Random LTL Rants (all are welcomed)

I work out of a satellite terminal. Most of you probably never heard of that or interacted with those. But it's a bare base operation staffed only with a handful of drivers. There is no terminal manager, immediate supervisor, dispatcher, or any other type of support staff here.

Linedrivers come in during the night and drop off and pick up trailers like at a regular terminal. It is up to us to figure out the routing, load planning, contacting customers for appointments, and doing stuff like ordering terminal supplies.

We have a parent terminal 200 miles away that kind of watches over things and interacts with us if something goes wrong. They also send the terminal manager down every two months to either give us a pep talk about not working fast enough, or to fire someone.

My conflict is our senior driver has been given full authority to run our barn and employ his personal discretion when it came to other drivers. This includes how many hours we receive, what time we start, and how many hours we can expect to wait to receive a call.

If he likes you, you get a guaranteed start time. He also lets you choose how many hours you want to work. If he doesn't, he groups you into several made up subclasses each with a colourful name that I can't mention on here.

It's a complete BS system. Cause I occasionally get tasked to work till almost midnight. He will call me at 5 AM that following morning and go over my route, appointments, what stops need a trailer spotted, where I am expected to do pickups, where he wants to trailers placed in the yard, and what other crap work he wants me to do. I am then expected to come in on my ten hours off, which would be 10 AM.

It's complete BS and that is why I am done.

 

We cycled through 27 employees in three years. We started out with 10, out of those ten, four remain. The other six that quit and left have been replaced five times each. We now have seven people doing the work of ten. Three of those people are slated to quit within the next six month.