The day to day ramblings of the LTL business.

Gotta love the old cell phone. Depending on the situation, you can change people's minds really fast if they are in the wrong.

Our equipment is notorious for breaking down. Because of this, our management tries to run us with the defects anyway and route us around the scales.

No thank you... I quit playing that game a long time ago. I am friends with several LEOs and they love it when I call them up to ask questions concerning the status of my truck.

"Hey Bob, I just talked to my friend who happens to be a DoT officer. He thinks you are full of poopy and that my truck is definitely out of service. He also bet me a six pack of beer that I won't make it into town if he sees that piece of equipment on the interstate."

I will never get an invite to any of Bob's pancake socials. Bob hates me.

 

My trucks a 2011.

 

So have any of you had this happen ever? Today i get to work on time and my trailer was not in it should have been there in theory, but it wasn't. So it's 2:30am and my trailer is nowhere to be seen. I call up my voice mail to see what's cooking and nope no intell there so basically line haul is running late with my trailer? Have you guys ever experienced line haul running late?

Anyhow one of our sets of doubles comes in and the driver tells me that my trailer was paired with a late release trailer and it would be in around 4:30am! That puts me behind 2hrs! Usually on Thursday I can be done by noon and back at the yard by 1pm today I didn't clock out till 15:00!

I was a little steamed, I wasn't all that nice to the transit driver who brought my trailer even though it wasn't his fault, it was goofy dispatching, but still I told him I said I'm 2hrs late get that thing unhooked I got to go, just drop the trailer anywhere. I didn't even care to hear his response because it's irrelevant.

I don't much care for line haul running late and I'm sure you guys do not either, it really has adverse problems when it is running late.

How do you guys handle late line haul do you tell your supervisors or lodge complaints with dispatch or remind the line haul drivers that you have time sensitive deliveries to make or do they not care about any of that. (probably the later of all of those.)

 

So today on my way home from work I saw a twofer not good. YRC Yellow Freight on a non truck route pulled off to the side old 2nd gen Volvo and Yellow 48' city trailer with HAZMAT Placards on pulled off to the side with two police cars. Behind the truck was a rusty Mazda with a good scrap along the front quarter panel. I see the YRC driver sitting on the ground with a clip board doing what looked like accident report paper work. Then I don't know half a mile down the street same street same side of the road the police have US Foods truck pulled over. Writing him a ticket for being off of a designated truck route.

Mercy Me Oh My I thought, not good.

 

Dispatch prolly should have given you a heads up on the delay. Bit of a douche move on them to let that one go.

Keep in mind that it wasn't the linehaul guys fault that nobody kept you in the loop. The guy that brought you your stuff was also 2 hours behind his schedule and probably just as frustrated as you. Stuff breaks down, runs get delayed.

About three years ago I was running a set to a turn point. My back box had serious electrical issues and it took three hours to replace all the parts. I got to my turn point and the Spokane driver was livid with me. He just went off on me like I had any control over being late.

Three weeks later I had another turn and ran into the same driver. He stuck out his hand and apologized about being so short with me the previous month. Said he was pissed cause my breakdown caused him to run out of hours and he had to lay over. He missed his son's hockey game.

It's easy to get mad at the moment while not knowing everything that contributed to the events leading to a delay.

 

It was dispatch they had two routes put together and some real goofy routes and set ups that really did not make any sense. They had some goofy Akron-Cleveland drops that really were very non-sensical. What they should have done was put route 16 and 17 together which is what is what they did not do. Now usually the transit guys leave a VM, but the one's who run out of the warehouse do not, not usually and that makes things crappy.

 

We got the same issue. Actually it is worse. 10 trailers of LTL freight clogging up the yard. We don't have enough drivers to deliver all of it.