Written up for being in the shower while logged as sleeper berth.

Retired now, so I don't have a dog (anymore) in this fight.
Large companies are audited every two years or less. The DOT is looking for violations in logging AND that the compliance dept is self auditing to ensure accuracy. Yes it's nitpicking, but the auditor has to prove they're earning their keep. So they look to see if the department is combing thru everything. If they find things like this, they trust (more) that the department is watching for bigger things and is constantly retraining drivers to follow the rules to the letter. No matter how good a job the department does, the company is fined for violations. The more of these little nitpicking items the company catches, the less close the auditor looks.
It's not about safety, it's about money. No company ever gets a clean bill of health. It's a question of how much the fine will be.
When the company I retired from (driving, then later dispatch) put a different head in that department (and she was a nitpicker!) our annual audit fine was reduced more than $300K from the average fines we paid.
Money and politics is the basis of all this nonsense.

 

Audits have become a thing of the past, unless a major incident occurs. Unless a driver gets caught on the road for some violation, as far as DOT goes, the driver has got by. AUDITS?? LOL

 

I really laugh. The OP is the one that screwed up his logs. Which is a violation. But everyone is calling the company the bad guy. Better that he learns from a write up. Rather than being dinged for it as a log violation.

 

This gives a new meaning to "its only illegal if you get caught." What a fine line. You don't have an accident, they don't even look at your logs.

 

Well it's hard to tell if he's sleeping in the sleeper vs out taking a shower. W/o something like this happening.

 

I know it. What are the odds? It is a false log technically, and oftentimes I got to sleeper to complete a split without thinking about it, but I know one thing. If I shower on those 2 or 3 hrs, then I'll go off duty going forward. This opened up my eyes some

 

It's easy on a split. Park, log off duty, go shower, come back and log sleeper.

 

In my own personal opinion, a 'write up" compares to a child running around and hollering, "I am going to tell on you". It is "childish" as you can get. Years ago when I was running local for Overnite, dispatcher threaten to write me up over something, I told him, "give me about 15 mins to run down to Kroger and get you a whole pack of notebook paper, and you can write until you get "writer's cramp".

 

Some drivers could get dinged for that advise. I’m fairly certain there are safety departments out there anal enough to compare ignition events to manually logged events.

 

Well if your on the 7 to 8 hr side if it, you gotta log sleeper. Perhaps that may have been the situation OP was facing.