, what a mess. Delivery didn't take too long, and I had a preassignment to pick up a trailer from the nearby Walmart DC and relay it at the Gary, IN OC.

So, after fighting through 5pm construction traffic through this town I get to the Walmart DC, drop my empty and pick up the preloaded trailer. In the remarks it said to use the company scale, so I drive on to it, of course its turned off and nothing works. Oh well, there's a couple truck stops with CAT scales not too far away so I'll just swing by there and get it weighed before I drop the relay.

So, I first try the TA, because the Pilot is so packed you couldn't ride a bicycle through the yard. Fedex with his double trailers hanging halfway out of the entrance doesn't move for 5 minutes, so I give up trying to turn into the TA, and go to the no-name truckstop across the bridge. They have a cheapo-knockoff of a scale there, but whatever, it'll work, right?

Pull up, weight the trailer, holy crap 38,000lbs on the drives. I do the math and realize there is no way in heck I'm going to get all that weight off the front of the trailer.

So, I head back across the bridge. Maybe it was just that crappy no-name scale, maybe its way off, lets try a CAT scale. Luckily Fedex has his doubles out of the way now and is instead parked in front of an entire row of parking spaces. So I pull in the TA, hop on the scale, there is literally no room to park anywhere so I stop right beside the scale where it says no parking, put my flashers on and run in to get my ticket. Still 38,000 on the drives. You've got to be kidding me.

Ok, only one way to find out if I can get it legal or not, go back out, slide them all the way forward. Pull back on the scale. Go back in and get my re-weight ticket. Still 36,100 on the drives. Nope, not gonna work. Pull off the scale and park next to it again.

Then the local police who is on patrol in the parking lot for parking spot evaders shows up. He starts yacking at the driver next to me that he can't park there. He comes over to me with his big ego and I explain to him I'm just stopped to scale my load, its overweight, give me a few minutes to get on the phone and see what the company wants me to do.

So, I call after hours, sit on hold for 10 minutes, finally get through. I tell him its overweight, ask what I'm supposed to do, he puts me on hold. I sit. And sit.

15 minutes later Barney Fife shows back up and tells me to go, I can't be stopped here. There's nothing I can do, I'm still sitting on hold, so I hang up and drive off towards the OC.

Then, as I'm about to turn off for the OC, I get a message from after hours saying "sorry its taking so long, take it back to the Walmart DC".

I manage to slip back into traffic from the off-ramp and head back to Walmart. When I get there I explain its overweight, show them the scale tickets, they say it will take some time to fix. I decide to call after hours again and tell them it won't be ready within the hours that I have left, they delete the work assignment and tell me just to bobtail back to the OC.

So, halfway to the OC I get another message. There is no where to stop and read it, and every time I try to make the Qualcomm read the message aloud Navigo tells me to take a turn and overrides the voice trying to read the message out loud. At this point I'm just absolutely losing it cursing at the top of my lungs and about to throw this Qualcomm through the windshield.

I reach the OC finally and read the message. He says that Walmart has another load I can take and that he will send me the preassignment.

BUT YOU JUST TOLD ME TO BOBTAIL BACK TO THE FREAKING OC.

I've got about an hour and a half left on my 14 and its ticking away unlike my 11. By the time I drive back to the Walmart DC, pick up the load, attempt to scale it (which wouldn't have been possible since there was no place to stop without getting kicked out for parking in a no-parking area by the rent-a-cop), and then take it to the OC, I'd be over my 14. Just not gonna happen. I message back saying I don't have enough time, explain why, apologize for any trouble. Don't hear anything back.

I go into the OC, get a burger, come back out to the truck, a message from a different support shift op saying PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ETA TO PICKUP ASAP.

Oh come on.

I get on the phone and finally reach yet another support shift person. I explain the situation, and that even though the pickup window runs into tomorrow morning, I have safety training then that will probably run me out of time. She says "oh its not that strict of a window we just need you to get it to the OC". I tell her my DBL had me assigned the original relay (the overweight one) just to get me into the OC, do they really still need me to go back out and get that one tomorrow. Yes she says.

So, tomorrow after safety training, however long that takes, instead of finally getting a load and having a chance at a decent day, I'll be spending a good portion of it running back and fourth to the Walmart, the TA, and the OC to get this relay here. Great, huh?

I'm so frustrated right now I just want to get on the phone and curse someone out and let them know what I really think of them and the way that Schneider has been treating me as a company driver. I'm just at a loss for words right now.

 

Alright, this morning I did my "accident remedial" as they called it. First I sat down with someone and he went over any other issues that I was having, I forget to input my load information into the HOS tab on the Qualcomm a lot so he said I needed to do this, and got on me for a couple log edits I made when I accidentally left myself logged on when I meant to be off.

Then I explained what happened when the fairing was damaged and I had to write down on a piece of paper what I would do in the future to prevent this from happening again... I wrote something along the lines I will be more careful when doing slow maneuvers... even in my own driveway.

After that another OSR took me to the simulator and I did the slow maneuver course and the highway course. Before he put me on the sim he asked about what happened with my accident, I explained about bending the fairing on a tree branch in my own driveway after it was leveld out, when I told him what happened he was laughing out loud and said "you have got to be s***ing me".

Anyway, after that they made me catch up on a couple courses on crossroads and then I was done.

It took about 2 hours.

After that I went back to the Walmart to pick up the load I was assigned last night, brought it back to the OC, called my DBL and talked with her for a bit.

I'm being assigned a new DBL now since its been 90 days, it will be interesting to see if my miles improve. She also went over my bonus metrics with me an explained what I needed to work on, surprisingly she didn't mention my overspeed (which is at 28% LOL). Of course, since bending the fairing counted as a preventable accident, I wouldn't be getting the bonus any way this quarter. Not that that will change, I will continue driving with my foot on the floor.

I did learn something interesting about how your ETA percentage is calculated for your bonus - when you are filling out your pickup tasks and it asks you for the ETA to final delivery - this is what this bonus metric is calculated off of - not after your "updated" ETAs if you are making good time and change it after that. You can be 3 hours early or 30 minutes late and it won't count against you. So, even if you update your ETAs a lot and keep them accurate, if your original ETA to Final Delivery task is not accurate, TOO BAD.

Apparently I'll have a load headed to Iowa on me soon, I'm also supposed to get in touch with my new DBL some time today.

So, who knows where we go from here?

 

Well I can tell you exactly where I'm going... NOWHERE!!! I went through the express bay to get one of my dust covers on the drive axles removed because it had broken where it bolted on... And the mechanic found cracking on the bottom of the mount where the brake chamber attaches. So, sitting again until tomorrow morning. What a freaking week.