The Food Service Rant thread

Well, today was kind of crappy at work. We had a meeting and some of the information that was relayed to us in the meeting I wasn't to thrilled about. They want to change stuff and are trying to measure everything blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda, more corporate jargon I guess this year was not a good one, business wise our branch grew, but performance wise we pretty much got our behinds whopped was pretty much the underlying theme. Business is up and performance is down.

Good news is I only have one more year in the truck I have right now (if it even makes it a year) company said 12 months from now all the Internationals are going bye bye there getting rid of them, shining artifacts of the past is all they will be. Which is good the fleet of Internationals is aging and are really only spare trucks anyhow they've all been past around from DC to DC and there all beat up and junked up. The one i have now is dependable, but performance wise it's awful it's a total rag and it's just been fixed to it has a lot of new parts, but it should have been sold off in my opinion I would have never fixed it, I would have just sold it off.

My route today was meddled with a little bit. It was alright, but I'm used to doing things one way and when you have to do something the other way sometimes it screws you up and I had gotten screwed up a couple times today and it cost me time.

Had my cooler imploed and explode on me. Not good made a huge mess had some grape tomatoes before the day even began fall over on to everything and then that made some cases wet and then that led to the explosion later on in the afternoon yeah it was good times...

 

Alright so now I'm a big time company boy, had two back hauls two days in a row after my route was complete I like watching all the OTR trucks back into the docks, it's been a very long time since I've pulled any thing bigger then a 28' trailer, I've screwed around with some doubles in the yard at work, but haven't hooked onto a 53' trailer in a while and I've never really driven a sleeper cab truck either, whats funny though is the freezer warehouse we pick up at they make the OTR trucks wait and wait and they usually get to the straight trucks right away-go figure.

I see a lot of the OTR guys at the freezer warehouse and I guess with most of them it must be a life style, but they all look run down and wear sandals and shorts and socks with sandals. They all have the blue tooth hands free set in there ear like the borges from Star Trek (I know I know were not allowed to talk on our cell phones and drive it's against the law hands free I know, personally my cell phone to me is an albatross that I have to carry with me in my pocket ha-ha.) Obviously while I was a tad disheveled looking today, as well, I have to wear a uniform because I work for a big name company that want's us all to have fancy uniforms, like I think don't some of the LTL guys have to wear uniforms too?

I know XPO-Conway has uniforms and obviously UPS which kind of goes with out saying. Even our transit guys have to wear uniforms it's the rules. I don't know being an OTR driver sounds like fun and looks like fun maybe, but then again going to strange cities hauling strange loads sliding tandem axles, and the warehouse I pick up from is usually a lot of owner operators who are picking up loads from freight brokers which is why they have the thing in there ear for booking loads and chasing payment and probably some of them dabble in brokering freight them selves. Really a freight broker is a sales man who sells wholesale transportation. A warehouse puts it out there that they need a load moved the brokers come in and bid and get the load, who ever is cheapest then the load goes on a load board and a small company or big company or owner operator books the load and away it goes.

I know though in the LTL world certainly brokers use LTL companies and probably a little vise versa, but I also know with LTL it's a lot more of the LTL company has there own sales people and does stuff more directly they go straight to who ever it is and make them a customer and cut out the broker.

Lots of fun things happening I put my new two wheeler into yesterday and today was really using it hard today it works pretty good, I like it, nice light aluminum frame 500 pound capacity, I was dragging in two loads of freezer at one time out of a high school that I do fun in the sun. Got my through put up to 11-15 cases at a time (depending on the cases size and product) instead of maybe 7-8 cases at a time. Any how I have to go to sleep now very tired.

 

MBM is sad that you left them.
Hows the new job going delivering construction materials?
Thursday morning I listen to Red Eye Radio when I'm sitting at my first stop waiting for the customer to show up and I hear the advertisements for JB Hunt I guess there really doing some great things at JB Hunt.

 

Quality of life occasionally trumps dollars, especially if you were that miserable at mbm. You're young enough to tough it out a minute, it'll be worth it long term.

 

I got passed up by an MBM truck today on I-90 going through down town C-Town I went "Huh there's an MBM truck."

It was a mid roof sleeper Freightliner I don't know if it was an old Columbia (are those even still in MBM"s fleet or have they all aged out by now?) I think it was a Freight Shaker pulling a fully marked MBM Trailer complete with the MBM Rocky Mount, North Carolina and everything.