Snackbar is chillin'....at Shaffer

Yes, yes you can.

$5 wine will mess you up, $15 wine will leave you disappointed, $25-50 wine is pretty darn good, but once you get over $100 there are diminishing returns and over $1,000 you're just burning money.

 

I wasn’t thinking about the wine either. Lol

 

I understand that these posts are his way of stress relief, but for many of us SSB is the first guy:



There are a lot of things that he does that just don't make any kind of sense. Like when Ops asked him to rescan a BOL so he rescaned it 10 times. His posts don't read like the 20+ year industry veteran he is, they read like a new driver who is just figuring things out.

Many years ago, there was a driver who worked for my company. We'll call him Angry Driver. The first time I met Angry Driver I was hanging out in the Edwardsville OC waiting on the company car and AD was ranting at a couple of other drivers about something. It was - memorable, shall we say. We'd bump into each other over the next few years, and each time Angry Driver was full of bile and vitriol. The second to last time I saw him we were at the Terre Haute Menards DC on a Thursday afternoon. He walked up to me as I was watching my trainee get coupled to our loaded trailer. Angry Driver told me how Ops had tried to saddle him with our load, but he was supposed to be home in Green Bay Friday, but "he wasn't going to take that poop" because it was going over to St Louis. I humored him for a couple of minutes, then tried to politely tell him I needed to keep my trainee moving. He followed us around as we did the pretrip, moaning the entire time about how the company was "too stupid to get him home on time". Once we got on the road I explained to my trainee that he would run into a lot of "Angry Driver" types. Guys, who despite their years of experience, don't understand how things work.

I knew that we'd be able to get to the store with the hours we had (Angry Driver could have as well) and there were several restaurants in the same plaza. Even though we had a 0600 appointment, odds are the store would have us back into the dock that night and then unload us in the morning and we'd be able to not start our clock until they were done. Or they would unload us right away and we creep out of the dock and finish our break in the lot. Even if we restarted our 10 after pulling from the dock, we would still have a fresh 14 when we started Friday morning. That would allow us to go to any of 5 different shippers that usually have loads heading in the direction of Green Bay, where we needed to go. Long story short, we made Green Bay by end of day Friday. Angry Driver could have done the same, but "he wasn't going to take that poop".

At that time, Trainees finished their classroom time about 14:00 on Saturday. I stopped by the yard to do a meet and greet with my trainee for the next week and then run him through the grocery store so he wouldn't be reliant on truck stops for everything. As we were going over the atlas, Angry Driver came into the building to scan his BOLs. Upon seeing me, he exclaimed "Those [naughty words] just got me in, when did those [naughty words] get you home?" He was less than pleased when I told him I was in on Friday, with time to spare, and had more paid miles to boot. Angry Driver started ranting, and at this point I'd had enough and said "If you're that unhappy, quit. I'm tired of you #####ing every time I see you". That was the last time I saw him.

Angry Driver didn't seem to understand how freight lanes or trip planning worked and certainly didn't understand how to communicate his plans to Ops. If you listened to his rants, it quickly became obvious that he owned the lions share of responsibility for things going sideways, but did not recognize his own role. He also didn't understand that his Driver Manager would only do the bare minimum for him, as his DM knew that no matter what happened Angry Driver was going to be, well angry.

As we roll down the road, most of my trainees will talk about their lives. They think they are the protagonist in their stories, but more often than not they embody the roll of Fredo, while seeing themselves as Michael Corleone. Insanity is defined as repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results. @drvrtech77 and I see eye to eye on virtually nothing, but from what I can see the guy understands how to figure out how a system works and then manipulate that system to his advantage. I follow this thread more for his and @newbietrucker91 posts than for SSB's. I appreciate @BM 58 's posts because they depict a counter point to SSB's experiences which could be useful to new drivers reading this thread.

 

I’ve pissed people off for comments I’ve made here about SSB’s problems. I think he’s a good dude but when you have the same issues over and over then you have to look in the mirror and figure out what the real problem is.
Plus when you are a 20+ year veteran in this business and continue to deal with mega carrier bs over and over how do you expect anything any different. I know how he likes to run but surely he can do better than where he is.
But once again, I’m not putting him down. Just don’t understand why he keeps putting himself through this bs.

