Too soon to change companies?

Hi there,
My husband currently drives for Werner, started there as a new driver on 4/1/13, fresh out of CDL school. He went with Werner because they have a pet policy and a rider policy and I can ride along. We thought it would be better to be together on the road rather than live separately for 3 or 4 weeks at a time. He chose OTR, Eastern Regional. His 8 weeks training at Werner was awful, due to the trainer, (a story in and of itself), but he persevered and was issued his own truck. The truck was a rescue, it was a wreck but he tried to work with it. He got home about 14 days later for home-time and I packed up my things and the dog and went with him for the past 7 weeks OTR. What an experience. We came home the first time after 4 weeks (for 4 days), went back out again for 3 more weeks and are now home again on the last day of 2.5 days off.

He loves driving, I love going along. But the trucks we've been living in are awful. We didn’t expect a new truck but we did expect a working truck. The first truck, a KW "junior" was an embarrassment to drive, it was all dented in on the passenger side from the previous driver. The 5[SUP]th[/SUP] wheel had issues, tires were flat, there was a laundry list of repair items … but I won't list it all. Without going into every little detail, it kept breaking down and finally the company rented us a car (another chapter to this saga that I won’t go into detail about right now in the interest of time), we transferred all our things from it to the car and drove from Detroit, MI to Indy to a terminal to get a different truck.
We got a ProStar, it was larger, thank God ... no more banging our heads 20 times a day on everything while trying to maneuver around inside it. The down side is that it was a smoker's truck and it reeked. If you are not a smoker you understand how awful that can be. It was hard to breathe in there, we were coughing all the way from Indy to the Gulf Coast of FL where we live. We were sent home with it (that was our first hometime) and we spent an entire day cleaning it, washing it, scrubbing it, spraying it with Febreeze, (all the cleaning products were at our expense), trying to remove the smoke smell, trying to make lemonade out of a lemon. All we wanted to do was make it livable and breathable. We were not able to get all the smell out of it but it was a little better.

We got back on the road after our 4 days home-time and this trip went better than the last one until the truck a/c went out (after 4 days) in 96 degree heat, which meant it was about 115 degrees inside the truck. We opened the windows and kept driving (it’s so noisy on the interstates with the windows down!) because in our experience with breakdown with the last truck, we learned that we'd have to sit while it was being fixed and we'd not make any money while sitting. (one week we made zero pay and another week we made $75 and we were "in the hole" because it costs money to be on the road, as your know ... have to eat, etc.) After an entire day of driving in the heat and noise, we couldn’t take anymore and we had to call breakdown, it was too hot, and we had to (try to) sleep in a drop lot in a sweltering hot truck with no a/c. How was he supposed to get rested enough to drive in the morning in those conditions? So we sent the breakdown message. They sent us to an International dealer the next morning and we spent 10.5 hours in their customer lounge while the a/c was fixed. At least it had a/c.
Finally, we got back on the road again. We had been at the repair shop long enough that we could call it a 10 hour rest so we asked for a load and we were driving again, making a few bucks! Four days later it broke again. We didn't notify breakdown this time, we just wanted to keep driving to make some money and get home for our scheduled home-time and figure out how to handle this. So that's where we are right now.

There is a LOT more to this story, breakdowns, broken trailers, flat tires on trailers in drop lots, being sent to receivers up in Canada that were closed when we arrived, babysitting their trailer full of products from Friday at 2pm until Monday at 8am when they re-opened, stuck in Canada with no cell service or internet, high priced food that wasn't fit for a junkyard dog, the list goes on.
Contacting Werner is not an option, contrary to their slogan "Werner Cares", they don't care. Can't call, they don't allow phone calls. If we try to call, they don't answer. Sending a message on the Qualcomm is futile; they send a message back ... "working on it" and then ignore us for the entire weekend. We didn't hear a thing, we felt abandoned, isolated. We tried to make the best of it. This happened more than once. Like I said, there is so much that happened that just didn’t feel right to us. But what do we know, we're new at this.

Once we got home, we did our usual, took everything out of the truck so I could begin laundry, wash all the bedding, rugs, clothes, etc. The truck still smells of smoke, it doesn’t come out no matter how much Febreeze or Pinesol we use, but we are going to scrub it down again before leaving out at 8am tomorrow morning, see if we can make it a little better. We both had problems breathing after living/sleeping in it for a few days… eyes itching, nose running, headaches, coughing, sore throat. It’s beginning to clear up now that we are back home again, breathing fresh air.

