I'm sayin...I walk out the door of the truck stops and find myself trying to unlock the doors of other Swift trucks ....lost? confused? GPS has a pedestrian mode...maybe I should use it!....lol
Some fleets are banning GPS. Because so many drivers become completely reliant on them and blindly follow them into pickles they would have avoided had they not been using them. How on Earth did we ever get this job done before GPS, satellite photos and computer navigation systems? One of the reasons Swift gives for wanting to go exclusively to Maptuit...everybody else is doing it. Probably the lamest reason I've ever heard and one my mother would laugh in my face for attempting to use. Use your atlas, your head and directions from the customer and you will rarely go wrong....unless, like me, you fight dislexia on occasion. In spite of this, I haven't had trouble figuring it out. Like the delivery I made to the Kellogg's DC by London, OH. Maptuit would have sent me northbound onto a state highway that would eventually end up at I-75. I looked to my right and saw an industrial park on the south side of the freeway. Trusting my gut, I went right...and drove straight to my receiver. Sometimes you have to do that. Maptuit was wrong and Google maps hadn't been updated with those streets. The best tool you have for getting to your destination is your brain.
Haha I would do that too but they gave me a Volvo 670 with a new front end and it has a grill not like all the others. Plus they forgot to put in the Volvo logo on the grill. so all I have to do is look for this cool looking new grill and there she is my truck. Thanks all for the GPS advice.
I recently enjoyed a similar experience. There's a brand new, third party KRAFT DC in Stockton, CA. It's address didn't exist online and it was my first "post mac 23" load. (It never dawned on me that I could pick up the phone and ask for the big mac.*) The consignee's phone was answered worthlessly by a distantly related entity in some other part of the world. Mac 12 and DeLorme both had the last turn as a right to final. It was midday with unlimited visibility. The closer I got, the more evident it became there was no action on the right and all kinds of stuff going on to the left including flat and wide, truck friendly pavement. In a fit of pure genius, I turned left. I was right! Brilliant! Or maybe just lucky. This was central California in fog season. It isn't unusual to encounter pea soup fog that can appear out of nowhere and it's especially fun at night. It is just as likely that I couldn't see left and simply followed the directions. If anything minor happened I might have gotten away with it because I have good standing and relied on the "official" directions. If something minorly major, it gets DAC'd -required by contract of all subscribers- even if I don't get disciplined. If something major happens, I can be thrown out the door and straight under the bus. If I'm new and certainly if I'm on any kind of probation, I'm out the door, no ifs, ands or buts. That is my point. A newer driver with a promising future gets the bus ride home and faces a long, up hill pull to ever get hired again, by anyone, all for something that was entirely foreseeable and preventable by the infinitely wiser and more financially capable employer. The technology exists to put me within 6 inches of any point on the globe via a route that is appropriate for my truck, load and conditions. I had a hazmat load going from MD to MI. I tapped start and finish into the ol' HP and shazam . . but I couldn't reconcile my route to the fuel route. I had crossed PA so many times before and they had always been identical. Turns out that the fuel route had automatically deleted the flammable hazmat restricted tunnels. "How did that happen?" I wondered. "How many dollars in carrier fines did it take before it made more sense to correct the problem at the source?" I concluded. *Ain't it odd? Remove the capability to request it digitally and "improve" it by making us pay to get it and make it time consuming to you and your DM, as well. This, brought to you by the same brains that pulled it, then restored it in response to driver feedback. Might it have made more sense to seek driver feedback first? This is best in class? You knock over one fence and you're done. What do they do to the person who sent 100 trucks into the same fence?** Just wondering . . **This is a real example but I can't remember where/who it was. Mac 23 tried but failed to make it clear that the best looking, most logical choice among three driveways was the wrong one and tried but failed to make clear the correct one. The abutting tenant required the fence in his lease contract. It would get knocked down, the landlord would fix it and send the bill to the many carriers responsible. It was a routine occurance. Who ever wrote the original directions literally sent a hundred trucks into the same fence before the directions were fixed. 2ND HAND HALF TRUTH As anyone who uses it can tell, what we call mac 23 is a work in progress. This is how it was explained to me by a person I deem knowledgeable: Swift does not own and didn't necessarily "author" any of the directions contained in the underlying database. It's a common database created and shared by many carriers. That's why it's difficult to change even obviously erroneous info and that's why you often see Swift info/corrections that appear to have been added on. An example would be, let'say Knight and Werner pick up loads, one each on either coast. The shippers might be house accounts and only K or W would ever see those directions. They're both headed to the Costco DC in IL. They will both see the same set of directions which may have been written by Crete or Costco, for that matter. Now you get a load to the same Costco. You, too will see the same directions as the others but, because we almost always drop, there might be additional drop instructions that only we will see.
I used to work for Hartt and the directions that they gave were usually very good. I worked mainly NE regional. I am just wondering, Where was the shipper/consignee that you both had directions to? I am just wondering if i had been there.
I can't remember. He was fairly new and out of the (Is it N or S?) Carolina terminal and we were fairly close to it . . he was rerouted there as opposed to delivering the load. He had a GPS and my GPS had originally tried to put me on the same route. The difference was something simple like I had more free time on my hands and was able to go online and look at it from above. I knew exactly what he was talking about when he described where he went wrong and neither of us had been there before. It was late at night and that didn't help anything. I'm originally from Maine and any time I see a Maine (or so I think) truck and driver in the same place, I'll try to introduce myself and that's how I got his story. The damage to his truck was minimal but the stuff he hit didn't do as well. Too bad. He seemed like a good guy and his truck was very high spec. He loved driving it but also had a pretty good idea of why he was going to the term and that he wouldn't be driving it much longer. The bottom line was, he made that one wrong turn. Rather than plan ahead or at least stop and engineer a solution, he crossed his fingers and hoped he could make it. The cops wanted to charge him with felony hit and run. Fortunately, he was sharp enough to convince them that he wasn't aware he hit anything until after he hit it. By that time (a couple hundred yards downwind of the damage . . ), his only concern was to find a safe place to stop the truck without hitting anything else. I can blame training, lack of experience or the lack of tools but the reality is it was poor judgement caused by a combination of the other three. He could have and should have been trained and equipped to avoid a situation like the one he got himself into.
I agree that "cross your fingers and hope for the best" is not a safe way to make decisions. It really makes more sense ....at least from my experience...to flip a coin....I have found that solution to be right 50% of the time....which is better odds than me trying to figure it out.....lol
I hate macro 12. I followed them, was a load picking up in St. Cloud. Got there, and just like my trucker GPS, took me to the front of the place, and not to the truck entrance! Thankfully all you had to do was follow it around the block and there it was. I know not all shippers are like that. I got screwed up trying to get into the railyard in Cicero, IL first time going in, and that place you can only get into it one way. The entrance is at an angle to the street, so you couldn't get into it from the far lane coming the other way. Anyways, if you have a laptop and mobile internet, Google maps with street view is the best thing to find out how to get there. What better way to find out how to get there than take a virtual trip to the place?
This is slightly unrelated to thread but.... Just wanted to say I love your TAG line, very compassionate, one of the best I have seen.
