It's a Team's Life

Slow Down

Slow Down

Last week I talked about how the expedite business is a “hurry up and wait” type of business. This week was the wait portion of that phrase. Or was it? Let’s take a look at how the week went. Oh! And if you thought this was going to be about speed limits, you would be wrong.

For those readers who are not familiar with the laws under which commercial truck drivers must work, I will give a brief explanation of them here. Any commercial driver (that is one who holds a commercial drivers license or CDL) cannot work more than 70 hours in an eight day period. While that sounds like a lot of hours, those hours can get used up very quickly. Work hours are defined as any time spent working. This includes driving, loading or unloading the truck or even staying up to monitor the load. The law says that we can drive up to 11 hours per shift. Within the first 8 hours of that 11 hour shift we are required to take a 30 minute rest break. The law also says that we cannot work more than 14 hours in a 24 hour period. Once the 14 hours are used up we must show 10 hours of sleeper berth or off duty time. This resets our clock for the next day. To reset our clocks back to a full 70 hours we are required to show 34 consecutive hours of either sleeper berth or off duty time.

We offloaded on Monday after having taken our time over the weekend to get there. We each had used up over 25 hours of our 70 hours available. An email popped up that gave us two different load options. The first option was to pick up a load on Tuesday, make a delivery on Wednesday, another on Thursday and the final delivery would not be made until the following Monday. While this load paid well because of all the added stops, we could not take it. We would have run out of hours before we ever made it to the final delivery. So we opted for the second load which had fewer miles and less pay. We also had to wait until Wednesday to pick up the load. That allowed us to reset our clock to a full 70 hours for each of us. We picked up our load and made delivery on Thursday.

Finally, we deadheaded (that means that we drove without getting paid) over 1,000 miles to pick up a load on Friday. Some might not deadhead that far; however, we will for the right reasons. In this case, deadheading got us three loads that we may not have gotten if we decided to stay where we offloaded on Thursday. This set us up to have a great week ahead. 

Here’s to millions of safe, profitable and GREAT miles!

Kelly Plumb