My DS, C1,and USA Truck experience

Yeah they have their petro passport. Neither Usa nor Sni ever really fueled there so I dont know how good that program is, but petro tends to have really good showers. My true weakness is those Chicken tenders at the J... I cant ever seem to pass them up lol

 

Even a very forceful question is still a question. And sometimes it's not even in the form of a question. An example would be "I need you to be there at 0900 tomorrow without fail!" If that does not gel with what my logbook will allow me to do then, whether they asked a question or not, they're going to get an answer. I limit all of my communications to the Qualcomm or email so there is never any question about who said what and, once I tell them what I can legally do, I've never had anybody tell me to do something illegal. There's a written record so they wouldn't dare. I often wonder if many of these "the company told me to do something illegal" stories are simply a matter of the driver not being clear with the company, and in a timely manner, about what they can legally do. In 19 years of driving this has never been an issue for me.

 

KCMOFIRE, I am a former Swifty. They have a macro 22 that you can send in when you are under a load to explain situations like you have described. It lets you explain why you may be late picking up or delivering a load. It is designed to keep them up to date on load status and to keep a driver who gets in a jam with traffic, time taken to get loaded or unloaded, etc from getting a service failure.

Does USA Truck have a micro like that? Could you have used it? I am very curious, not trying to assign blame.

Thanks and good luck with Swift. My friends who still work there say with the driver ranking system, the new elogs and qualcom and the "plus one" system they have implimented they are getting lots more miles.

 

BINGO!!!!!

Companies are not perfect; drivers can be their own worst enemy.

Do these people actually expect us to believe that a company the size of USA will "direct you" to run when your outta hours? Communication would have cleared up all these issues. I never had any communication issues with my FM, I suspect its was because I actually participated in my career and communicated.

imagine the concept.......communications to avoid conflict?

Communications to solve conflict?

Nope.....companies fault, they did it, now give me my welfare check!

 

I have been with them for 27 months and have never been told to run illegally

 

I worked for USA Truck for almost 7 months. In that time I was not asked by either of my FM's to run illegally. However I was put into a bad situation by weekend dispatch. Even after telling them I was very close to my 70 hours they kept me on a load. I finally stopped at the Pilot on the Conn/RI border on I95 out of hours and stayed there long enough to get a 34 hour reset. If my memory is correct I delivered 3 days late. I notified Safety the following Monday and somebody in operations got reamed over this. And yes everything was kept on the Q-Com because I refused to answer my phone.

 

In the 3.5 months I was with USA, I was asked to run illegally. Plain and simple. If I didn't they would have fired me. Logbooks to prove it too.