Turning my authority back on...

[Rawze]

I like my own situation. Not the most profitable but very reliable, no-nonsense income. I can come or go as I please, take time off when I want, or work hard and make a lot of $$$ if I like.


I haul cheap freight, VERY cheap!. 0.92c/mile + whatever the national rate for F.S.C. is. That kind of cheap that most would claim they can't crank up their their truck for.

BUT...

* I get paid every mile truck goes, loaded or empty, and usually even when going home from half way across the country if I wanted to. I have been paid the miles for bobtailing home from several thousand miles away before, several times, though they can choose not to pay me for that, it is optional.

* Most all expenses are paid for me, things like insurances, ifta, tolls, permits, tags, you name it. - It gets paid and does not come out of my settlement. I do pay for OA, and couple other things, adds up to about $130/week, and of course I pay for fuel.

* As far as fuel goes, I pay so little, compared to rest of industry, that it is not even funny. The mega-fleece I am leased onto buys fuel by the "tens-of-millions-of-dollar/year deals" for their company drivers, so I get that same discount. It is not unusual to pay only 1/3 or less a gallon than most others do whenever we are using their fuel network (currently TA/Petro). There is quite a bit of extra profit in this alone.

* There is no such thing as sitting really. - Since the mega-fleeece I am O/O with is a sublet of carrier for UPS, Conway, Fedex, Amazon, Estes, and every other damn carrier out there, I have never been "stuck" anywhere. - Not even in south florida.

* e-logs all the way, qualcomm, and they tell you not to drive if your too tired, if your out of hours, if there is any official reports of ice in the roadway, or if the roads require chains.

* I have been with them now for more than 10+ years, and damn qualcomm has never "beeped" with a load that did not make me a profit, i don;t care where it is going from or to.

* I have never had an incorrect paycheck, got cheated, not gotten paid, or anything else. Sure there has been discrepancy/shortfall on occasion, but they always seem to find it a paycheck or 2 later and fix it without me ever having to tell them about it.

-0-----

Downsides:

-- You are nothing but a number to them, and their "fleet dispatch managers, load planners, etc." are mostly completely useless 1st year graduate students in buisness/trucking and have no clue how a trucking operation works in the field. This means that you have to ignore them and just do whatever that qualcomm has planned for you the best you can, turn a blind eye just like an under-paid company driver would do for the rest. .. They clearly can't plan their way out of a wet paper bag most days and will stack you up with 3 or 4 loads that have no concept of proper delivery/pickup times, empty miles, etc. - They have no idea that it takes 30-45 minutes to navigate/complete a delivery before your next pick-up and that there may be 400 empty miles of driving time in between. - Actual consideration of though/planning from one load to the next on your own part that they stack you up on will only frustrate you and make you want to choke someone all the time.

How do we deal with this?...

We simply don't!. We ignore it completely and laugh about it. - We just push the truck in whatever direction it is supposed to go next at a normal pace. We just ensure to average 50 mph, same as industry standard, from pickup-to-delivery, no faster. -- No matter what they say or do, no matter how late the load is or gets. It is not my problem even if we run out of hours or it took 9 hours to get unloaded and the next pick up is 9 hours late. All we do is move the damn truck, play dumb as a brick, nothing more. - We let them be the bad guy if the truck does not make it on time due to their poor planning because no-way am I going to let it cost me more money by speeding up or doing other things trying to make the constant unrealistic deadlines. It all pays out the same 0.92/c mile to me, never changes, so therefore I have no incentive to make up for anyone else's poor planning, or for the shipper getting me out of their gate several hours late. i get that load out the gate 6 hours late, it is getting to the other end 6 hours late,.. even if I can make up the time if I had sped up,.. I am not making less profit for anyone else's poor planning.

- Low-rent freight and low-rent pay = Not my problem!, complain to someone else!.

- We love it!. -- WHY? -- Because settlement take-home, after fuel and expenses pay is usually in the $4,500 - $5,500 (roughly $2,500 average per driver) range most weeks and we make more than $80,000 - $100,000 a year of "after-all expenses and even maint. and other costs" and that is decent money no matter how you look at it. Let that damn qualcomm thing beep,.. we will go wherever it says next, ignore the rest completely, and just make our profits. In the end, I have seen hundreds of people come over here,.. some with their own authority + many people leased onto places big and small and about every situation and trucking style and company over the years.

-- In the end, when comparing it up, it all pays about the same and it is based on the type of freight you haul. With Dry-van and reefer freight, it all pays about the same no matter how you slice that pie up. Confidently, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 beign the best pay you can make in the dry-van market, I can say our take-home pay is right about 6 of 10 of what most O/O's will earn and have kept in their pockets at the end of a year. - Not great, but the advantage is the fact that that damn truck never sits unless we want it to. There is always 15+ loads waiting/ stacked up, even in the worst places in this country for it at any given moment of the day. We can be dumb as bricks, I can come and go as I please. Every load makes me a profit and I have never lost money on one yet. - That is worth every damn bit of not being the highest paid, because it allows a person rely on those things without question of headache. - i call it Owner-op on training wheels, and to me, that is all I am willing to put up with,.. to hell with all the load planning, and dead zones, and other things,.. I just want to drive, make a decent paycheck, fix on my own stuff, and the room to come and go as I please, so that is why we do it this way.