My new adventure with Gordon Trucking

Gerdin's Dream--A Fictionalized, Speculative Parody of a Possible Executive Dream that NEVER HAPPENED and NEVER WILL...

Gerdin's wife wanted to press her advantage. 'Twas a mistake.

"So can they come back??" she asked.

"Sure."

She didn't expect that. She well understood that if the GordonDuo were a drag on earnings, even a potential drag on earnings, they weren't just expendable, they were on banana peels. She assumed that her hubby had just been keeping the best and getting rid of the rest, like always.

"We always need drivers, Hon," Gerdin said. "And both of these are long-haul, turn-and-burn experts. A couple world-class, great drivers... "

Puzzled, she didn't know where to go next. "So are they like a SuperTeam, long-haul team drivers?"

"Ah, no," Gerdin replied. "Each drives his own truck."

"So we let them sit until they moved on to be rid of them," she summarized, "but you'd hire them back tomorrow..."

"Something like that," Gerdin replied.

"Down on your hands and knees and begging and pleading with them to come back??"

"No, that's different... "

She could hardly stand it.


(Any resemblance to real persons, while perhaps not entirely coincidental, is entirely FICTIONAL.)

 

Humph! So a couple weeks ago after this thread had been abandoned for a month or more, I stopped by for a peek... Yeah! Sure looked abandoned, all littered up and all. Door had been left unlocked, looked deserted.

After a while I put 'Gerdin's Dream' on the projector. All fictional, of course.

It's only partly right, though. Certainly Gerdin has 'just in time' and 'keep the best get rid of the rest' in his quiver but there's also another important arrow there: mileage pay. What a trap!

Lots of other industries, like construction, pay by piece rate. Why, framers, painters, roofers and lots more typically get so much per piece like turn-and-burn truck drivers. That doesn't, of course, make a framer the ultimate wood worker or a new construction painter a budding Picasso or Rembrandt any more than it makes a turn-and-burn truck driver more than he really is, make that driver a SuperTrucker or something like that.

Some that were here might have had you believe that, though, that turn-and-burn equates with SuperTrucker. I think not. In fact, I think these 'mileage-only' jobs are something you should graduate from and move on to better as soon as possible.

By 'better', I mean better in that you have enough time at home to have a real life, that gives you a break from the health damage from living in a bathroom-sized space that's vibrating and bouncing you all around all day and so that you're closer to a 40-hour work week than not and well-paid for any time beyond a 'standard' 40 each week. And, hopefully you get to a job with some exercise built into it.

That's not most mega-OTR, of course. Some really good companies exist, like Old Dominion. There are good companies out there. ODFL's not a truckload OTR, though, where you find the most grievous problems. Like Heartland.

The mileage-pay trap has enabled companies to pay drivers less than minimum wage when minimum wage is truly 'minimum' and not a livable wage. It allows companies to slide the risk of shipper/receiver delays and breakdowns and maintenance onto their drivers. It's a good deal for Mike Gerdin.

It fools drivers into wanting more driving hours each day and each week, to slide as much as they can of actual job-related, non-driving functions and hide it in their 'off-duty' hours. Makes drivers their own enemies, in short, and makes it easy for companies to take advantage.

Mileage pay doesn't have to be a losers bet but in today's trucking world it probably is. It locks many of us into a one-dimensional, wall-to-wall trucking life limited to shippers, receivers and the roads between them, rest areas and truck stops, fast food and no time for side trips or the energy to get out of the cab once you pull to a stop. Surprise! That's not all there is, nor should it be...

Anyway, since I stopped by here--to an abandoned thread--I see new muddy tracks all over the place from that mud puddle in front of the unlocked door. And... hold the phone!

Oh, my, my. Lookee here. Found a couple more reels of 'Gerdin's Dream' to put on the projector...

All fictional, of course.

 

Gerdin's Dream--A Fictionalized, Speculative Parody of a Possible Executive Dream that NEVER HAPPENED and NEVER WILL...

The Second Unconscious Dream Segment

Interwoven through much of Western Literature you find references to the River of Forgetfulness, Lethe. For example, in the Inferno, traveling through the nine rings of Hell, Dante wrote that souls could not reincarnate until they had bathed in the River of Forgetfulness and forgotten their lives.

