Do you Hate Jb Hunt

I'd rather slide down a mile-long razor blade into a pool of alcohol than drive a straight 7 speed governed at 57. I'd have shot somebody, don't know how you did it.

 

I got into an argument with my dispatcher, warned him I was going to file a grievance through the company for his abusive politics. Punishment for doing that was fast and severe.
He put me on permanent duty recovering abandoned trucks. The first trip was to Robert, Louisiana to recover a tractor that was towed to a storage yard. I rented a car in Dallas, drove straight to Robert, and waited for the towing company to open. At 0700, the employees showed up. When the office was working by 07:15, the owner told me that JB wouldn't pay the tow bill, so he was refusing to release the tractor.
For years, I had come across companies JB owed money to that had held or seized equipment. For a multi-million dollar Motor-Carrier, they owed a lot of small bills, and were just ridiculously slow to pay up.
So, dispatch told me to turn the car in and stand by. But, I'm not that stupid.
I checked the tractor, it was FULL of "stuff". In fact, someone had been driving this tractor for a long time- there was food, clothes, money, valuables in it. All it was missing was the driver. So I asked the owner if he knew why it was towed there in the first place. He told me the driver had a heart attack two days ago and JB asked them to store the tractor. I called safety, went through several people who told me to "find a dumpster and clean the truck out". Folks, I was beyond shocked. Throw a man's clothes, family pics, personal documents, CB radio and everything he had in this tractor IN A DUMPSTER?
I returned to Dallas with the rental car- purposely didn't top off the fuel so that JB would get stuck with the extra charge for having the rental company fuel it, and reported to my IDIOT dispatcher in Dallas. I called him incompetent, noted that the tractor was not ready to pick up and the tow bill was not paid. I was officially reprimanded for being insubordinate. To punish me for insubordination, they gave me the mother of all recoveries next.
I flew to Orlando, took a bus to Ocala and a taxi to the Ocala yard. The yard was shutting down, the office was closed and locked up, the payphone had been removed from the wall. So, the truck was there by itself- the key was under the rubber mat in front of the office door. I unlocked it, started it and turned the A/C on full blast. It was HOT and humid, a typical Florida summer day. Before throwing my bag in and driving away, It got a thorough Pre-trip. A brand new cabover with only a few thousand miles on the odometer. When I inspected the cab and sleeper, I found a broken crack pipe and a ladies' compact with powder in it. So, I THREW my stuff out the door on the ground. Hey, I saw this stuff all the time as a city cop in Texas, and Florida is pretty much a ZERO TOLERANCE jurisdiction. I walked 2/3 of a mile to a C-store in the summer heat, and called safety. I flat refused to drive this truck. Several safety idiots told me to "throw the stuff out the window and drive the truck." Eventually, I got my personal Idiot Dispatcher on the phone. He seemed delighted that I was in a pickle. He told me to take the tractor or be fired on the spot. I hung up on him and called the local Sheriff's office.
The young deputy was a good guy- I explained to him that there was cocaine and drug paraphernalia in the cab. Being in a zero tolerance area, it was a good idea to ask him to remove the contraband for me and give me a report number. I said "that way, when I have to see the Judge because I lit up the drug dog at the weigh station, I can drop to my knees and beg him to have mercy on me". The report number was a weak defense to prosecution but it's all I could get. Well, he helped me, I thanked him. I called dispatch back and told them I was going to "detail the truck" and would be ready the next morning.
So I drove directly to the Pilot truckstop in Ocala. Opened all the doors and vents, the side boxes, took the mattress out of the bunk and stacked everything neatly in front of the tractor at the fuel island. Put on a pair of shorts and stripped off my shirt (THAT WASN'T PRETTY), turned the water hose on full blast, and climbed in the cab with it. The interior of the WHOLE TRACTOR got a thorough rinsing. The FM radio/tapedeck quit working, and a few gauges on the dash were never accurate again.
Now, I'm saving the best for last. In the bunk, on top of the mattress was a shoebox. In the shoebox was about a dollar in loose pennies, a brand new driver's license with the driver's pic on it, and - you ain't gonna believe this- a pile of paperwork for the driver that had been in the truck. He was just released from prison, retrained in a federal work release program, and given a job at JB under a rehab program. All the paperwork, contracts, agreements, it was all in the shoebox. When I was hired, the first thing they told me was that if I had any felony convictions, don't even apply at JB Hunt. In other words, a convicted Felon who served his time and successfully re-integrated into society (it's a #### hard road, not everyone makes it) had no chance to work for JB. But a Felon just released from incarceration, in a retraining program could walk in the back door with a job, even though he had not proven himself in society yet. Uncle Sam gives the companies a stipend for hiring X-convicts in this program and the whole thing is never discussed.
Well it turned out that he had stuffed more stash up under the dash where I couldn't dig it out. Believe me, I wanted to buy a wrecking bar and peel the dash back like a can of sardines to dig the crack out of the wiring. All day long a little piece here or there would show up on the rubber floormat. The truck was supposed to go directly to Dallas and get a close inspection to dig the dope out but that got pretty much ignored. Ten days later I rolled into the Dallas yard on Kiest to deadline this truck in the shop. As I rolled away from the guardshack, a young kid waved me down. He had a duffelbag in one hand and a CB in the other. He was REALLY upset. He wanted to know why I wasn't there three hours earlier, he was slipping into this truck and had to go. I parked, showed him the crack crumbles on the floor, the contracts I found in the truck and explained what a ZERO TOLERANCE jurisdiction was. I watched him walk directly to his pickup truck, toss his duffel in the rear and leave JB Hunt. Probably never to return.
Folks, I have a deep, permanent dislike for JB for all the apathy, incompetence and abuse we took from them as employees. So I'm being careful to stick to the facts here. This is the real story just like it happened.
And, if you're a Felon, I gotta make apologies here- when your time is served and probation's over, your life is still tougher than everyone else's. Getting back in a career is tough, you've usually lost some or all of your citizen's rights. So I have nothing against you at all my friend, but it isn't fair that some convicts are going from incarceration to re-training and right into the job that's being denied to Felons that have cleared the system. These programs are huge and involve a lot of people. The driver of the truck that I recovered failed a random test in Dallas, picked up a female passenger somewhere and kept the crack pipe lit as long as he could, 'till the money and the luck ran out. I took all his stuff to the terminal Mgr, he told me the story. He wandered around Florida until his fuel was low and got arrested away from the truck trying to buy more crack.
Well, like I said last time, I could have written a novel here but it's late and I'm old. I'll be glad to type it all out, whenever there's time.

