Why I left C.R.England

Well, as I said, it's not all the company's fault. For instance, there was a truck I pulled out of a Pilot near Rockford. She left all the messages. She went home to get her hard copy CDL. And, of course, she needed to fax it to the company. Well, she only faxed one side of it. The company told her to fax the back side of it to them. Three weeks go by with them occaisionally nagging her. Finally, they put a "stop dispatch" on her and cut off her fuel card.
She fires off a message about how the men in the industry all give her a hard time and how she's doing her best. Then she goes off about how they 'abandoned' her in such a terrible neighborhood and she's so scared of getting raped in her truck. Then she tells them she quits and they can come get her truck 'cause she's got a friend coming to get her.
She was sitting at a Pilot and all she had to do was fax the back side of her CDL to them and they could have lifted the stop dispatch and reinstate her fuel card in a matter of 5 minutes. Instead, she opted for the drama queen exit.

Yeah, sometimes there's a few nice goodies to be had. We're supposed to leave them all for the company to sell. But there's no way they can stop us from taking whatever we want. I won't tell you what I got since it's technically theft.

A second part of the "relief and recovery" gig is... well, relief. If these lease drivers need to be home for more than a few days, they can hire us, pay a flat milage fee (in addition to everything else they pay), and we keep the income flowing. At least, that's the plan.
A lot of the R&R drivers are just as fresh out of school as the lease drivers. Which means they're just as likely to crash the truck as the lease guys. And, of course, the poor lease driver still has to pay for repairs. And that assumes these guys keep the wheels rolling enough for lease operator to break even. A lot of them can't. Still, losing some money while you're at home is better than losing a lot of money, I guess.

I remember this one time, I had to do some scheduled maintenance on the truck. The mechanic had topped off the coolant and put the cap on, but not tight enough. I ended up with a pressure leak - never noticed until I got about 4/5 the way up Elk Mtn. It didn't take long for the engine to shut itself down I barely managed to get it off to the side. Luckily I had some coolant with me. When I told the Lease operator about it a few days later, he goes berzerk and calls the company. We review what had happened and everyone agreed I did all the right things. But the LO was not satisfied.
Then he started complaining about how little money I'm making for him. He complained that he lost over $1K in two weeks. So the company and I go over all the numbers and realized I was making him more money than he was making while driving for himself. But instead of arguing with the guy, we all agreed to park the truck at the next terminal and leave it there for him.

Now for the long story. Remember when we had those tornados go through Joplin Mo.? Two weeks later, I'm flying into Tulsa to grab a truck. This was on a weekend, so my regular dispatch was not there. The weekend dispatch thought it would be efficient to send my next load to the qualcomm before I got there.
Bad idea.
The guy saw the dispatch and thought it was for him. So he takes the truck to get fueled up - only to realize his card was cut off. So he calls in to the company. The dispatch tells him I'm coming to take possession of the truck and that the dispatch was for me. This doesn't go so well with him. He threatens to blow my head off if he see's me and tells them he's parking the truck in front of his house.
That's when the company calls me and let's me know about this. At least they gave me a heads up.

I get a cab at the airport and start talking to the cabbie about the tornadoes. He tells me that Tulsa never get's tornadoes. There's something about the area that just repels them. They haven't had a tornado anywhere near them in years. This little conversation becomes important later...

So I tell the cabbie what I'm about to do, I pay him in advance and tell him that if he hears gunplay, he's to take off and leave me. I would need him to call 911 from a safe distance. So we stop right next to the truck, I open it up, toss my bags in, start it up and I'm gone in about 20 seconds. Normally, I have to wait for the air to charge, but since he tried to get fuel that morning it was all charged up for me. Nothing but grabbing gears after that.

I bobtail around a bit just to make sure I'm not being chased. Then I find some industrial complex to park in and let the company know I have the truck.
Next thing, the dispatch is asking me to bring the truck back so the guy can clean all his stuff out.
Say what? You nuts? No way!
The the dispatcher get's tired of hearing him whining, so she forwards his call to my cell phone - another big 'no no'.
The guy starts giving me this big sob story about everything he owns is in that truck. I look around and think, "I could probably replace it all for $90 at any rummage sale". Seriously, everything was cheap junk.
Then he gives me this big sob story about how his house was blown down by a tornado.
Now I know he's BSing me. He parked it in front of his house. I saw his house - in perfect condition. I know it was his house because I found the truck by going to the address he listed on the lease. It's not rocket science. Plus, remember the conversation I had with the cabbie?
If there was even the slightest chance of him getting anything back, it died as soon as he started BSing me.