Of course, we all carry with us a deep and wide River of Forgetfulness, that boundary between the conscious and the larger part of our psyche that is the unconscious, the larger part of who we really are that sits like the lower, hugely larger part of an iceberg below sea level.

There, all sorts of turmoils roil...

And so it is with Mike Gerdin who, as he woke from this bad dream, the part he could remember, down on his hands and knees begging and pleading the GordonDuo to return to Heartland. This part he could remember, his fervor, their seeming indifference, even glee as his tears flowed freely.

While within the dream Gerdin still had a strand of--shall we call it 'consciousness'?--of the more important first and second segments of his dream, but the moment he awoke and his conscious consciousness kicked in, so did that protective boundary, the River of Forgetfulness that protects us all from the searing pain below...

Nor was the second segment just a one-time occurrence, no. No, this was a nightly ritual that consciously Gerdin had no memory of, not even a ghostly outline of, just the push up of a little nausea here and there.

The Universe seeks balance and in Gerdin's case, each night he was visited with the pain he had inflicted that day and there was much pain and he had to feel and share in it fully. Drivers, mechanics, office workers, investors, friends, family and relatives and loves ones, angry landlords whose rent had not been paid, bill collectors, tax collectors, Gerdin felt all the anguish, embarrassment, all the emotion, all of it.

He felt the loneliness of wives and girlfriends, boyfriends and husbands, significant others both faithful and unfaithful, even family pets. He felt the abandonment of mothers and children, the estrangement of family with chairs left empty on holidays, birthdays, graduations, sports events and other special days. As each appeared before him, Gerdin felt and shared it all.

There were ex-wives and ex-husbands in line, too, and anguish felt over missed child support payments and Gerdin was swept up into their painful feelings, too. He wept.

What a frightful nightmare! What a roller coaster of emotions, of pain.

In his dream, first in the long line were the GordonDuo... the two, so dedicated and loyal to Gordon that Heartland had let sit and sit and sit... until finally Heartland was rid of them!

Gerdin would have to feel and share their pain, their loss and abandonment.


(Any resemblance to real persons, while perhaps not entirely coincidental, is entirely FICTIONAL.)

 

The husband moved to this company back in 2013 after coming off his student year from FFE. After all of us starving from that POS company, Gordon seemed like a godsend. Started off making around 2,300-3,000 miles each week. Pretty decent DM kept him running while he was out and got him home at his requested time. A few months into it, he started having turbo issues. This is when we first got a glimmer of the joke that is the maintenance process for these trucks. He put it in the shop, requested a loaner to keep him running, and went on his merry until his truck was fixed and they could work him back to it. This became a part of every week or second week. Turbo would go out, he’d put it in the shop, they’d “fix” it, and he’d get to run it for awhile before the same problem reoccured. The mechanics don’t trouble shoot. Not even a little. They plug it to the computer and work off the diagnostic results. And if you mention this is a reoccuring problem they don’t look at the work history to see what’s been done. It doesn’t seem like rocket science that if you are doing the same freakin’ repair over and over that something else is the problem.
After this went on for some time the husband finally got moved to another truck (around the same time Heartland took over). This truck was aolder but had less miles. He also got a new (and not improved) DM based out of Chicago. We’re based out of Pac, WA. Now his APU has him in the shop each week. Sometimes the shop will release the truck as fixed and when he asks them what they did on repairs they’ll look at the history and realize that it never made it into the bay at all. I mean how unprofessional can you get?? It never fails that after he gets the truck “fixed”, it’s back down and out after a few days or a week, tops. All the time spent trying getting the truck readmitted to a shop, find a loaner, and get back running means no miles. When he’s finally in the loaner, he gets dispatched crappy miles so they can keep him near his truck so they can work him back to it quickly when it’s (not) fixed). On top of that when he actually is running the miles don’t come in like they used to. For the last 6 mos he’s been bringing in, on average, a whopping $300 weekly check. My daughter makes better than that working part time at the local burger flopper.
I don’t know how Gordon isn’t up Freightliner’s arse about this kind of stuff. They must be hemorrhaging money constantly having to put a truck in for the same issue.
BTW, he's driving a reefer/company truck. I hope this is the appropriate place to post this. I'm learning the ropes.

 

Part timer!

 

I actually will match that this week, but only because I took an extra day off sitting at 2948 in long prairie. Mn with a 950 mile ride home today as soon as she finishes unloading/reloading me. Be safe, I don't want to have to find someone else to argue with!