Profile For Phox

Something I have learned from my 3.5 years of driving, the further south and east you go, the more "solar powered" drivers there are. since you're new you may not have heard this term yet. it's pretty self explanatory but basically they're drivers who shut down before the sun goes down and they don't start until it comes back up. There are divisions / loads that require this (over dimension loads) but i'm not talking about them.

I have found that when driving in the south (i40 or lower) as well as the east coast, you need to be shutdown well before the sun goes down or else you'll be buying a reserved spot or creative parking. the ne, there is no good time... just hope n pray you can find a spot or buy a reserved in advance. west coast and northern states are usually a lot easier to find parking. When I did reefer for Pride (pride not prime), we ran the i80, 90, 94 and sometimes the 70 a lot. i could almost always find parking well after dark. certain states like PA can be bad.. Chicago area is a nightmare. seattle.... hahahaha ta in northbend i always tell drivers don't ever expect to find a free spot there. if you passing through and find one and can shut down, great otherwise plan to buy a spot and by no later than 1-2 pm.

For the most part you'll figure it out with experience. but until you do, make sure you have back up plans. even for us drivers who have the experience and usually know where to park at certain times, sometimes those plans fail on us too.

I tend to avoid buying a spot until it looks like i have no choice. I'll have the location i want to shut down at in mind several hours (usually when i start my day but things can change those plans, like traffic jams) beforehand and then in a case like pilot j for example i'll have the app open, set to the specific location and i'll refresh the reserved parking page every 30-60 minutes and if it starts getting close to 0 (like if i started it with 13/15 left then it starts looking like 3/15) and i'm still a ways away, i'll reserve a spot. if it stays close to lots of reserved available i won't reserve one until i get there and can't find any free ones. keep in mind i'm o/o and have to pay for this out of my pocket. when i was with pride i was a company driver and they reimbursed (or sent an efs code to pay) for spots.

hope i have helped.

Believe it or not there is actually a non dot reason for adding remarks... liability.

If you get sued (as a company driver it'll prob be the carrier not you, but that's neither here nor there), having remarks helps to prove you were doing something at a certain time.

It can also help when requesting things like detention and layover. go on duty when you arrive at customer, remark it as such then when you go off duty to start that waiting game and again with remarks when you leave. that gives you something to show when you got there and left.

It also makes it easier on the carrier if dot were to audit the company's logs. it takes 5-10 seconds to pick a reason for a change of duty status not a big deal if you ask me, not for the amount of work you can save your logs department if they get audited.

After deadheading from Saskatoon, SK, Canada to Valley City, ND (around 600 miles) I picked up a John Deer seeder. It was in 11-12 pieces weighing about 40k lbs. picked up on Saturday, did a 34 in Fargo, ND and delivered in Thief Falls, MN (about 180 loaded miles) this morning.

Don't have my next load info yet as I'm at our Corp terminal to discuss leasing.

I agree with you both on getting exercise... but you have to view that keep the door closed phrase from the outside view... it really does sound like your saying to just drive as much as possible and only stop if you have to.... this is the internet... what you mean to say and convey may appear much different to someone else reading it. you might mean it as dont slack off, treat this job as such, but someone else, especially new drivers may read it as only stop and get out for fuel & food / 10 hour break aka stuff they have no choice on.

the point i'm trying to make is that the "keep the doors closed" phrase is really bad to use with new drivers. They dont know the industry well enough yet to understand it properly.

Keeping the wheels turing and the doors closed leads to more miles.

It also leads to various health issues... I for one am getting tired of reading that line. I am the type who prefers to stop as little as possible so i can either maximize my miles or get shut down early enough to get more sleep and have a better parking spot. That caused me to develope adema in my feet (swelling due to retaining fluid) because I was not stopping and taking enough breaks. I would go 250-300 miles before stopping and then that would be my 30 which I usually didn't even get out of truck for, then I do another 250-300 to complete my day. When my feet got so big they looked like water baloons I went to doc... they were afraid I was having a blood clot or something else more serious and sent me to er. I ended up having to take 9 days medical leave because of it. I still have the problem but not as bad and I can manage it, but I also have to stop about every 2 hours and walk around.

So this "keep the left door closed and keep rolling stuff" yeah that's bad advice. I stop for about 15 min every 2 hours or so (obviously limited by truck stop or rest area availability), 3-4 times a day is not going to kill your miles.

