team driver question

Been driving with my wife for 5 weeks now with werner, I heard they like to run your butt off, and they kinda do, in a sense. My idea of running ur butt off is constant coast to coast 3k mile loads. They are giving us mainly solo loads, so its like two solo drivers occupying one truck. We do probably 4 solo loads for every one team load.

Its like, we do a 500 mile load, a 350 mile load, a 120 mile load, a 9 mile load, yes, I'm not lying, we actually did a 9 mile load in cali the other day, and then they throw us a bone and give us a 1700 mile load. There's lots of downtime between loads, so after each solo load, we sit around averagage 6 to 20 hrs waiting on the next one. Well if you're not moving, you ain't making money. I wouldn't mind 12 hrs of down time if I knew I was getting a 3k mile team load, but sitting around in a truck stop all night so we can pick up our whopping louisville to indianapolis load..... not cool.

We run each load the best we can, never late unless shippers fault, have yet to decline a load, and we are getting 4900 miles a week. Can we survive on that? Sure. But I just wish we could get team loads so we don't have the hassle of dealing with 20 shippers and consignees each week instead of 5. Its real annoying having to keep up with 3 loads a day rather than 3 loads a week. Maybe werner pissed off their customers and has no more team loads, or maybe we aren't friendly enough with dispatch to get the good loads.

The longest load we have had in 5 weeks of being on the road was 1800 miles. Have yet to break 2k, and 3k? I must be dreaming. I actually did get a 3k mile preassign which I got excited about, but was taken away at the last second for some reason.

Well, teams what do you think? Are we being screwed or is this normal?

 

I went to their website but couldn't really find much info, like the qualifications for team drivers, if they hire in FL or not. All I saw was their pay package.

 

I remember reading some of your posts before about team werner and you had a good experience, so naturally you're going to defend them. First off, a 9 mile load is a slap in the face to a team. I can understand doing a 200 mile load to get to an area with a team load, but 9 miles is a joke. Also, we don't have 4 500 mile loads, ever. It will be a 120 mile load, a 300 mile load, a 500 mile load, a 9 mile load, then oh I get a whopping 1700 mile.

And let's say I did get four 500 mile loads, that'd be fine, IF they were back to back with no downtime to keep the truck moving like you would one 2k mile load, but that doesn't happen. Four loads vs one load equals four times the crap. I will have to sit at four times as many docks, which means I'm not moving. Can you understand the difference? Almost every short load we have is followed by hours of down time.

I seem to remember you claiming 22 to 24k miles a month, last week we got 4800 miles, we have had maybe one 6000 mile week in the past five we have been out. There's something wrong with that. Me and my wife want to run, and sitting at four slow recievers is a hell of a lot worse than one. Ill take the long load anyday.