Educate us about working as a Switcher / Yard Dog....

You can have your $590 check lol

 

Good luck. I didnt know jockeys had sign on bonuses. I'm sure you know by now that most companies wont consider that any form of driving experience. Hopefully you're there for quite some time though. Have at it

 

I work as a hostler for LTL company. I’ve been doing it for about a month now. I get a big list from dispatch/supervisor in the morning and do moves for 12 hours straight. I do not get down time where I’m at.

It seems easy but I constantly get out of the spotter truck to hook and unhook service lines, chalk every single trailer, close doors, check the dock to make sure all chalks are on the dock and I also hook/unhook doubles.

Big change from OTR but I get compensated for every hour.

 

I'm gonna go against the flow here, cause I actually loved the short time that I ran as a yard jockey. The bad part was definitely the money. I got paid slightly more than a forklift driver.

You know when your parked in a truck stop and you see some lunatic fly through the lot at 30mph and back it into a spot in Hi Reverse? Well with yard hostling you get paid to be that lunatic, and you get a little blinky beacon on top of your ottawa to let everyone know your special. That yard is your castle, and everyone must yield to the king or get fed to the bridge troll. Let me be clear though, it is not "trucking". You are essentially part of the warehouse team. You keep those dock doors full of empty trailers while keeping the finished loads nicely organized in the lot, and keeping the yard clear so everything moves efficiently.

The bad? Pay is garbage. Your manager/supervisor/HR is always too close for comfort. The mirrors on those yard buggies shake like a mother and make it incredibly difficult to "ease" into a dock door ... it's actually much smoother to gas it until the last foot or two. Despite what people like to say, it will not help with your backing skills. Those yard buggies manuever around like a go-cart and they allow you to back into difficult spots with ease. If I backed in trailers with my sleeper cab the same way I backed in trailers with my yard buggy, my sleeper cab would be smashed on all sides probably.


Hope this helps a little. I could see the job becoming pretty boring if you worked at a low volume distribution center. My spot had 4 yard jockeys on night shift and we were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I enjoyed it a lot though for the short 6 months I did it.

 

Well, I think you're dreamin'. Like someone said, you are more part of the dock crew than the trucking end, and I bet those jobs pay $10-12 bucks an hour. Bonus pay? A boot in the rear, there's you're bonus pay. The only plus side, is while moving trailers, you might see some secretaries walk by,,,