Force Dispatch

I am sometimes talking directly to a planner and have some choices, but that is very rare.

 

I never really understood the appeal to most local jobs either over OTR . but that’s me . the average local driving job that I’ve found usually you start about four a.m. in the morning . figure an hour commute each way . you may not get off until six to seven p.m. that evening . then you still gotta drive back home . what are you gonna do when you get home ? probably rush to go straight to sleep . just like you would OTR only you’ve got to drive two hours round-trip, to get to your “sleeper.” Seems pointless. Now if you actually could find a local job That was literally actually eight hours, then it would seem like a worthy adjustment.

 

Most of the local drivers I know wouldn't go back to OTR. Eating at your own table, bathing in your own shower, and sleeping in your own bed can get to be habit forming.

 

Companies get around that by not sending you the address in their preplan.

Mostly it's not that bad. Companies will tell you it's not forced dispatch, but it kind of is. I can reject loads for certain reasons, location not being one of them.

That blindside backing off of a busy Chicago highway, into a crowded parking lot, then blindsided around another corner stuff is BS. You are responsible for your equipment and safety, then they tell you that you have to do crap like that? Lol

And it's usually the newer drivers that get roped into do that stuff.

Since I jumped over into flatbed, I havent had to deal with monkey business like that. But my dispatches are still mostly forced. I have to run into CA a lot. Sucks, but I'm doing it, at least for now.

 

I was once driving through the heart of the Bronx of New York when dispatch started blowing up my phone telling me that they needed to fax me an order in order to get my load where I was going. He literally wanted me to find somewhere that could receive a fax in the heart of New York. I said “look, first of all I’m not driving a Volkswagen and I’m in the middle of New York. You need to figure something else out, and anytime I’m driving around New York I’m putting my CDL on the line and I’m certainly not gonna risk it more trying to find a fax machine in a semi truck in the middle of New York for you.”

guess what? He figured it out! By the time I got to the shipper, the order was waiting there for me. Imagine that.

 

I work for Magnum out of Fargo, ND. They hire new CDL drivers and are not forced dispatch, you can turn down any load that you want for any reason, with the caveat being that if you do so you will go to the bottom of the load board and you might wait a day or two (without pay) before you get a new load. They've been really good about keeping me in the regions of the country that I want to run as well (the Upper Midwest and out West, even during the winter time I'de rather be up in those regions).

You also get to choose your loads out of Coon Rapids, MN (basically the Minneapolis-St Paul area, same metro) and Fargo, ND. How it works is those two cities are the main bases, so they'll send you away from one of those cities and then back to one of those cities. Meaning, you get to choose your loads about 15-20% of the time, which is pretty cool.

I would give them a chance if you're wanting to do OTR. They're a great company and I came on board with them last year as an experienced driver already.

 

Just stop in the road and start walking from business to business, asking if you can use their fax machine.

I've known a couple of guys that might do that if you told them to. Lol