Pride only has around 500 drivers.

Only??? That's a big carrier. It definitely puts them way up into the upper 1% of largest carriers in the nation. 93% of all trucking companies in the nation have fewer than 20 trucks.

I do indeed prefer the major carriers but I'm not just talking about the top 5 or 10. I would say anything above about 250 trucks is pretty major. That's a lot of trucks. You have to do a whole lot of things right for a long time to get to that size.

Well when I compare to companies like Knight, swift, CR, etc that have thousands, 500 is fairly small. I was with Knight for my first year, something like 5000 trucks for them and yeah dispatch to driver ratio was much much higher, shop stuff took longer, getting loads from planners took longer... just everything took longer or was not as good. I haven't counted myself but if I was to walk into our terminal where the dispatchers work (on monday because weekend staff is limited) I would probably count at least 20-25 dispatchers... so that's like 1dispatch to every 20 drivers, with knight it was closer to 1 dispatch per 100 drivers, roughly estimated. I never saw more than 5-10 dispatchers per terminal some had less than 5 and I calculated at about 20 terminals to the 5000+ drivers. just some fun morning math to get your day started haha. I personally would call Pride a medium carrier. not small but not large... but I would agree Pride is doing something right.... now if I could just get other drivers to stop comparing us to CR england JUST because our owner is related to the englands. he left them a long long time ago and started pride because he didn't like the way cr was doing things. like i said before i don't know much factual about cr because I never worked there but from what I hear.... yeah I can see why he left haha. oh and he still drives.... got himself a real nice Kenworth long nose. ok i'm going off topic so i'm gonna stop here haha.

Not going to happen... most you can get is around 260-300 watts. to figure out what your 12v outlet can put out you need to take the 12v then multiply it by the # of amps fuse it has. usually it's around a 20 amp fuse so 12 x 20 = 240 watts. even though there's 300 watt 12v inverter and even 400 unless you have a fuse that can do that much you won't get it and going much past 20amp fuses you are risking a fire because the wiring was not designed for that much power. you would need a hire gauge wire installed on top of hire amp fuse. your company will probably allow a direct to battery inverter before they re-ire your truck haha

And what is it that Marten and Pride offer that's so incredible?

Well I can say as a "current" employee of Pride that it is a decent company, I can't compare to Marten, nor cr england as I have not worked for them. I will admit Pride has it's share of negatives but far less than my previous company. Here's one good thing in particular: Pride takes pride in their trucks, we have a working truck wash at our terminal plus an account with blue beacon. they also expect us to get our trucks into shop at least 2x a month for PM service and our shop is open 24/7 so unless it needs one of our truck specific (aka freightliner guy) guys to work on it it's usually taken care of in a couple hours. When I was with Knight a simple PM could be an all day thing if you were lucky and assumed they actually did the pm. I know brett prefers the major carriers based on one of his blog posts but I prefer smaller ones and Pride only has around 500 drivers.

those are just a couple things that make Pride awesome, but to be fair here's a couple negatives as well. #1 we mostly run i80 / western 11. sounds nice and all to some but for me it has gotten boring. we can run all the lower 48 but it's not likely. mostly you'll find yourself on the 80, up in washington, or down in so cal. #2 pay is meh for reefer div. also pay raises are kind of a joke, looking at 10 months min at a time per half cent raise. based on career points, every 10k you get half cent raise but you can only get a max of 1k per month. that's hard to do as it is, I avg around 650-700 a month as it's based on mpg, productivity and being on time. mpg is the hard part because reefer does a lot of heavy loads and our lanes have a lot of hills and mountains, plus summer temps are not taken into acct for mpg requirement. productivity should be easy but quite often things i cant control lower it, such as not being able to deliver a load till a day later than needed, or pick up till the next evening (having delivered in same time the prior day morning)... stuff like that makes it difficult. so yeah pride has it's negatives too but it's still a good company.

Yeah I would say 90% of the time I see something wrong with the placement of triangles... everything from # of them, distance apart, sometimes they're in a straight line, sometimes they are angled towards truck n trailer as opposed to away (by angled I mean if you were looking at them from above the line of triangles most of the time s going towards truck when it should be going towards road). heck sometimes there's not even any put out at all!

it seems a great many drivers don't know proper triangle placement.

So now it's out: we are just bytes in a computer that is trying to find the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything.




-42-?

no... butter... 42 sticks of butter to be exact