(Decided to hang around here in Laredo a little while longer, T-State say their bidding on some loads)
Ok, how can I put this to make you honest owners understand what I am saying. (My hubby is always telling me I am not good at explaining things but I am going to try.) I think it is probably the same with most of us older drivers so let me tell it like this.
Ok, I put over 20 years in at a beauty salon, my husband put over 20 years in at a police department. Now, we are getting older, the kid is old enough to be left alone, heehee, so we start talking of doing something different. Now, him being a cop and me being a beautician we know absolutely nothing about the trucking industry. But hey, ya know, sounds like it might be a fun interesting thing to do, after-all we both put in our time in our industry, now it is time for some fun see some new exciting places. With me so far?
Ok, now we don't know expediting is different from 'trucking' so we go online and type in 'trucking companies' and 'how to be a truck driver'. All these different trucking companies come up with schools for cdls ect. So for a while we are just 'thinking' about becoming truck drivers and are reading about cdl training, different trucking companies like Werner, JB Hunt, Schneider, ect.
Well then we run across this one web site that offers to 'hook' drivers up with both a CDL school and a company to drive for. So my hubby fills in the info and hits 'submit'. Right away we start getting phone calls from different recruiters. Werner was the first caller we received, asked them to send us all of their info and went online to see what we could find out about them.
Then we get a call from one that they are a recruiter with PantherII and that we would only need a class b cdl, well I already had a class b cdl for many years as I drove a school bus part time when my son was little in grade school. Would drive in the morning, go to the salon, then drive again in the afternoon and then go back to the salon. So I could drive for this PantherII company and not even have to spend any money to do it. GREAT! Typed in PantherII to try to check the company out.
See, what I mean? This is who we thought we were driving for. So we check them out. Everything looked great so we decide, YEA, LET'S GO FOR IT!
So then this girl contacts us with all the information of were we were to go in Indiana and how we would be going through their orientation and asked if we had cdls. We told them I did but hubby didn't. So she say's no problem they would help him obtain the proper cdl. Gives us direction on how to get there and a start date. So now, for now we think we are going to the orientation for PantherII, still not understanding we are actually going to orientation of a fleet owner.
See, no one explained until after we had left our jobs behind and spent all the money to go to orientation, relocated so we would be in the 'freight line' as we were instructed to do, ect that we would not actually be working for PantherII, we would be working for this other company that has a fleet of trucks. Hmmmm, so now, here we are, we have left our jobs, relocated, are miles from home all on the wrong information.
So, we at least make an effort to check them out. They have an awesome website, show only top notch equipment, and have wonderful testimony from drivers posted, so we think 'well ok, guess it will be ok'. Course if it isn't it's really too late now anyway. lol We've already spent thousands of dollars on this little adventure.
So we go ahead and go through their orientation, at which no contract was ever presented until the very last day of orientation. See, we thought we had 'checked' it out. We thought we had done our homework. But since we did not know the industry or how things work with it we did not check out the correct thing.
As for sitting around in a truck stop, a normal person that has no experience with trucking and does not know the industry doesn't even know you can sit around in a truck stop. My gosh, I had never even heard of showering at a truck stop or driver areas ect. So no, I definitely had never heard of EO. By the time you learn about truck stops and EO you've already been burned.
Our first clue something was wrong was when we were given a really really bad truck, no air conditioning, leaked horribly in the rain, was a little cat engine couldn't make 20 mph on the hills in the Virginias, diffinately not as described on the second companies web site. Then when we started getting negative pay checks after running 3000 miles in a week, one week we ran from coast to coast and ran up over 5000 miles that week, our take, under 1000.00. This is when we started to figure out something was wrong. lol So ya see, it is easy for new drivers to get 'taken'. It is amusing when we look back now at how gullible we were, but it definately was not amusing at the time. Am I getting across what I'm trying to say here?
It isn't hard for a dishonest truck owner to take advantage of new drivers who know nothing about the industry.
