mercer transportation

You think that was a good enough learning tool for a lot of other carriers?

 

Shaping up to be a pretty good Monday for me. Got my load all loaded up and headed up to the truck stop, got online and finally got a lawsuit going to guess the guy who hit my hood two months ago.This guy is one of those slime balls out of Chicago and he’s been ducking and weaving for two months so today I said I’ve had enough of it...electronically filed a small claims suit against them online for the measly sum at $314.
I can bet you that as soon as he gets served with this thing he’ll be emailing me or calling me to want to know how much I would settle for.

 

I had Eric in the claims department and Mercer go after this guy for about the past month and a half with no results. At the original time of the accident he gave us false insurance papers it took us about two weeks to figure that they were false. Then I had a OOIDA help me track down his insurance company but when I emailed the guy he said he would like to take care of it without going through the insurance.

Typical crap for the past two months where he’s been saying that he’ll send it as soon as he gets to the office, or his safety girl is out of the office for the week, or it’s been a hectic day he’ll get to it soon, or blah blah blah

Bet your ### is going to get to it now and it’s gonna cost him a little bit more than it would’ve cost him if he had just been straight up with me two months ago

 

I didn’t send it through our insurance for the simple fact that I didn’t want to pay the thousand dollar deductible and try to get it back from this guy down the road.

 

Your nicer than me. Police report, and sent off to insurance immediately with me. To me the $1k or whatever is worth not having to chase someone around for 2 months trying to collect my money. I'd get the $1k back eventually anyhow...

 

What was the final result with the freightliner in Ohio paying your repair bill in Wisconsin?

 

Well Freightliner in Wisconsin contacted Freightliner in Ohio and told them what was going on. Freightliner in Ohio flatly refused to pay for anything said it wasn’t their fault .....their mechanic didn’t touch anything underneath the valve cover that could cause the cam cover to get cracked by the cam getting knocked back into it. I call BS.

So I ended up calling Diamler of North America out Portland Oregon and getting them involved in the whole deal.
What helped me out through the whole thing was I had the email from Ohio stating that their mechanic never touched anything in there but I had the mechanics work order stating that he did touch something in there. So after Freightliner North America got involved they got both the service managers on the phone and a conference call and Ohio ended up paying $850 of the $1100 repair bill. I had to pay for labor.

 

Well I'll let others be the judge of that. I was constantly criticized by him and his buddies because I ran the speed limit or less. Mind you in the northeast much of the roads are only 55 anyway, with a lot of traffic and congestion. He probably averaged over 70, actual dock to dock speeds. What you spend on fuel is irrelevant I was told, it's what you gross that matters. He and the other big CAT drivers (straight pipes, lots of chrome, idle 100% of the time) were #### proud of their 4 - 4.5 mpg. My truck at the time I had over a decade long average of 9.2 mpg. But I was losing money because of that, not to mention the wear and tear on the rest of the truck's components. He was one of Mercer's typical "top producers" in his category for many years. Basically did the work of two drivers, had the additional opinion that logs were to be filled out on the weekend so "you could make it all work". Yeah, still here but has been somewhat reined in. I know if I did any of the things he and some others did I would have been let go the first transgression. Things like that get frustrating, at least to me. And yes, he's still on paper.

 

Just another valid reason for keeping documentation of every little thing on the truck....

 

No, not hardly.