Does 20 hours off duty = two ten hour breaks?

I'd say, "Sleeping." Why would I say anything that contradicts my logs?

 

I consider myself lucky to be rarely inspected in my time. I think it's about once a year to once every 18 months over 30 years. That's pretty low rate of inspection.

I remember one lady inspector in California who wanted to flip from nice inspector to ##### in about 10 seconds when she asked me the travel time to her scale house from where I left at towards San Fran going east. I told her the logs will know what time I left.. she was trying to nail me down to what time I actually left. Plus or minus roughly 15 to 19 minutes. If I said I left more than that then those logs would be wrong. (It was actually right about 23 minutes on the ground...) So I did not say anything. I said whatever is on that log is what I left at. It's a busy day, I don't have time to go through these inspections. Company boss man is already on my qualcomm wondereing why Im sitting here.

That inspector looked me over thought about it a moment and let it go. She could have easily made a case of it. If she wanted to. It would have been something. Sometimes you have to play the cards you have to work through a situation that threatens your ability to turn in a work day if she chose to put me OOS.

Another inspector looked at my chicken scratch newbie logs and took a cig to light and have a smoke, Said to the trainer, when I am finished with this and you two are still here... looking at his ticket book... trainer grabbed me and we hauled out of there at like 70 plus still on the ramp. The price was two to three weeks in log school from that trainer, which pretty much evolved into a monster once I brought in two or three more logs to work with.

 

It's not the inspector you need to worry about. It's the dispatcher wanting to know why you pissed away 20 hours in one place without a valid reason such as no hours on your recap. Sometimes drivers sit in the ##### house or gambled away time that made them late. Then it becomes a firing issue over a service failure.

 

But to play devil's advocate...

I live in the cross-country OTR reefer world. 12 hour days with 11+ hours behind the wheel can be tough enough. Now stack 5 of those back to back ... now add 2 more of those same days to the previous 5. That's tough on most. And if dispatchers and planners are no longer hobbled with the 70/8, what's to keep them from planning all long loads as if you're always going to drive 11+ hours a day, every day your out?

Sometimes that "light day" is welcome to relieve stress, especially winter driving in bad weather and summer driving with double the traffic volume. I don't want to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. But I don't want to be forced to sit 24+ hours at a truck stop or be limited one day to only 2 hours. So how does the driver and the dispatcher/planner come to an understanding?

 

Screw dispatch. You're an O/O between loads, don't call me I'll call you, sleeping as long as you want. Why does DOT care? All I'm looking for is DOT's justification for setting a magic number.

 

Theoratically you can sleep a thousand hours and work one next week. DOT sees no violation.

There is no violation for DOT to write, follow me so far? 20 hours sleeping is awesome but not for keeping your job as a company driver.

As a O/O you have total freedom to do what you want. Dispatchers serve you, not the other way around.

 

Not according to this. Sleep 10 hours and one minute, and you're in violation. It's BS that I have to set an alarm when I'm not up against a deadline.

 

But officer, I was stopped for 20 minutes and I'm allowed up to 50 miles this hour.....