Exit Interviews

Yeah I had a phone interview.

Dude kept letting me know I’d drive a large car with a polished Mac dump trailer.

Ok cool what’s it pay?

18 an hour and you can work as much as you want!

Sorry dude we’re not even on the same planet as far as pay...

Idc about the truck if I can’t pay my bills. Shocker, they are always posting on Craigslist...

 

My one and only exit interview started with one question.

Are you independently wealthy? Implying I could care less about payroll. I had no bills other than car insurance and gas money so I could run on very little some weeks back then.

Then the question number two began with what can we do to do better?

I write a 10 page legal sized fomal paper. It pretty much ###### the company top to bottom. Beginning with the Colonial Williamsburg Furnished lobby and waiting area out front to impress those with money all the way to a row of his tractors that have no shop support after they close and go home at 4 PM. Half the tractors would have been placed OOS or simply written up on DVIR and turned in. I would have refused that tractor, or any in that row (All of which would have gotten write ups of everything needing fixing) and I would go home and wait for them to call me when it's fixed and ready to take a sea container to Norfolk in the morning.

The worst of it was no sleepers for those who have to sit awake in Norfolk in excess of 10 hours waiting for orders that come late in the afternoon to bring a box, chassis or both home to Baltimore. I almost killed people from not being able to stay awake. (I also adopted several different types of uppers such as caffeine pills, eat a entire box and the body would simply reject it as tolerance increased to nothing and still fell asleep at 70 mph)

In short everything about the company needed improving. And when they continue to fire or dismiss people who actually give a #### like myself and continue to hire arabbers and heeyucks who sit around the drivers room all day not caring if they actually had a box to run that day.

And the standing 100K overgross weight permit I had in the zip bag behind the drivers seat along with the seagrams alcohol permit, bingo cards and truck registrations etc. Was a pathetic joke. I routinely turned over gross tickets on 1000 to 3000 dollar fines sometimes from both Maryland and Virginia in one day. One time they both got me coming and going I think it was 2400 dollars for one box to Portsmouth and 4000 dollars for another box back to Baltimore. A total of 6400 dollars in fines for weights in excess of 100K permits for both maryland and virginia. (This was in the 20 foot and 40 foot box days.)

Finally but not last, their container yard was gravelled over a old railroad yard. A type of switching area dating to world war two for the docks across the street of various types. All they have to do is get a crew in there, pull the rails, send that to scrap sale and pave the lot properly. It would not cost that much. If you are running a multimillion dollar trucking company Im pretty sure you can afford to eat a 150,000 dollar paved parking drop lot strong enough to take heavy containers. But no. They were so tight fisted as to whistle up a dallop of end dump of gravel and bobcat the craters and rail switches that broke front ends of trucks that occasionally got trapped in them.

If they went out of business by now I would not cry for them. It would have been a monumental waste on so many levels. If I had hired on after say 20 years expereince and started ordering permits before moving a 125,000 pound triple axle 20 foot box from Norfolk to Baltimore they would have fired me that day.

As it was Im kind of glad I hired on with them when I was too stupid, too new to the industry to know any better and simply decided that a broken mack tractor with half the stuff not working on it and missing the rear window among other big problems were not a conflict to taking it out onto the highway. If it broke down oh well. Make a phone call and wait a while.

If I constantly asked the shop for good tires for example instead of trying to deal with the really cheap retread crap in those days I would have been fired.

The log book was a joke there. Put in 30 hours on duty monday into part of tuesday from sunday night commuting to Baltimore to get in the truck, go home early tuesday and recommute back into the yard on wed to put in another 30 hours. HOS would have put me out of service at 70 hours after about 3 round trips total to norfolk and back to Baltmore (About 245 miles more or less one way) And so half the logs I turned in were pure BS. I suppose it was the 6 months throw them away requirement that kept the company from being put out of business by FMCSA and DOT etc.

Exit interviews? HA.

Fast forward to 2001. When we were waiting for our tractor to be fixed in Lancaster, FFE dispatch hands me 30 dollars by comcheck to go to Fort Worth and recover tractors from drivers who quit. I discovered that in each and every single one of those tractors I transported back to Lancaster Tx (Sometimes 5 per day) other times 20 per week) would have about 6 pages on average free macro piles of piles of profanity laden whining and yelling from the driver who has had enough and quit. Every time that driver angrily bombed the satellite with so many pages of greviences, the dispatcher would question back, oh that? Come to the yard and our DM will take care of that it will be a little time because you have a load to Portland Oregon we need you to go get first.

Driver explodes you take that Portland and shove it up (Bad word) and I quit. The responses from dispatch constantly following a script designed internally to "talk down" or "deescalate a bad problem" always made me laugh on the floor of the cab. Then I would check that thing front to back for sabotage, bombs and that sort of thing. And there were a few that needed to go into the heavy wrecker to go back to Lancaster because they were indeed sabotaged.

When we quit we simply turned in a very clean truck at Memphis. Went down 4 blocks, got a rental car, tossed the stuff into it and we were home in 3 hours. No one interviewed *&^$ except to ask both of us One little question Why?

6500 ground miles a week as a husband wife team and three straight weeks of $0.00 paychecks due to the papers being grinding through the offices staffers in say 4 seperate dispatch offices around the USA unable to decide who got paid what miles when and where. So they paid nothing. The problems was we kept a journal with trip numbers and so forth to go in to DM and get a comcheck for the miles run from A to B with a load of this and that and over there and something else for the last 6 weeks. 4 figure comchecks cash too. Formal payroll after 3 weeks of 6500 miles on the ground each week? $0.00 300 gallons of fuel purchased every 30 hours or so the whole time. And the reciepts to prove it. And no payroll.

