Why does it seem everyone hates brokers

Yea, it's called my employer.

 

Broker won't budge on a 500mi $1,500 load. Next day same broker reluctantly agrees to $1,750 on the 500mi run.

I'm winding up straps and the Receiver asks how much the broker paid on the load. I said they only wanted to pay $1,500 but finally agreed to $1,750. Reciever cusses and says they charged him $2,700 and told him it's just too difficult to find trucks.
That Broker was screwing both of us while feeding us the opposite stories about availability of trucks.
That's why I despise people who lie and swindle. Brokers just happen to fit the profile on a regular basis...

 

I'm not sure you're cut out for this. How long have you been doing it? Seems like you have a lot of angst and not a very good understanding of how trucking works in the modern day or for that matter, how a cell phone works.

You don't need to delete apps. You need to go in to your location services in settings and turn them off when you aren't using them. The only one I won't agree to is textlocate, if I'm remembering the name right, because it wants you to change your browser settings so it can always run in the background or something.

Oh, you could make this easier though. Just go get your own customers. It's real simple. That's why so many do it. :eyeroll: Give it a try.

 

You don't tell me what I do with my phone. I paid almost 1500 dollars for it, I pay for monthly service on it. If I say no tracking software, NO TRACKING SOFTWARE WILL BE INSTALLED. Brokers can go suck a #### egg. Because when I put that #### on my phone, it's not tracking the load, ITS TRACKING MY PHONE. I can no longer take my phone in personal locations because the #### broker thinks that's where the load is going. I had a nightmare a few years ago from this exact situation from when my company provided a phone for us to install all this tracking software on and I forgot it was in my pocket. Broker started calling and #####ing at my company because they were tracking me on a dirt road in the woods. I was walking my dog down a country road with the company phone still in my pocket.

I'm very much cut out for this. I'm just not going to bend over and take it in the ### and let ####ty brokers violate my right to privacy. If they want me to install tracking software on a phone, I told my company to buy me a phone and I'd be happy to. But I'm not installing it on MY phone.

#### brokers. We use Samsara and brokers can be emailed a link where they can track my truck via my Samsara tablet thats mounted in the truck and only leaves the truck when I'm on hometime. They just don't want to do that. They want to use "their" software. Well #### them. You want to track the load? Use the free Samsara link. If that ain't good enough, #### off. My company will let you know when I deliver.

 

Hilariously, TextLocate is the T&T option we have. Nobody in the office actually uses it, because it's genuinely terrible from a usability standpoint, and most drivers generally refuse to use it in the first place. Nope, good old fashioned check calls for me, thank you. Most of the time, I'm content to just leave the drivers on my freight alone. Y'all got enough crap to worry about without me bugging you.

 

My apologies. You're right, you are cut out for this. You'll be a company driver being told exactly what to do and how to do it for the rest of your life. Enjoy that.

But for your own sanity even away from trucking you should know how location services and permissions work in your phone. If you don't, you're letting all kinds of crap track you.

 

I couldn't agree more but it's never gonna work with general freight and big accounts for big customers. They are simply too many fly by night carriers out there working load boards they don't have enough skin in the game to be trusted. And a truck full of freight could be worth 100 times what it cost to move it.

I'm sure the brokers here will comment more on this but it's not like have any personal interest in tracking you, it's what their customers want and they have to satisfy the customer to get the loads just like we do. I'm quite sure that tracking is written into their big contracts.

 

So, I very rarely make a check call. If I do, it's usually because there's some critical factor about the load. I advise the carrier in question up front, and will default to calling dispatch (if the carrier has dispatch. If it's an owner operator, I'll work it out with them how they want to be contacted.) The only time I'm calling after a driver without that, is if something has happened either as regards receiving time, location, etc *or* if they're either coming up close on the proscribed delivery time, or are already late. Again, preference is to deal with the home office first, except if I'm unable to get ahold of someone over there.

Most of the time, I'm not dealing with time critical stuff. When I am, it's relayed and agreed upon in advance, when the load is booked and paperwork is laid out. There's no mystery to it, and even then, I'm not burning up a driver's line because someone's getting antsy. There's usually a reason I need to be calling, and I try to explain that pretty thoroughly. In the past several years, I can only think of a handful of times in thousands of loads where someone got bent out of shape for me making a call. Usually, the first words out of my mouth are if I'm calling a driver are, "Hey, it's PPDCT-- sorry to bother you while you're working, but I need to get/give an updated on the load you're on for me. Reason is XXX."

 

I understand the sentiment here (and appreciate the tone in this post rather than the angst ridden posts seen else where in this thread), but unfortunately for more and more large shippers not using some type of geo tracking (MP, fourkites, etc) simply isn't an option. They've established KPIs and include geo fencing performance (number of loads tracked, number of loads "super tracked", etc) as part of your performance as a provider. If you don't adhere to the customer requests you can end up losing the business to someone else.