Aren't Our Customers Wonderful?

So I'm still in Fort Collins, CO even though I should be well on my way to Texas by now. Last night I delivered in Loveland and parked near my pick-up location, ready to start the long drive to Texas. Well I show up to my customer (as much as I'd enjoy naming names I'll keep it to myself) and they tell me they rescheduled my load for a Feb 2nd pick-up. Too bad they didn't pass that along to the company they hired to ship for them. So I sat at the customer location for a few hours hoping the Planners could do something, but being the time of year that it is nothing has come through yet. So I crawled the truck back to the rest area I had been at the previous night. Hopefully I get something soon, and headed in the right direction. I had requested to be home on the 27th, but that ain't happening...now I just want to be pointed in the right direction.

Anyone else have fun stories of your customers screwing up your day/week?

I enjoy reading stories by you OTR drivers. Man, the only thing I could relate with doesn't even stack up to the level of frustration you guys must learn to cope with. I might get delayed at one of our terminals for 2 hours while waiting for freight or my bills. Since I don't deal with customers running linehaul , I deal with central or regional dispatch, the local terminal dispatch, or sometimes having to wait on our dock workers. I know a lot of these people by name now since I interact with the same group of people, going to the same terminals over and over again.

When I read stories like yours, where you might be delayed a whole day, and how that could impact the rest of your week, I just think to myself that I have absolutely nothing to complain about when I'm delayed just a few hours before I turn back home for the night.

My first load to go home for hometime after I tested out to go solo with central/swift was from Utah to el paso tx and central don't normally run that far south so I finally got dispatched and had to wait for the trailer to show up the next day which was a thursday and my delivery date was Saturday well I got there Friday and come to find out that my stop 90 was closed on weekends and had no way to get home cuz my wife don't have a license or a car and had to sit in my truck in 110° weather till Monday and to top that off my appointment was at 0800 and I didn't bump the dock till 1500 and didn't get unloaded till 1630 I was ****ed

That stuff is going to happen from time to time, obviously, and it sucks when it does. But over time you can make up for that kind of stuff by being savvy out there.

For instance, I used to keep track of where we had customers with our trailers. That way if I dropped a trailer somewhere and there weren't any empties I had a list of locations I could check instead of waiting hours and hours for dispatch to finally scrape up something. I've passed many bobtails sitting around waiting for trailers as I bobtailed down the road to scrape one up. I'd get a load assignment and be gone while others sat around waiting.

And of course moving appointments ahead is another way to get ahead on things. I always used to try to move appointments ahead. The company never likes that of course....they want you to let customer service do it. But it's not their paycheck on the line, it's mine, and nobody is more convincing than someone with something to gain or lose. So I would call and "imply" I was with customer service. I would just say, "Hi, this is Brett Aquila with US Xpress" or whoever I drove for at the time. I didn't mention I was actually a driver....I'm just "with" the company and they always assumed I was in the offices. I would tell them we have another load scheduled after the current one we're on and we have to get this appointment moved up in order to make the next one....things like that. It worked the overwhelming majority of the time. You can save yourself an extra day or two per week just by moving loads ahead even a few hours sometimes.

Then of course there's a lot of things you'll do to prevent problems.....avoiding severe weather by keeping an eye on it at all times, avoiding the heaviest traffic using smart trip planning, prevent yourself from wasting time trying to find a parking spot by getting stopped at a decent time in areas where parking is the toughest......stuff like that.

There's no way to fix this exact situation so you'll get home sooner, but you can make up for it in the long run pretty easily if you're smart about how you do things out there. It takes time to learn a lot of the tricks, but once you do you can make up for a lot of problems that get thrown at you.

This wasn't a customer.....but one time I sat for eight days in a hotel waiting on my truck to be fixed because the dealership I was at kept telling myself and my company that the parts were "on the way". They were supposedly "on the way" for a week before my company looked into it further and realized they couldn't get the parts because they were one-off custom parts made for an experimental truck setup. Instead of just telling us that they kept lying about it. Finally they shipped me on a bus to a terminal a few states away and I was given a different truck.

Poop happens! But hopefully you'll be able to make up for time and money lost to poop down the road.

I feel your pain, man! Nothing in my experience matches yours. However, once I was sent to a paper mill, a 24/7 operation, to pick up a pre-loaded trailer on a Wednesday. It turned out to be the one day a year when the mill shut down their computer system for 12 hours or so for maintenance. They could not/would not check in any trucks/trailers for inspections and could not release any loaded trailers. Once the system was running, the pre-loaded trailer was not loaded yet. It took several more hours for them to clear the back-log of trucks (must have been over 50 trucks waiting). It was a bit over 24 hours waiting before getting the drop/hook completed. The plant claimed that all the trucking companies were notified about the pending shut down and should not have sent in the drivers for loads. My company claimed they never got the notice. I did collect layover pay, but it was not nearly enough to compensate for the time lost or for the frustration of sitting in a dirt lot of a stinky paper mill with 50 other frustrated drivers and one nasty porta-potty. Good luck to ya!

Just a wild guess here, but would that particular customer's name start with A and end with B? If so, color me thoroughly unsurprised. I've had to sit there for 12 hours waiting for a "preloaded" trailer before, on more than one occasion. And that's after the 45 minutes sitting in line to get checked in through security. Utter blithering idiots, the lot of em.

Just a wild guess here, but would that particular customer's name start with A and end with B? If so, color me thoroughly unsurprised. I've had to sit there for 12 hours waiting for a "preloaded" trailer before, on more than one occasion. And that's after the 45 minutes sitting in line to get checked in through security. Utter blithering idiots, the lot of em.

Very good guess.