It's time to quit and move into a company that had a McKesson Medicine account with million dollar loads. FFE had that account too. But did they send us there? Nooo.. They did however have us take those loads three times in 2001. We ended up spending the last 5 months of 2001 running McKesson, about 8 blocks from the FFE Memphis Office. Ha. And you would think after that company's payroll people were destroyed and it might be months before we were paid, we said we have savings in the thousands, roll us on with loads. And so they did. One day into the 7th week we got caught up from 9-11 all the way to that day with a catch up payroll check. (That particular check was in excess of 10K net. Our bank dug in it's heels because they were required now after 9-11 to report transactions in excess of 10K to try and cut down on terrorists.) HA. that was fun. It saved our year as far as gross pay was concerned.

Exit interviews HA. I piss on them as a useless waste of time. If you really have that much for me to sign mail it to my house. I'll have plenty of time to sign it and send it back eventually. If I remember to.

Getting work or leaving work these days involve so much crap, even for a simple flipping burgers in a meat cooker at McDonalds (That I did for 4 months once... and I made sure they were cooked really good, a little bit beyond mandatory company set time of cooking.) Its simply not worth it.

For all the crap involved in getting work today, you might as well have the president nominate you for something to be confirmed by the senate over a few days. Once in you are in for life unless you quit because you get disgusted at the corruption in DC. Im firmly convinced that one day DC will be burned out entirely from a proper nuclear strike of many megaton because God refuses to allow such a corrupt city to continue to do the damage it does everyday. And I say this out of love for America It would be very easy to get a govt job these days when you consider the crap you need to go through just to get a CDL then to go find work and then avoid being fired for a preventable or ordinary problem in the industry that comes up every day.

Heck I had a PM discussion a few months ago that if I was drug free I can take their rifle training to gaurd gold bullion loads into the Federal Reserve some 90 feet below the street level with a armored 18 wheeler coming and going. I would not need a CDL to drive the thing. But would know enough when and how to use that rifle if that time came up to do that butchering. The possibility of being killed doing it would not be a problem. I don't have hardly anyone left in this world who gave a #### if I lived or died.

Who knows. There are still possibilities in life. But for me? Exit interviews will not exist here on earth. There will be one in front of God after I die and give a account of my life with all the good and the bad things.

 

Central Oregon Truck Company. 65k minimum salary, top pay is 104k. Not based on longevity, based on performance. Full company paid medical, dental, vision. 401k is fully matched and fully vested from day 1. No driver code, no truck numbers. Just first names. T680s with inverter, APU... flats and curtainsides. It’s flatbed work. We run a ton of miles. Our planners are on the clock. If we empty a load and aren’t under another dispatch within 59 minutes and 59 seconds, they immediately put $100 on your EFS card.

Best company driving job in the world. I grossed 2100 this week and only drove 9 hours a day lol

 

These interviews are a way of finding out what they can get away with. If 10 leave and don't mention bad equipment, then they ignore that. They only fix what they have to, or what they can. Also remember some recruiters don't even work on site. They are just bird dogs sniffing out newbies. They have no first hand knowledge of the company.

 

Is this available in paperback?

 

Ding Ding Ding!!! We have a winner. This is how it is done maybe as much as 75% of the time. Some drivers don't even realize their doing it. I find it interesting you made that comment in light of the fact I was last night and this morning exchanging some FB comments about this thread with several friends whom work in the HR dept of several carriers. They told me these so called exit interviews were really not begs to stay but just getting information so they can close the qualification file and finish the process of changing you from an active driver to an ex driver. Carriers that offer health insurance are required BY LAW to offer COBRA insurance and they need to know what you want. Think about this next time someone comes in here and makes snarky comments about the time delay in reports to either DAC or employment history from a previous carrier. Some don't realize with most large and midsize carriers there are four different departments within that carrier and sometime they don't communicate all that well. They are 1. Operations 2. Safety 3 Payroll 4 HR. In almost all situations it is NOT safety or Operations that handles these verify work requests and made the DAC entries. It is HR. One comment I got this morning was from a friend at JBH that said a driver quit recently and it was almost 2 weeks before the proper dept was even notified. BTW it is HR in the majority of the cases that handles building and verifying the qualification files. It is HR not operations or safety that transmits the information to hireright/DAC!

I HIGHLY recommend you place that call to your carriers HR dept as close to the time you actually quit as you can. Not being fired. Having just quit. In almost every situation HR is not why you quit. They are just people like you. Be civil when you speak to them.

 

Exit interviews are just to get a feel if they are coming back
with a weapon to get even with someone.

It happens occasionally ... people take things personally
and want revenge .

Employees and how they like the job or why they are leaving
has nothing to do with the business itself ... a business is an
micro economy ... a few at the top hoping to succeed of the labors
or those at the bottom . People are expendable .

If any of this was about people ... Trucking would have changed decades ago

 

Gee... You make The Hunchback of Notre Dame seem like a short story.

 

I had one, they may try to get you to stay, I got the,
“If you tell me you’ll stay, I’ll gaurentee you $0.50 more an hour starting today!
And next year another $.50/hour!
How does that sound?”
Me, “Sounds like about .27 1/2 cents after taxes, putting me in a higher tax bracket so I’ll be spending more for less, and if you offered $1 an hour more starting right now, my answer would be the same, it’s not worth it.”
I got up and left