It's your fault.

Thanks for starting this thread. I now know more about pallet jacks than I did before.

 

Well bless your hearts. Thats southern for piss off.

 

What the hell is a pellet jack and do i have to tarp it lol

 

LOL.

No but it does have 4 stops for $1.83/mile all in. And you need full safety gear plus 29 pcs of dunnage. Your appointment is at noon but they tend to load around 1am. Delivery is 7am 400 miles away. What email do i send the ratecon to?

 

Well here is my thinking, and you guys go ahead and get your torches out. I am 62, I rode with my grandad a lot till I started school, and I remember something he said, way back then.
Anybody can drive a truck, but there is not many truck drivers. Now that was sometime in the early 60's when he said that, it holds true in a big way today.

I have always felt like you can not teach a person to be a truck driver, you can teach them to drive a truck, it is not the same thing, in my mind. A person is either a truck driver or is not and it will be apparent in just a few days, if not day one,
If driving truck stresses a person out,he is going to have a long miserable career.
I think a lot of it is in a persons head, and it doesn't change, a guy can with time gain some confidence and that helps, but it is not the same.
If a guy has to be shown every little thing, when his routine changes, he is going to have a long miserable career.
I have hired guys that have driven for years, that could not hook up a strap, even though they had seen it done for years, how is that even possible?
I have hired guys that retired from freight companies pulling switches and doubles with nothing wheel base single axle trucks. They worked 30 years and made a great living, but just could not make the switch to pulling one trailer, even in forward motion, a couple of these guys were friends and I kept them and gave them every chance in the world, to get it down, but in the end had to let them go.

Trucking is not really for everybody, never has been and never will be, not everbody driving a truck has the mental ability to actually be a truck driver.

Everybody has this fantasy that truck drivers made great money back in the day, well nothing much has changed, except that money comes 100 times easier these days. I bet the percentages of real good paid drivers to low paid drivers is not much different than it is today. There were a few high paid jobs, but many, many drivers were running for 15 to 20 cents a mile or less. Just as many if not more got screwed out of pay, we didn't have near as many laws to protect us as we do now.
Nobody was going to pay you and ride around with you for 6 weeks for you to get used to it, maybe one trip and you may have got paid or not, guys running teams were expected to pull their weight.
The biggest difference is, the guys that did it back in the day, even if you don't count anything but riding and guiding 10 or so hours a day, worked at least 10 times harder then than we do today.
It was at least 10 times more dangerous, other than traffic than what we drive today. I liked trucking when I started out, butI would hate to go back to them days and doing what my little 550 does today with that little 318 I started out in, and I was in a brand new truck and stepping in tall cotton, with my BIG motor. lol

 

I have tried to be a mentor and still do.
The people that are driving today are just that - - drivers. They already know everything and you are #### sure not going to show them anything new.
That is until they can’t trip plan or fix any minor problem - - then it is always someone else’s fault!
I don’t think that they ever really learned how to drive a car or pickup correctly in the first place. Some have no spatial awareness at all.
Where I am I would bet that most of the drivers could not use a manual transmission and would not want to.
Sad.

 

Then start with younger ones! Fisher price glider kits, now in classic EXHD daycab, EXHD coffin and shorthood aero unibilt midroof.

 

Overworked?

Seriously, most are not even close to being overworked. Many don't know what work is.

Too many scream about stupid crap, my sleeper is too cold, I didn't get to my stop because of the eld controlled my mind and so on.

Hell if some of these drivers drove the trucks some of us old farts drove to make a living, they wouldn't last through a whole day.

My last job was hard, the companies I serviced as a temp driver could not keep drivers because it was too hard, more often than not they would just leave. I had one customer who had a large foundry and raw castings would come out of the sand, cleaned and cooled just enough to load on the truck to go to the tool and die shop, their last driver cried about how hot the chains were when he would unload. When I did a load like that, I knew the chains were hot and used foundry gloves made for high heat, and let the chains cool enough to rack them.

There are some common sense involved, which doesn't exist today.

Really the only guy?