 

I think everyone has their own reasons for hating JB Hunt. I hate them mostly because the ones I've run into on the road are complete idiots behind the wheel. It seems like they only hire people who have no experience.

 

Good for you, intermodal is the way to go. Many of our regional intermodal guys are making 1200-1300 a week working 5 days and home for 2. Let the haters talk about stuff that happened over 25 yrs ago and those that repeat the hearsay, you'll be laughing all the way to the bank and enjoying your two day weekends every week while those schlubs are left sitting at some truck stop in rural Indiana on the weekends.

 

Try this same thread with: "Do You Hate Swift or Werner or Schneider, etc, etc."
Of course there are going to be detractors about ANY company that they've had a bad experience with. YES, I drive for JB..and have for the past 5 years. YES, they have some bad points and ....they have their good points too. A company as large as JB is never going to please 100 % of their drivers...or 100 % of all the other drivers they come in contact with. Maybe we should start a new thread.."What do you LIKE about JB Hunt?"

 

I don't think you will be hitting the Carolinas if you're pulling out of Harrisburg.
I pull containers out of Harrisburg (local) and know the basic range for the regional side. They go as far as Wytheville, VA to the south and Carbondale, PA to the north. If you hit SC, that would be news to me.

But in any case you should make decent $$$$ if you like running. 3000miles x 43 cents (paid in hub miles) = a decent check.

 

I don't drive a truck, my ol' man does - however, I can tell you from having to deal with JB Hunt drivers on the interstate it didn't take me long to figure out why they're hated. Holy hell do their drivers give professional drivers a bad name; and after observing them at many truck stops while waiting for my hubby to pick him up .... I swear I don't know who can't park their trucks more: JB Hunt drivers or Schneider

 

Explain how this is done.