 

As I said before, 80% of the time, it's the driver's fault he couldn't make any money. To lazy, too crazy, or too immature to handle that much steel and rubber.

But then there's the other 20%. I picked up a truck in New Jersey. The guy left all his pay information on the Qualcomm. For four weeks running, the guy was begging - and I mean *begging* for miles. And the most they gave him was 1900 miles. He lost money 3 weeks out of 4 and that fourth week - he got a whopping $8.

CREngland offers a '6 month demo' lease for those who want to try it out for a short time before being committed. Well, I saw one demo that raised my eyebrows. They gave him a used truck. The tires had about 50K miles on them. He leads a team for 6 months, and wears down the tires. When he turned the truck in, they charged him for new tires.
Funny how they managed to give him used tires and then charge him for new ones.
Even more interesting when I saw them lease the truck to another guy with the same old tires still on the truck.

 

Some of these LOs were cut off needlessly. It all depends on their dispatcher. Some are pretty quick to pull the plug on them, other are not. I got into one truck and after reading all the messages, it seemed like the guy wanted to do miles, but his dispatch just kept giving really short runs. Now the agreement was that he would run in a limited area around his home so he could go home every weekend. This is usually a red flag for me to think it's the drivers fault, but in this case, he clearly stated he just needed an hour or two at home once a week.
So his dispatcher just gives him these 200 to 300 mile runs every day and makes him sit and wait if one was not immediately available. Clearly, his dispatch didn't want to deal with the guy and made sure he would lose money. He asked for another dispatcher, but by that time, he was so far in debt that they just cut off his fuel card instead.

 

I got to read all the qualcomm messages the drivers left behind. You would amazed by how many never bothered to clear out their messages. I was privy to all their dispatches, travels, troubles and travails - even their settlements some times. It's easy to do a post mortem when you have all that information in one place.
Good thing I'm honest enough not to steal identities. A whole lot of them left their names, addresses, SSN, their lease agreements, even a few account numbers behind. I'm enough of a cad to repo trucks; but even I have scruples enough to just clean up their mess instead of trying to use or sell all that info.

Edit: it really doesn't take more than 50 messages to know if a guy has an attitude problem, is constantly late, hit's a lot of things, etc. or if he's a good driver in a bad situation. Even so, a qualcomm can hold hundreds of messages.

 

Another problem I found with CREngland is when a truck turns out to be a lemon.
Everyone know that a certain percentage of new trucks will have problems. And we all know how much time and money these problems can waste. But CREngland has a standard policy of defering only one truck payment. It's not forgiveness as they stick it at the end of the lease. But if your truck is in the shop, that's a lifesaver.

The problem is when someone draws the short straw and his truck breaks down again and again. Once you use up that one deferral and your truck breaks down again, you're screwed. So in a way, England uses these lease drivers to find those lemons for them. The driver gets screwed, the company get's the truck back and simply sells it to some unsuspecting sucker or dealership.

BTW, England pays cash for these trucks and then turns around and leases them at high to outrageous interest rates. That's how they make tons of money. It's also why they don't have to make any money on their rates.

You get some indication that something is up by the way they try to push their students into leasing. Their second trainer is supposed to teach them how to run the business. But...
1. If you decide to lease, you only need to be with your second trainer for 2 weeks.
2. if you do NOT want to lease, you have to be with him for up to 40 days.

Wouldn't you want to give the most training to those who want to lease? Instead, CRE does the opposite. It's not about training - it's about convincing the student to lease.

Of course, as soon as you get out of your second trainers truck, you go right into the 'train the trainer' class and then to the leasing office. As soon as you get a truck, you can get a trainee. Literally, these guys have not done a single solo mile and they are already training. What's more, he get's paid for all book miles done by both. The trainee is not paid by the trainer. The trainer pays the company for the 'privilege' of having a trainee and the trainee is paid by the company (I think it's 12 cents a mile now). And the trainee HAS to go through the course or he will get a big bill for all the classes and training he received to date - which could be over three grand. It's literally indentured servitude, or rent a slave, imo.