Deadhead

As an owner operator I would hate to count the times I deadheaded 1000 or more. Pulling a flatbed, if I made delivery late on Friday the chances of getting a load before Monday was almost nil. Many places the rates on Monday would be piss poor. It was better to boogy on out to my home terminal in OKC and be in position to grab a high paying load on Sunday or Monday. It's all about the revenue generated to the truck per week.

A few times I made the mistake of trying to string together poor paying loads to get back to OKC. ONCE that worked out really well. The other times I bit myself in the butt. I learned my lesson and boogied if the loads and rates were slim.

When I was a company driver for Swift they sometimes dispatched us on a "reposition". Moving from central California to SoCal was a frequent example.

OP, it sounds to me like your company dispatch figured they would make better money by getting you to where high dollar freight is shipping. As long as you are paid those 600 miles it's all good.

 

I routinely deadhead from 500 to 2500 miles. Almost every load I haul, I return empty to home base. This is unusual for most OTR jobs.

 

One of the things I always did is fuel up before the customer. That way I can run 1600 miles or more to get a load straight through without stopping as a team for example to get a load.

As long your urine is clear or nearly so your body is in good condition hydrate wise. Now if you progress into dirty urine then it's a bout of UTI infection or worse on up to blood loss through the kidneys etc. and a thousand other reasons that are possible.

I continued to consider the deadheading. Frankly I don't care. The pay is the same as loaded permile and sometimes they want me and only me to go to that load. When you have a bunch of trucks, say 1000 of them.. that expense of about 430.00 that it takes to move a trailer to the customer empty should be rewarded with say a 5000 dollar haul across the USA. We might be the only team for that area.

 

It has nothing to do with your situation, but when I ran OTR, I was like lepton. I would much rather dead head than load some cheap freight. I could never wrap my head around taking a load to pay for fuel,
I used to haul regularly to Alaska, I would deadhead back probably at least 50% of the time, and I could always haul cheap pipe back if I wanted to. I finally talked another driver into leaving empty instead of hauling the pipe, he thanked me later, as he came out ahead on the run.

 

first, many times they want/need a trailer for a DOT inspection/service.

i personally have been deadheaded like 500+ miles from MA to Richmond , VA, we had no freight up here, but tons and i means tons of cigarette loads down there, to come back up..you usually always bring a trailer to balance out the inventory at either end..

you did complain (at least to us) about being an OTR driver, and doing some sort of local stops..???

maybe they wanna explain a few things to you about that..

or maybe about that not driving an extra 150 miles (3 hours) that you had, but stopped instead.>???

 

Or maybe give him an atta boy for delivering the load on time. lol

Sounds like the dispatcher may have some splaining to do himself. lol