I had a load out of North Carolina going to Indiana. It was a full load of furniture and I knew I had to help unload every single piece. I'd been to the consignee before and the last time it took us nearly four hours to unload the entire trailer. This time, it was only two. I was out of hours (as far as my fourteen hour window was concerned), so I drove to a nearby truckstop when we were finished and I did my best to get some sleep. The load had required me to drive all night to make my 7am appointment and it's really hard to shift your sleep schedule that much so suddenly. Impossible, actually.
My next load picked up at 11pm about an hour away. It's a distribution center I hate picking up at because something always seems to go horribly wrong and I'm there forever. The first time I picked up there, it was New Year's Eve and my trailer was supposed to be pre-loaded, so it was just going to a drop and hook. Easy, right? Except they overloaded the trailer and my Gross Vehicle Weight was nearly 83,000 pounds (legal limit is 80,000). Because of the holiday, I had to wait until the morning of January 2nd (which is when the warehouse staff came back to work) for them to take freight off the trailer and modify the bills of lading. Two days of sitting. (after having had to wait from Sunday night to Monday night, doing nothing until the load was ready). So, more than two days of waiting actually.
The second time I picked up there, the load put me within 100 pounds of the maximum GVW and could not get the weight distributed correctly. They ended up taking two pallets off (they had to take them out of the middle of the trailer, so it took them half an hour to put the rest of the pallets back on). What should have been a drop and hook had been a live load (two hours) and then the weight distribution/tandem adjusting problems meant I was there for about four hours.
This last time, I was about 2000 pounds under the legal GVW and I could not get the tandem pins to release. It took me about two hours to finally get the tandems in the right place. Again, should have only taken me half an hour to do a drop and hook. Oi! This trip had an addtional annoyance in that the last driver had damaged the trailer (dented rim, bent cross-member and a gouged tire) and I wasn't sure what to do since it was almost midnight. Luckily, someone answered the phone in the shop at the main terminal and he told me where to go for the repair. It took two repair stops (and several hours delay), but we got it all fixed. The repair stops made the load late, which wasn't fun. The load was due by midnight (a drop and hook at a distribution center in North Carolina) and I let the dispatcher know a day ahead of time that it was going to be late. I told her my revised ETA was 5pm the day after. She started calling me and sending me multiple QualComm messages at 10am (while I was sleeping) asking me if the load had been delivered. How could anyone misinterpret 5pm as being "before 10am"??? Sometimes I think you just have to be a passive-aggressive shithead to work as a dispatcher. At least in this company.
I responded to her messages, reminder her that it would be late afternoon before I was ready for my next load. She wasn't the dispatcher for my next load anyway, but she was sending me info about it. I also had another dispatcher doing the same. This company would work so much more smoothly if the dispatchers ever bothered to talk to each other. With few exceptions, they all sit in the same room in the main office, but if you ask one a question, they just tell you that you need to talk to X dispatcher (but they can't be bothered to turn their head and ask X dispatcher directly. They make you call back and ask the switchboard for the other person. What the hell!?) It's like that poor guy in Office Space who forgets to put the cover on his TPS report and he has eight bosses who tell him how he screwed up. How is that efficient?
Frustration with dispatch is one of the many reasons I am leaving the company I work for. I know that some (if not most) of my issues with the company may very well exist at any company I end up driving for.... but if I work for a company that will actually let me take hometime once or twice per month (instead of pretending they have no freight going to my home state whenever I inquire about hometime, even if I ask a month or more in advance), I think the other frustrations would be tolerable. I've been home twice since October. That's too long. I'm not saying I need to go home every week, but once or twice per month would be nice. The last time I took hometime, I had broken a molar and was in excruciating pain and my company STILL gave me shit about having no loads going to my state. They wanted to send me on a five day trip to Georgia first. No. Just no. I remember one guy asking "Well, how much does it actually hurt?" Kinda made me wish I could invent a way to stab someone in the face over the phone. They had me sit at a rest stop for hours before they finally thought to look for a brokered load. They basically implied that I was inventing the broken tooth as an excuse to go home. The thing is, I had more than enough hometime banked that I could have gone home anyway. They just like to make you feel like the world's worst employee if you ever want to go home. It's ridiculous.
Anyway, I've given a month's notice and I'll be looking for another company to drive for. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment