misinformation you will hear....

Enough with the bickering and personal BS!

 

Black9, I have to side with Rerun when it comes to accidents and luck. Yes you can be the best driver in the world and still get in an accident. Maybe not your fault but still unavoidable. Over the road truck driving is one of the top deadliest jobs out there. I have had a lot of close calls and I know you have too! If you haven't then you don't drive. You can do everything in your power to avoid them but sometimes that is isn't enough.

How do you know what Rerun is teaching his students?

 

I wrote to a DOT officer for some insight into the out of gear situation, this was his response:

"""That is kinda hard to prove, there is a number of reasons it would be out of gear. I've had a few wrecks that the driver was incapacitated and you could see what gear it was in, but usually the truck is destroyed in these cases with blood and other body fluids and I'm not climbing in the rig to look at the gear shifter. I don't need a gear shifter to tell me what happened. The black box or on board computer when we download them will tell us a lot of information. But roadway marks tell most of the story, as well as witnesses."""

Hope that helps...

 

and i referred to the black box as well which will indeed capture a snap shot from about 15 seconds or so before the impact took place...the time may be 15 seconds, may be longer...but it WILL have confirmed what that truck was doing and subsequently what the driver did or did not do just prior to the crash..

 

Please keep it up! I need the entertainment.

My current boss (well, his son-in-law) told me not to idle with my door open because the vibration wears out the hinges.

I asked him when Freightliner started making doors for Peterbilt. He was not amused.

 

I can bet he was not amused. Some people just have no sense of humor!

 

"My current boss (well, his son-in-law) told me not to idle with my door open because the vibration wears out the hinges."

I think he was messing with you. I have never heard that one before. I don't see why you would be idling with your doors open anyway.

 

ive hit bumps in the road big enough to knock the truck out of gear....im pretty sure an accident hard enough to kill the driver could do the same

and also, although i know technically your not suppose to, many drivers including me tend to drive with our hand on the shifter whether we are shifting or not

so if you have an accident you are going to knock it out of gear....my buddy had a bad jacknife accident a few weeks ago and pulled the shifter right out of the tranny when it happened

 

Just curious if this was directed at me, because I believe that I have posted that our "top" driver would make $65K last year. I was off by a little bit. He ended up making $63K...he drove significantly fewer miles in the second half of the year. He actually made around $35K in the first 6 months of the year. I would never use the term best because my drivers have a wide variety of skills. The driver that runs the most miles is not necessarily capable of operating an RGN trailer, or hauling a complicated load. My drivers are not interchangeable parts. As far as I know he does not run illegally. I also don't play favorites when dispatching. The driver that had the largest income probably required less home time than some others. I would guess he averaged closer to 36 hours per week at home instead of 48. The driver that earned the most does not even earn our top pay rate. The reason I use that statistic is to show what is possible. We offer our drivers a lot of flexibility, and they can determine how hard they want to work.

In case, you really wanted to know how the other drivers did...I had 10 company drivers that pulled open deck equipment and worked the full year in 2010. Their miles were between 97,000 and 128,000. They made 63, 63, 61, 61, 55, 54 54, 52 52, 52. Out of the 3 that made 52, 2 were drivers that choose to run within a 300 mi radius and be home most nights. The third is a 72 year old man that didn't work the last 2 or 3 months of the year because he got prostrate cancer. Just in case you really wanted to know instead of poking fun.

I suppose drivers are too used to recruiters that lie to them. While I agree it is good to be skeptical, it is also unhealthy to assume that everything is a lie.

 

Do any of you know how difficult it is to retain all this knowledge ???

So, like, when I crash, be sure to be in gear.................

I'm going to have check that Before I pass out !!!

And make sure to grab my logbook and update my change of duty status !!

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