How's Everyone Doing in LTL Right Now?

May I ask why you left R&L after just a month? I’m just now starting to research all the LTL companies in my area for possible job change.

 

First off, there are several R&L folks on here that are happy with their jobs. My issues were terminal specific so don't let me poison the water. But here it goes.

I started there and everything was ok. This is actually a company that has their crap together. You pull into a onsite fuel island and the station can read an RFID on your truck so you don't have to type up anything when you get fuel. Mileage and truck ID are all picked up automatically. There are a bunch of cool features this company had and this is one that just came to mind.

I was assigned a 8 AM start time for Mondays and 9 for the rest of the week. But not even one day into working there my phone rings at 4 AM. They are asking about my start time and wanted to see if I could come in an hour early. Fifteen minutes later they called again to tell me to come back in at my normal start time. After hanging up and trying to get back to sleep my phone rings a third time, this time they wanted me to come in as soon as possible. At this point I'm awake, and so are my wife and kids. I'm pissed.

Next day, the same thing happens. The same the following. Some days they would call once, other days three times to adjust and readjust my start time. Each time they did this they would wake up my house in the process. I would leave the house pissed and my wife would have to deal with the kids that aren't even supposed to be up yet. I had an older family member in the State and have to keep my phone on in case things went sideways, so I could not even mute that.

Next issue I had was they assigned 48 ft lift gates for everything. They absolutely did not care how you got into or out of an area. I had a stop where I went about two miles down a windy dead end road for a residential. I called about having issues getting spun around cause this should have been on a box truck. I was told to back up this 2 mile windy hill and make it snappy cause I had another 15 stops to go. The dispatcher didn't give a single crap.

Then finally, their DRs are like 1 to 12 pages long (depending on the stop). The pages are not serated together but are individual pages where you had to sign, print, date, time, and trailer number each and every page. And of course nothing is carbon copy so you got to do that for the customers copy as well. You could realistically spent more time filling out paperwork than getting the freight off.

So anyway, one day I got called in and was told they ran an audit on my paperwork. I was told that on stop #11 on page 5 out of 7; one of the pages was missing the time. "But I wrote the time on the other 6 pages!". Doesn't matter, it needs to be on all seven..

Between all that and the barrage of phone calls, I called it quits. Too much micromanaging and people didn't care if I was in a bind. Of course things may have changed and individual experiences will vary by location.

Good luck in your job search.

 

That’s crazy I would have quit too.