 

Two thoughts - first, scale the load yourself. You don't know if your tractor is heavier or lighter than the previous driver's, or if the load shifted (Please see I think I'm over weight )

The other thought is about how the fuel solution program works. I don't know if your program is the same as ours, but there are only about 3 major fuel optimization programs out there and they all pretty much work the same.

The fuel optimizer is a stand alone program. It does not interact with other programs, at least not well. When the driver sends in his fuel request, the fuel program then asks another system where the driver is and where the driver is headed. This is where the problem is. In theory, my company's trucks are polled at least once an hour and every time the tractor breaks are set. Overall, it now works as planned, but most truck of the data is at least 30 minutes behind the driver by the time it is processed. Back when we were running Qualcom's, tracking was usually running more than 1 hour behind no matter where in the country you were. That lag time increases when the cellular network is congested or otherwise limited. When the Packers play at home, our operations group has almost NO VISIBILITY of trucks in Green Bay for 1 hour before the game until 1 hour after, and limited visibility for most of the weekend as Green Bay's cell network can not handle the tripling of the population. Similarly we have limited updating for trucks between Mauston, WI and Eau Claire, WI as cellular data in that area was 3g until recently (heck just north of Black River Falls was still 2g in 2019). And all that is before we start talking about the company's own server system and it's data priorities.

Odds are that when you sent the first request the program thought you were well north of where you actually were. Then when you sent second request, the fuel program still thought you were back where you started. I have no idea how to "force update" your location with Peoplenet.

Not one of the people who administer these fuel optimizer think they work well. I know our guy hates the fuel optimizer with a passion, but can't find a cost effective solution to improve it. It's gotten much better since we dumped Qualcom, but it still makes illogically logical decisions. Even with dealing with those stupidites - either from drivers going 80 miles OOR or Ops having to get involved - the fuel optimizer still saves us money. I didn't believe him when he said that the savings even pay for the idiots who run out of fuel, but it does by a healthy margin. Fueling in S. Beloit, IL is 20 cents a gallon cheaper for us than fueling in Beloit, WI. Out in Cali there are two Pilots 15 miles apart, one averages 90 cents a gallon less than the other.

When you look at just fuel costs, on paper it can look cheaper to add 80 miles to a load to get the cheap fuel. Just like it looks like running US 30 across IN and OH is more cost effective than running I-80, even when you account for the extra travel time. It's only when you factor in where the truck stops are that the math changes, and even then it's not quite enough. But add in data from appointment times and time remaining on driver's logs and it becomes a horse of an entirely different color. It's almost impossible to write a computer program that takes into account all variables at the appropriate weighting from a pure cost effectiveness perspective. When the data the program relies upon is out of date, the program appears useless from the driver's perspective, but when looked at on a division and enterprise level, it still makes sense.

 

What we have here is mutual antagonism.

SSB and Crete/Shaffer need a divorce. And I'm sure it will happen before too long.

They are just not compatible. Neither was I, nor many others. But some are content with Crete/Shaffer and do well there.

SSB needs to find a company that values what he offers. IMO, he needs to get away from short haul.

He doesn't have the patience for dealing with all that is entailed with how Crete/Shaffer operates. Neither did I.

On the reefer side, running long runs, I've learned to appreciate having the same trailer for long periods of time. And dealing with only a few customers per week.

 

Why don’t you go to Holland enterprises??..they run coast to coast.

 

Got a buddy that stays after me about hauling sand in the oil fields out around Pecos.

He's in a sleeper truck and flies out there from Florida and stays out 5 or 6 weeks. Then flies back home for a week or so.

I know my back is not stable enough to deal with the lease roads. But he seems to be making much better money doing that than OTR money.

I don't think SSB has tried that part of the industry.

 

Sand is good until oil prices tank. And even with sand the BS is probably worse. It’s harder finding a good sand company. They are real crap bags in most areas. I did 8 years in the oilfield and wouldn’t haul sand. Thats a statement LOL.