Random LTL Rants (all are welcomed)

City has been slow by me so I’ve been just working outbound dock and doing short turns. I ran nights before switching to city. #### I really miss driving at night. I got home pretty late but I really enjoyed my little 130 mile turn last night. I’d probably go back to linehaul if it wasn’t for my current life situation. Divorced 50/50 custody, just wouldn’t work out with the kids. My raise from going back to nights would get ate up by a nanny for the overnights lol.

 

Yep, we've been dead as a coffin nail for a couple months.

Lots and lots of grumbling workers. I'm fine, saved for the rainy days. Lots of guys who pulled 140k/yr for the past couple years are so caught up in the consumerist life they cant miss one night before falling behind on bills.

Dock, P&D, and office staff are down to 30 hours a week as an average. Line guys are all down a run or two every week. Line is doing better than everyone else though. By quite a large margin. We've had a few weeks around the holidays where lots of people missed 2-3 days a week. I had a week down to 18 hours.

Management all say late spring and early summer the flood gates are going go open and we'll be running nonstop and the busiest we've ever been. I'm pretty skeptical.

Old job just negotiated a new contract and are paying the same as I am making in LTL. Per diem is way up too which I don't get being local. It's like pulling teeth trying to get onto the linehaul division here where the real money is. I'll be pretty miffed if I get laid off and all I did was work dock and did P&D cleanup #### for dispatch. Old job was tanker regional running nights. If you ran hard you'd be done by wed/thurs and have a 3-4 day weekend every week plus 40-45 hours and per diem. If the housing market wasn't so ####ed I'd have never left but you need a six figure income to make it as a single man under the financialized-corporate ruled modern America.

7 years linehaul running hard is all I need. Pay off a cheap fixer upper house; I'm out of trucking. Gonna be a gov't job slacker. Either blading dirt roads again or maybe a building/house inspector or appraiser. Ride around the county in a blank white pickup truck and tote a clipboard. Truckin can kiss my ###. I'll be out before 40. Just need a few good years.

Edit: I'm also sick of being called in to work 3 hours in a day and having to drive an hour each way to the terminal because there is so little work. I have no idea why management has guys #####ing about being short hours and giving me hours I don't need when I work barely more in a day than I spent just commuting there. I'd rather just stay home and have the day off.

 

Cooper sends these city trailers out west for linehaul to run in the snow. You can tell they pre-date the sale to Knight Swift because the tandem slide has a stop at the 41' foot hole. Idiot proofed for eastern bridge laws. They are not meant for running west of the Mississippi.

Out here we run light, a lot of cardboard and plastic freight. I dunno about you all, but when I get a trailer with 14k on it and am dispatched through 500 miles of snow and wind, I like to slide those tandems back to the 45 foot mark or so. Can't do that.

 

Write it up and maybe the mechanics will cut those stoppers off at some point in the future...Probably not, but it would make me feel better at least.

 

Got a new OB dock worker a couple weeks ago. An offspring of the inbound dispatcher. He’s too lazy to build a deck in a trailer so a pup is just floor loaded. I mention it to the OB supervisor. Instead of telling him to fix it or how to they just add another pup. When I started about 8 years ago I would be told to rework that trailer but nowadays no one cares. My bid truck has been in the shop for a while so I’ve been taking different trucks lately. No big deal. There’s a 25’ Pete that’s been sitting nose in so I assume it’s out of service. Get to work the other day and the 25 is the only truck in the lot. Goes thru on my handheld so I ask about it. Oh it’s fine just needs fuel. The fuel gauge was completely bottomed out. Truck stop is walking distance from my center. I literally thought I was gonna stall out on the way. Bunch my lazy ######## by me and spineless management. So I no longer build decks or fuel trucks lol…. Well I’ll still put fuel in the trucks at least.

 

For what possible reason??

 

Side shift is the only reason I was able to max cube my pup on Friday. 1 20 foot long skid, about 2 feet high, 8,000 lbs and a second 16 foot long, 1 foot high skid that wouldn't lift more than a foot off the ground, and 6 nine foot high skids with a head load, trailer sitting above the dock plate. Dock supervisor said "get as much as you can, I'll hold the rest". Pulled off most of the head load, put the 20 footer on the left then decked above, putting skids on and then using side shift to move to deck boards over. It took forever, and whoever is unloading the ####### is going to MF me to hell while trying to unstrap/offload the quad deck, but I guarantee it looks the same as it did when I loaded it.