The a/c is still an issue. It decided to click back on while we were driving home on the last day of the trip, thank God, but we know it will go out again. It went on/off for the last week of our trip, mostly it was off. Once home, we reported it to breakdown and they said “drive to the nearest TA or Petro”. Looks like another day of waiting for repairs once back on the road.

This truck also has a camera onboard, we call it the “evil eye”. It rings all the time. It’s supposed to read the speed limit signs and make sure we stay within the limits and it also notifies you if it thinks you are going out of your lane and it beeps if a car cuts in too close while passing the truck (which happens all the time). It misreads signs, reads the speed limit signs on the exit ramps when we are not on them, notifies us that we are driving 30mph over the (ramp) speed, it misreads lane lines … OMG, we’d love to shoot it’s eye out. It’s a huge distraction. They send messages on the Qualcomm about keeping your dog restrained while driving and not using a cell phone, etc, etc … and then they put this HUGE evil eye distraction in the truck that goes off all day long for no reason! Really? WTH!

It also reads only in a straight line. So. We are driving on a tight two-lane (each direction) road in the middle of a small town in FL, going 35mph, the speed limit. An SNL truck comes up alongside us on our left, driving faster than the speed limit. The road curves slightly to the right and the SNL truck is now in front of us while passing us, yet we are both completely inside our own lanes. The Qualcomm goes off with a Critical Event message! It says it detected a collision at .3 seconds! There was no collision, no accident, nothing at all! A truck just passed us on a curve! Great.
There was no place to pull over in that town, and then we were spit out onto a country road with no shoulder to pull off onto either. A few miles down the road we found a little store with a dirt parking lot that we’d fit into and they were closed so we pulled in and tried to contact the company via phone to explain that we were OK, there was no accident, no collision. We got a hotline with options, press 1 if you are bleeding out, press 2 if you died, press 3 if you wrecked the truck, press 4 if you rolled the trailer, etc. (OK, maybe those weren’t the actual options, but they were similar.) There was no option for “bogus evil eye critical event” … and we weren’t about to select any of those options. So, frustrated, we got back on the road and drove the rest of the way home.

My husband is now faced with a broken truck and a critical event that never happened, great way to start a new trip tomorrow. He’s frustrated and disappointed. He just wants to drive, make enough money to pay our bills, get a decent truck that has NO evil eye distraction and go to work, is that asking too much of a company?

I got online and searched jobs for my husband, thinking there has to be somewhere he can drive that's better than what we've gone through so far. Found Knight, advertising for drivers. I then came to the boards, here, to read about Knight and also looked at their website. It says on their website that they require 3 months experience, which my husband has. He has 5 months, including the training weeks, and has driven 32,000 miles so far. Not much, but it’s something. He just wants to drive for a company that cares about him, knows he’s out there, will take a phone call, gives him a truck that runs! But is it a good thing or a bad thing for him to switch companies so soon into his driving career? He’s worried about that. He’s the type of guy who stays with something, he doesn’t run at the first bump in the road (although this time he’s actually considering it). He stayed with his last company for 25 years, he was an airline pilot at a company that was shut down last year, that’s why he’s trying this new transportation career.

He wants to work for a good company. Walmart, Knight, Budweiser, Coke, Pepsi driver …. Local delivery would work. What do you all suggest? We are thinking about calling Werner and asking them where they want us to take the truck, we bobtailed home from Kissimmee, FL Lowes DC and it’s secured in our own yard. This is so sad. Just don’t know what to do. It has cost us more money to be working OTR than we have made. What do you all think?

Thanks in advance.

 

Yep, I told him that Werner was on the "no" list but he wanted to try it anyway simply because he wanted to work for a company that would allow me to ride along. I guess he enjoys my company.

He's a good guy, a hard worker, good driver, dedicated. Just need to find the man a decent truck and let him drive! I even wondered about us buying our own truck ... but we know nothing about O/O or L/O and we'd probably lose our butts from ignorance.

 

Thanks for the info, much appreciated. But I went to their website and it appears that they are not hiring drivers from Florida. Darn.
http://www.drivewithptl.com/pc/company-drivers.html