|
jk651
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Jeff
Country: United States
State: Michigan
Metro: Ypsilanti
Birthday: 1/22/1976
Gender: Male
Interests: Cars, motorcycles, motocross, BMW, music,
Expertise: I can do lots of things, but I'm an expert at nothing. Except being a dork. I'm pretty good at that.
Occupation: Truck driver(temporary),Studen
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  jk651
Member Since:
4/15/2004
|
|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| It's winter at the higher altitudes. They got their first snow Saturday night. All the mountain tops have their peaks covered in snow and one of the ski areas has their snow machines going. The last few days in Reno it's been in the 50s. It's funny to see people wearing winter coats and hats and scarves when it's nearly 60 out. It's not even cold yet. .
This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!
To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.
Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime? 6.5 or higher is required.
 | | |
| So I'm in my first week of training at my new job. So far it's not bad. Most of the trucking work that I've done thus far has been mileage pay, so you're always rushing and speeding, because the sooner you deliver your freight the sooner you can get another load assignment, and with it more miles. You constantly have to find ways to shave time off of the hours that you log, because the more hours you can save, the more miles you can drive. Speeding means less driving time, and so you have more driving time for the next load, but speeding carries risks with it, but driving the speed limit basically means are left with less time to drive more miles, so less pay. Well this job is all hourly. So nice. We aren't intentionally slow, but we don't rush either. We can take our time and make sure things are done right, because we aren't just getting paid for the miles we drive, we're getting paid for all our time. There's no reason to speed, I mean why would I risk getting a speeding ticket so that I can get done sooner, and therefore get paid less money? We take our time, we do things right, and if we can't get everything done today, we just finish it tomorrow. It's nice. If we get stuck in traffic, who cares, we just make more money (instead of less money as with mileage pay). Even though I'm working for the same company I was working for in Michigan, I have to go through training here because what we are doing is different than the chemical work that we did in Michigan. Instead of delivering acids and other chemicals, we deliver cement additives to cement plants. This division is known as admix. The trailers are a bit more complicated, and because we load the trailers and unload by ourselves we have to understand the different additives that we're delivering and compatibility between them. Some can mix, and some react badly if you mix them, and it's our responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. On the chemical side our trailers were one big tank, and you delivered one product to one customer. Here our trailers here have 4 compartments. They have 3 different pump systems, each one designed for a certain group of compounds. So when we deliver we need to make sure the right compartment is hooked into the right pump system, and that we are pumping into the right tank at the customer. If we run the wrong compound through a pump, it could react with the previous compound that we pumped and damage the pump, and if we put the product into the wrong tank at the customer, it would create big problems as well, so it's a lot of checking connections and making sure everything is right before you start transferring product. Sometimes we just deliver on product to a customer, and sometimes they get 3 different products. Since we have 4 compartments we usually have more than one delivery stop per load, so we have to make sure that the right products get to the right customers, and into the right tank. On the chemical side like I was doing in Michigan, there isn't so much room to make mistakes. With one product, to one customer, you have to try hard to screw up. It's much easier to make a mistake with so many variables. I like the tanker work though because it's more involved and engaging than most other driving jobs. I also like that there's no rush here, and that I get paid for everything I do, not just how many miles I can drive in a week. | | |
| Goodness I love mountains!
This message has been sent using the picture and Video service from Verizon Wireless!
To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.
Note: To play video messages sent to email, Quicktime@ 6.5 or higher is required.
 | | |
| It's been pretty much forever since I did a post here I think. A few months anyhow. Quite a bit has happened in the past few months. I went to work for a company called C.R. England. I think they are the county's largest refrigerated carrier. It's been an experience to say the least. I've been working on their Wal-Mart dedicated fleet. Wal-Mart has a grocery distribution center about 20 miles east of Reno that services about 130 stores in Nevada, California, and southern Oregon. I pick up loaded trailers there and go to the stores and deliver the groceries to the stores. Most times I just go back to the DC empty, but I'd say about 25-30% of the time I pick up freight and take it back to the DC. Right now I'm at an egg farm in central California picking up a load of eggs to take back. As far as driving jobs go this is one of the easier ones to have. The pluses are that the pay is pretty decent, I don't have to load or unload, and I'm generally home 3 or 4 nights a week. The downsides are that I have to frequently go back and forth from Reno to California via Donner Pass. It's a pretty long and steep hill with lots of up and down grades and with a heavy load it can be slow going. I haven't had to do it in the snow yet, but in the winter it means having to put chains on the tires frequently. I also generally know what I'm doing for the day until I call in at 7am. Sometimes I have to go straight in to work, sometimes I don't have to start until the evening. I just don't know until I call in. Sometimes I call in at 7 and they tell me to call in the afternoon. So I sit around and don't go too far from home because I could have to work, then I'll call in at 3:30 that afternoon only to find that they won't have anything for me and then the next day I do it all over again. I don't need to work 7 days a week so I don't mind not working, but had I known at 7 instead of 3:30 that I wasn't working I would have used my day differently. That's about it for working on the dedicated fleet.
