Frustrated

So I got a phonecall from the manager of the Georgia terminal letting me know they had a load out for me and wanting to know if I'd be there Tuesday night or Wednesday sometime. He had pretty much expected me to be at the Georgia terminal by Monday night (my delivery was originally scheduled for Monday morning). My company had put my truck number on a list of available trucks in the area and had neglected to mention that I was in the area, but broken down in Kentucky. I told him I'd call him and give them an ETA after I was up and running.

Tuesday afternoon, they asked me to pull the trailer (just down to the next exit and back, so about seven miles) to test it out and make sure everything was okay. Everything seemed fine. I broke down a little before 5pm on Saturday, so the truck being ready around 2pm on Tuesday means I'm three hours shy of getting paid for three days of breakdown. Which stinks. When I was getting in the truck to do the test drive, I noticed that the fuel primer pump (which I'd gotten from the mechanic at Detroit and for which the truck had already seen two mechanics before the breakdown) was still in its box. I asked why they hadn't fixed it and they said that my company specifically told them not to. So my truck was going to have to go to the Georgia terminal's shop before I could get another load. Great. I don't understand why they did that. The shop I was broken down at was the shop that does all the repair for our Kentucky terminal anyway. If the truck only spends part of a day in the shop, I don't get paid anything. So almost three days in the shop in Kentucky (two days of breakdown pay) and three partial days (North Carolina, Detroit and soon Georgia) for which I don't get paid anything. That's a lot of wasted time. My time.

I sent QualComm messages to dispatch letting them know that the repair was done. I called the broker and asked whether they preferred for me to deliver it late Tuesday night or early Wednesday. They opted for Wednesday. I let Dalton know I'd be there sometime Wednesday afternoon. I drove until I was a little over an hour for the delivery and pulled over at a rest stop. It was getting late enough in the day that I was afraid if I tried to get closer to the delivery, I wouldn't be able to find anywhere to park. Even knowing I was going to be dealing with Atlanta traffic in the morning.

I ended up taking some small state highways in order to avoid some backups on the interstate. I hate driving in Atlanta. The backups aren't even usually caused by a wreck, but just by the interchanges being really poorly designed for the volume of traffic. Delivered and received my next trip info over the QualComm. I reminded the dispatcher that I was going to the Georgia terminal for them to finish the repair on the truck and that I wouldn't confirm my next trip until the truck was ready.

When they send the load and fuel routing for your next trip before you've finished the one you're on, the fuel stops are wrong. I didn't have any fuel stops for my trip out of Georgia, despite the fact that I was almost out of fuel. In orientation, we were told to call and get a fuel stop from the guy in the main office in charge of fuel so that we wouldn't get in trouble for out-of-route fuel stops. I was doing that every time for the first two months, only to find out that it doesn't matter whether you call and talk to him and have him tell you where to fuel. It still goes on your file/record as an out-of-route fuel stop. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It makes no sense. 

At the end of the trip, when you send the "empty and available" QualComm message, it asks you how much fuel you have from 0 to 8. So basically, how many eighths of a tank. You can't put any less than three, because it messes the computer up somehow (as the fuel guy explained in orientation), so even if you have less than that, you have to put at least three. I have about a sixteenth of a tank, so I'm going to have to put fuel in the truck before I head up to the Georgia terminal.

It took the Georgia terminal's shop a few hours to fix the truck. They loaned me the terminal car in the meantime and I went to Walmart and stocked up on food and water.

My load wasn't going to be ready until almost midnight, so I tried to get some sleep. It's pretty much impossible to shift your sleep schedule that much in one day (I'm used to starting my day at 5 or 6am), so I got hardly any. I was supposed to take a load from the Georgia terminal and drop/hook in Kentucky (some dirt lot just off an interstate exit) and essentially switch loads with another driver. I had no idea what QualComm messages to send for that, so I just kept sending qc61 and explaining where I was in the process. I had been told (by the other driver) that after I switched loads, I'd need a new trip number, but multiple messages to dispatch asking for it got no response. I didn't get the trip number, fuel routing or load routing until I had already finished the trip the next day around noon.

Whenever I have a question, I end up having to ask about eight different people before I get an answer. Dispatch will ignore direct questions for hours or days, but if I don't respond immediately to a message from them (usually because I'm driving), I get harassed with multiple phonecalls and QualComm messages unless/until I respond. And if it were something that needed an immediate answer, that would make sense. Usually it's something that wasn't time-sensitive at all and absolutely could have waited until the next time I pulled over.

When I mess something up, I have eight people calling me or QualComming me to tell me about it. I feel like that guy in Office Space who forgot to put the cover on his TPS report and has eight different bosses stopping by his cubicle to tell him he screwed up.

The trailer I picked up was a load to Atlanta. I hate driving in Atlanta. The delivery was pretty open, which was nice. I got really tired about half-way through Tennessee, so I pulled over and took an hour-long nap. It helped. Because of traffic, I got to the delivery around 10am. It took them about two hours to unload me and I had an hour left on my 14-hour clock, which was just enough time to get to a truck stop. Took a hot shower and then very happily crawled into my bunk. Dispatch told me that my next load wouldn't be ready until tomorrow, so I wasn't going to have to get up in ten hours. I slept hard.

I'm still at the truck stop waiting for my next load. If it's out of Dalton, which it probably will be, it won't be ready until late tonight. I took another shower this morning and now I'm sitting in McDonald's having coffee and free wifi. Kinda glad I wasn't on the road last night. Rain and sub-freezing temperatures (coupled with Atlanta's general lack of snowplows and salt trucks) meant there was black ice everywhere and tons of wrecks and traffic backups. I happily slept through all of that.

I was looking at pay stubs from some of my earlier trips and noticed that I wasn't getting paid $20 for each of the LTL furniture stops. They just put "load/unload $30" once for the whole trip. I'm going to have to go though all of my pay stubs (which I should have been doing anyway) to make sure that this was just a mistake on one trip and that they haven't been doing it on all of them. And before you ask, I know I entered the stops correctly on my trip envelope for that trip because I called payroll to ask whether one of them counted as a driver unload since I had to get in and move the freight to end of the truck, but then they took it off with a forklift. It didn't, in case you were wondering. All the other stops on that trip should have been $20 each though.

I am really frustrated with this company.  Communication among the various departments is terrible (despite the fact that they all work in the same small two-story building).  I do a lot of sitting and the miles are really inconsistent.  I am also encourage almost daily by terminal managers and other company drivers to falsify my logbook in order to get more hours and make more money.  I refuse to do that.  If that's the only way to "make good money" at this company, then I've clearly chosen the wrong place to work.