Search results

I would add one thing to TeamCaffee's excellent post. Your carrier should make competent dispatchers available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Maybe for you. Not for us. Many times we are predispatched on the next run before we complete the current run. And as I said, truck counts do not change such that delivering a few hours early would make a difference for us. And, the customers we serve often do not want an early delivery. Getting...

I am none of the above. Many of our loads run straight through and we drive straight through. Many others may pick up say at 3:00 p.m. and are short enough to get us to the delivery at 3:00 a.m. the next day or two days later. With those, there is nothing to do but wait since the consignee...

Then disagree we will. You are injecting "confirmed" into this. I have not used the word and it makes no difference. When Diane and I are on a load we are focused 100% on meeting the customer's needs. Whether the load is confirmed or not, we abide by the delivery times. Almost always, the...

Many have said here in the Open Forum that a recession shakes out the weak players and the strong pick up the slack. I came across this article today that puts some numbers to the theory. While it appears things will get worse before they get better, it was encouraging to read, "A record...

That's correct. It is also correct that some ways of communicating are better than others when it comes to managing driver liability and not making yourself a pest. Delivering early is seldom possible for us so it is not an issue. The freight we haul is most often time-specific. For the same...

Diane just mentioned another aspect of this. Just this week, she was standing in line with a half-dozen other drivers at a consignee's shipping/receiving office window. The others were there to deliver too. The phone rang. On the other end was a driver requesting directions to the delivery. The...

Expedited freight is not the same load by load. Much of what we haul is high-value freight where sometimes a dozen people are waiting to go to work on it the instant it arrives. If the freight resolves an assembly line down issue, an employer may be managing the time he or she will have a...

Yes. November is shaping up to be an unusually slow month for us.

I didn't. Reread the post and let it go. Gary has and so have I.

1. They often do give the phone number. 2. They always give it when we have asked. 3. I don't want the number if I can help it. We are more than happy to let dispatch talk to shippers and consignees. For things like local directions needed as you approach the delivery and find your directions...

You got it wrong, Dave. In the departure call, they ask you what your reefer set point is on the paperwork and on the control unit. Looking at the control unit to confirm the set point is what reminded us to turn it on. Human error. It happens. Service failure prevented. Would not have happened...

Onan's 150 hour service inteval is a curious thing. The oil and filter changes are quick and easy to do (after a couple practice rounds) so I do them. I'd rather spend a little more on 3 quarts of oil and a filter than risk the generator. But the 150 hours strike me as strange when competing...

Improvements have been made. Departure calls for surface expedite loads are now automated and completed with a few button pushes. For many of the loads we haul, I'm not so sure I would want a system as simple as you describe. We have had it happen several times where, on an involved departure...

Sounds good to me! :) We both had our say. Let's move on.

-- Pass --

I call 'em like I see 'em, Bruno.

The issue is not people sayig FedEx is not the best. The issue is an ex-contractor saying he is doing so much better in another opportunity when he never gave the FedEx ER-unit opportunity a fair chance. It is misleading to new readers to tell half the story. His decision to leave FedEx was good...

All this talk about Panther Driver Council elections is well and good, but would it not be more appropriate to post it in the Panther forum where Panther drivers can kick it around? This is one of the few things that come up on the Open Forum that really are carrier specific.

I happen to believe that FedEx Custom Critical is the best game in town, which is why I stay. If I knew of a better game for the kind of trucking we want to do, lifestyle we live and money we want to make, I'd go to the better game. There is more to this than what I'd like to think and I take...