Working for C.R. England however has been not such a great experience for me. Maybe CR is just the norm for the industry and my standards are too high because I've worked for two exceptional companies, but I don't feel like CR appreciates their drivers and doesn't treat them particularly well. When I got to their yard in Salt Lake City the first clue was that they needed armed security guards to protect their dispatchers and other office staff. In order to get into the corporate offices and talk to the staff you first have to go through a security checkpoint where you have to go through a metal detector and surrender anything that could be used as a weapon to an armed guard. It's almost as bad as trying to board an airplane. Maybe I never gave them a fair chance because of that, but I remember thinking to myself "how badly do they treat their drivers that they need armed guards to protect the staff?". At both Gainey and DistTech the orientations were paid, as well as the training that I had to do at DistTech for the chemical tanker stuff, both orientations were about 2 days long. The orientation at CR was unpaid. I was surprised to find this out on the last day of orientation that I wasn't getting paid for it. Not only that, but unlike Gainey and DistTech, they didn't provide lunch to the drivers either. So I was stuck there for 4 days not getting paid and I had to buy all my own meals. I also had to pay for my physical. All commercial drivers have to have a D.O.T. physical every 2 years, or when they are hired for a new job. Again, at both Gainey and DistTech this was paid for. I was charged for my physical at CR. Both Gainey and DistTech have paid holidays, not at CR. A few weeks ago my truck broke down and I was out of commission for 2 days. Gainey and DistTech both would have given me 2 days of breakdown pay for that. CR doesn't even have breakdown pay. They pay on the dedicated fleet is good and I can't complain about that, but their pay package for regular drivers is lower than most other companies that I looked at, well below both Gainey and DistTech. I just don't know how they attract and keep quality drivers, and perhaps they don't. They have a large school and train lots and lots of new drivers and put them in trucks and that's probably where they make the most money.
So when Dawn the driver recruiter for DistTech called me a few weeks back and told me they had a position open up on one of their dedicated fleets in California and asked if I'd be interested in coming back it was really a no-brainer for me. I did of course think about it and talk about it with Ashley because there is on major downside to the job, but we decided the pluses outweighed the negative. I'm going to be working out of Stockton, California, and this will mean being gone during the week, but that's the only real negative. The pluses are that I'll be making more money, I'll get treated better and have better benefits, and the biggest thing is no weekends or holidays. That was another negative about the Wal-Mart fleet is that they work holidays and being low-man on the totem pole meant that more than likely I'd be working Thanksgiving and Christmas and whatnot. Having predictable hometime means we can make plans weeks or months in advance instead of not knowing until 3:30 in the afternoon that I'm not working that day. I'll also be getting paid hourly for my work instead of by the mile, so when I get stuck sitting in traffic burning up my hours it's not money out of my pocket like mileage pay. The best I generally average is about 49mph, less when you take into account the time I spend picking up or delivering. At 49mph with my mileage pay it works out to be about $19 per hour, which doesn't seem too bad, but that's just if you look at the driving time. We don't get paid extra for pickups or deliveries, it's just part of the mileage pay, so on the run I did last night it paid 272 miles. The load had 4 stops and I spent about 3 hours at stores delivering. I had 6hrs 45 minutes of driving, and the pay was about $110, or about $16.30 per hour. That's so-so as it is, but then when you add in the 3 hours I spend delivering that drops down to about $11.30 an hour, less than stellar. It's not really fair to look at it like that though because that's just how most truck driving jobs are, and when you look at my total pay for the week I do pretty good overall. But still, the new DistTech job will be all hourly, and the pay is well above what I make with mileage pay averaging 49mph. Being gone for 5 days at a time will be a difficult sacrifice, but overall we think it's worth it. DistTech is also letting me keep my seniority, so that means I'll still have my 2 weeks of vaction, and I'm half way to having 3 weeks of vacation. I wonder if CR even has paid vacation? Lol, I can't get too upset about things at CR because I think I made a lot of assumptions and didn't ask some questions that I should have, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm not too impressed with how the drivers are treated.
That's it for work, as for life in Reno, we like it, we like it a lot. Reno has tons of beautiful parks, and there is so much to do within a short drive of Reno. We really love being 45 minutes from Lake Tahoe. We also took a trip to Yosemite last week, but I'll save that for another post, but let's just say that we will be going back frequently.
This is my current truck:
| | |
| Wildfire smoke.
This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!
To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.
Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime? 6.5 or higher is required.
 | | |
|
