Max time you spend in sleeper birth?

No one is going to prison for not marking a change of duty status from sleeper berth to off duty when they run inside to go pee and back.

These kinds of inferences are hyperbolic...

Have you ever worked in compliance, scottie? Have you ever participated in a full scale FMCSA company compliance and safety audit?

I have...

I used to work on the inside of a company that has 150 trucks and sat in on a compliance review with the FMCSA auditor.

She did a full 6 mos review of a randomed sample percentage of the fleet.

I can guarantee you that ALL of those drivers at one point or another had run inside to the truckstop to go pee while in sleeper status and had not changed it to off duty and then back.

The ONLY violations she noted were a few random form & manner notations, and one guy who she busted, via a license plate reader camera, that showed himself at a different location on his log.

Even at that, no one was fined and no one went to prison!

Look, I can understand wanting to use a forum like this to emphasis compliance. However, when individuals start throwing around the potential of going to prison for something like the pee example, I'm calling bull on that.

Besides, I think you're more likely to go to prison for being an internet troll

 

This thread here, is a classic example of Fearmongering. Thousand dollar fines for not logging a pee break. Prison terms. FMSCSA audits. "Be afraid. Be VERY afraid." And in an attempt to legitimize the tall tale, they misquote regs.

When that fails, they will attempt to localize things. "Oh, that's the way they do things in California." If so, show me the regs according to the California DOT site. And if it were a reg, a ticket wouldn't be issued to be driver, but thousands. All they would have to do is look at your driver cam, right? Can you imagine...someone watching you sleep so that they can check and see if you logged from sleeper berth to off duty when you got out of the truck to wet down the grass behind your trailer? How much would that in manpower?

"Oh no Six, if you get caught behind the trailer wetting the grass, that's a Hazmat violation and you will be a registered sex offender for exposing yourself. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid."

I reckon this is the 21st century version of the lunch counter bull.

 

We had this one driver on our fleet that was one these super paranoid guys when it came to compliance, etc.

One day he called me all freaked out. He was driving south on I-5 in N. California and spaced out on the Dunsmuir scale. He realized as soon as he passed the open scale he didn't get a green light on his prepass.

So, what does he do??? He slams on his brakes, makes a hard right turn back into the scale exit so he could say he was sorry for passing the open scale.

Just wait, it gets better...

There was a CHP sitting in the median who saw him do it! The cop writes him up for an unsafe and illegal turn AND for blowing past the scale!

He would of been better off to just keep going once he realized what he had inadvertently done in the first place. There aren't any photo bypass cameras there anyways. Instead he completely exacerbated the situation by having an unfounded paranoia in the first place.

He ended up getting the violations expunged by hiring a ticket lawyer for $1,200 who showed up at the court appearance on his behalf. The cop didn't bother to show up and the judge threw it out.

Good for him, but an expensive lesson.

 

If you split break and log 8 hours in the sleeper berth and have to use the restroom???

 

SOL


And that don't mean "slide over lady."

 

The irony of that kind of got me LOL

 

This is fun... Let's add to the conundrum... If one is filling out thier logs, technically shouldn't they be on duty since it is work related? So now, to take a simple Duece, one must log on duty, to log off duty, to go dump, then log on duty again to log SB again and go back to sleep.

 

I think I'll stick to something simple... like quantum physics.

 

Your post backs up most of what I have heard from carrier officers that deal with the FMCSA. What this poster is doing is taking a regulation and what I call hard interpreting it. When the person types a code section like the one quoted above what they type is technically correct but factually wrong because they leave out a very important thing. Your logs are only legally required to be current to your last change of duty status when you are OPERATING a CMV on a public highway, not sitting at a truck stop. And because your off duty and off public roads it is not a violation of the rules to go take a potty break.

I used to work for a company that had a safety compliance officer that hard interpreted rules like this. I finally told this person to fire me because I was not planning to change how I logged. I was never fired and not long after that idiot was removed.