Stevens Transport aviary

Can someone help Mister out here ?? He's bored.

 

Not me. I'm off until saturday. He'll have to fly solo.

 

That obvious? Something about 3.5 hours at a receiver that does that to a guy...

Although, I did go for a 9 mile bike ride today...!

 

The office really needs to get some process improvement going. I heard from a fellow driver that had a load to Laredo, it was his sixth trip down there. He got turned away at the receiver because he didn't havexa trailer inspection. Nobody let him know that he should take it by JO Alvarez. As a matter of fact he did not know where it was. How hard is a canned message? Then last week he got sent for an ice cream load and got hung up for three hours because no one told him he needed his trailer precooled to -20. I always try to remember to do that, but really, we get reminders to use the meat lock, why not a reminder to precooled the trailer? Things like this happen all the time and it's usually the driver that gets hung out. It also makes the company look bad when the load assignment says you have a window and you show up to find you have an appointment but the csr never bothered to pass that info to the driver. I had a trainer that told me every load going to Laredo needed to be inspected but not everyone got told this I guess.
Just some random ranting. Now I need to decide if I'm going to take a 34 or keep running on recapture.

 

I obviously can not speak for the other driver, bit I have usually found all those kind of special instructions at the end of the load assignment. The few Ice Cream loads I pulled all said to precool it, and my one load to Laredo mentioned the trailer inspection. I had to call my DM to figure out what it was talking about and directions to get there though.

Were it me, I would run the recap hrs because you never know if your next pick up will give you another reset anyway. I personally do very few resets, usually only at home or the yard, although I just had one at the Cummijgs repair center.

 

The person who 'builds' the load is suppose to note these things in the load profile. Often times the load is built without all the data from the shipper...where it goes, when it gets there. This information is sent over at a different times, often in the form of emails to the CSR. Shippers aren't always timely.
So we may pull a load off the board at 0800, have it built by noon and 'soft planned' on a truck by 1500. Soft planning (as opposed to hard planned...a preplan to the driver) is done to allocate loads but isn't 'hard planned' often due to missing information or to be sure the truck is going to be available to pu a load.
An example is where you are scheduled to deliver to Ralphs in Compton at 0900 and pu a load at T&A at 1500.
They're only a few miles apart, but as anyone that knows you can do a full 10 while waiting for Ralphs to get their sorry buts working.
So often, the load won't be hard planned until they know you are actually in the door being unloaded. Often, the planner may need to switch with another truck, as T&A has very strict pu appts.
Then there's the missing information issue.
So we get a load from Swift that is heading to Laredo. Where will it unload? There are several expediters they use. Some cross transfer the freight to another trailer, such as at the Dolores location, others take the trailer directly to Mexico.
Often we don't know until that information comes to the CSR.
Well if the load is soft planned (waiting on information) and the information comes to the CSR at 1900 at night, guess what? It gets dispatched without that information. Usually because the pu time is later that evening, even tho the DLD is 30 hours after that.
Those meat plants are very efficient machines, even tho we don't see that.
They begin killing the cows, pigs, chickens or whatever when your trailer is there. So if you're late dropping your trailer, someone will have a late load. True, your load is being processed, but the next driver may be late due to your being late to the pu.
All kinds of things out of yours and Stevens control may delay your load...maybe the bullwagon got delayed.
So often a load is dispatched before the information is sent to us.
Now sometimes, the missing information is dispatch's fault.
True, it's good to tell a driver all the same things over and over, but that's not always practical.
The phones are backed up 20 deep, the qualcoms are running 20 mintues behind and you call to say, "hey man! where's my load? I was empty an hour ago!" (assuming you know you have a preplan)
In the pecking order, QC's are often handled in this order: 1-Execute Swaps, 2-Send money for Lumpers, etc, 3 Fix Loaded or Empty Calls...further down the line is the Empty Call. We have to review the call, look to see if there is any OS&D, make sure the computer processed your QC (you'd be surprised how often it doesn't!), then review your preplan (to see if we need to give you a security talk, tell you to get your trailer washed, etc), then dispatch you.
Well, as the old saying goes, "When you're up to your tail in alligators..."
We often (and it's our fault) just dispatch the load and get on to the next QC message, while answering another phone call.
Hope that explains some of this.
Not a perfect world.

 

Clegg, do they have you heading to the yard yet to get that diesel-holic you drive looked at?

 

I gotta start reading my posts before I press SEND. My english teacher would cut my knuckles off for all the disjointed thoughts, poor punctuation and wrong case usage.
Geeezz!

 

Me Truck Driver... hukd.on fornx werkd fer me...

It's called knowing you're target audience. I think we all understand and appreciate your insights with or without tue English language butchery

 

I had to go home for a couple days to take care of some things. Just got back on the road last night. Need to run some miles before I hit the yard. I bought the wife a new car for our 19th anniversary, and I gotta get some cash coming in lol.