Now I have a question. Is there anything within your contract that says they (your carrier) MUST be able to get in contact with you 24 hours a day?
Some carriers state that you cannot disconnect or disable the Qualcomm so at least they know where you (and their equipment) are. Of course, that doesn't prevent you from turning the volume on the QC down all the way. And since cell phones aren't 100% reliable, they can't expect it to be 100% reliable. But...
...Or is it a personal choice to keep everything on so that you may not miss that next possible 8000 mile run???
Ultimately, yes, because if not, they might just place you OOS.
You can always just go out of service on your own to not be bothered, but you hose your board position or dwell time when you do that. You can tell dispatch not to bother you, but they still might, so you could turn everything off, but the problem with that is, if they try to contact you, and can't, they aren't 100% positive why they can't. Shift changes and multiple dispatchers make it so that your telling them not to bother you might not make it to all the dispatcher. If they can't get ahold of you, they will usually just put you OOS, because they don't know if yer dead or what, but either way, since they're unable to get ahold of you, you're unavailable regardless, and are thus OOS.
At Panther we have the "Available Sleeping" status (and also a "34-hour restart" status for trucks), where we are still available insofar as not losing our board position while we're sleeping, and they're not supposed to bother use when we're Available Sleeping, although they sometimes do. If they're hurting for trucks they'll call, just in case we'll take it, or if there's a load picking up after we're due to come back from sleeping, they might offer if to us in case we might want it after we wake up.
But for many carriers, the only option to be truly left alone is to place yourself OOS (and with Panther, even that's not good enough sometimes
).
