A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  “Joe, do you know where we’re located in Baltimore? If you do, then just come on down here.”

  He said he’d try, and I hung up. I wasn’t about to stay on the phone and listen to him ask someone for directions to Baltimore.

  On another occasion, a driver who was also likely missing his last two pallets, or more, was dispatched to pick up a load of steel on the west side of Baltimore. He should have taken an exit off I-695 to reach the shipper, but for some reason or another, he missed his exit number. Instead, he kept driving, thinking he would eventually find the exit. He drove the entire circumference of I-695, over fifty miles, looking for his exit. Then, somehow, he missed his exit again and completed yet another revolution of Baltimore.

  The driver must have thought that his third time would be the charm, because he went around Baltimore one more time. Finally, he decided he should stop and find a pay phone. After driving damned near two hundred miles, plus paying three separate tolls for the Key Bridge, he eventually found the shipper. It was a damned good thing that he had been dispatched early that morning, or he would have missed his pickup.

  It’s hard to imagine a world without cell phones, but back in the day, truck drivers had to find pay phones in order to perform their jobs. Every driver had to perform a check call each morning to inform their dispatcher if they were unloaded, loaded, or en route to a delivery, including an approximate time they would arrive. In the event of a truck breakdown, or a flat tire, the driver had to once again find a pay phone in order to get help. Often there were pay phones located at gas stations, so the driver would have to exit a highway, if it was an interstate highway, and hope that there would be a gas station at that exit. If there wasn’t, he’d have to get back on the interstate and drive to the next exit to try again. If a driver had a flat tire on one of his front steering tires, he couldn’t “limp” into the next highway exit. If this happened, drivers locked their truck cabs and stuck their thumbs out to hitchhike a ride to the nearest pay phone. Local calls cost five cents in the good old days, and came to cost twenty-five or fifty cents toward the end of their popularity, or the driver would call collect and have the receiver pay for it. If you talked too long, the cost increased. And, of course, there were no electronic devices giving drivers directions to shippers or receivers, and because a map could usually only get them to the middle of town, they usually had to find a pay phone in their destination’s town or city to call the consignee. The drivers would have to look up the telephone number of the business by utilizing a phone book, which was always attached to the phone booth with a small, sturdy chain.

  After writing down the directions, using paper and pen they carried with them, off they would drive to their destinations. If the person they had spoken with had given them the wrong directions, it became necessary to find another telephone and call back.

  Drivers also often had to continually access phone booths in order to call their dispatcher. Say a North Carolina-based WMTS driver unloaded in New York and needed to know where to go next. He’d call his dispatch office to inquire where to pick up his next load, but if no load was available, the driver would be asked to call back periodically until a load was found for him. If the driver was told to begin heading toward the Baltimore terminal and call along the way, he had to locate an available pay phone each time he needed to call. This was the modus operandi prior to CB radios and cell phones.

  The whole process was always a pain in the driver’s rear end. Many drivers would exit a main highway in search of a pay phone and have to manage endless obstacles, like narrow streets, telephone poles, street signs, guardrails, fire hydrants, one-way roads, and cars parked everywhere, many of which were inadvertently destroyed as large tractor trailers tried to maneuver around them. More than a few gas station awnings were also knocked down because of a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-tall trailer trying to fit under an awning measuring twelve feet high.

  Buster, one of WMTS’s drivers with a great, dry sense of humor, called his dispatcher one morning to inform him that he was unloaded and was awaiting a dispatch for his next load. The dispatcher informed him that nothing was available at the moment and asked him to keep calling back. That afternoon, Buster called every hour from the morning to the afternoon, until he finally said, “Well, goddammit, I have wasted a lot of my expense money on pay phones, calling you all goddamn day long, are you going to give me a fucking load or should I just pitch a fucking pup tent for the night?” We all understood his frustration.

  Today, because of a truck’s onboard communications and GPS, drivers often don’t need to call a dispatcher to know where to pick up a load. But this also means we can track trucks, in a way we couldn’t before. Back in the day, if drivers wanted to goof off some, they could easily do so because no one knew where the hell they were. Thanks to the GPS units on top of trucks, truckers cannot hide these days.

  I was operations manager for a company at the time it began installing satellite communications in all its tractors. Several months after installation was complete, a driver called our dispatch office to report that he was running a little behind on his delivery to New Jersey, but said he wasn’t far and would be unloaded before lunch. He said he had just pulled into a truck stop north of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I don’t remember which truck stop, or which town he said he was in, but while we were talking, I pulled his truck up on my computer screen.

  I said, “Just so I know exactly how long it will take before you arrive at your destination, what town are you in again?”

  He gave me the town’s name again, so I replied, “No, you’re not. You’re in Baltimore!”

  “Hell no, I’m not! I’m in New Jersey,” he declared.

  I asked him if he hadn’t noticed the new white gizmo on top his truck. This seemed to startle him and he said he’d seen it, but “didn’t know what the fuck it was.”

  I told him it was a satellite tracking device, and I could pinpoint his vehicle within a few hundred yards. Later, back at the terminal, he wasn’t bashful when admitting, “Man, shit! You sure did get the goods on me, didn’t you? Y’all got all this new shit looking at us that we can’t get away with nothing these days.”

  We soon learned that this one lie was just one of many he had in his repertoire, and his employment soon ended at our company.

  Shippers

  Trucking folks know how badly some shippers treat truck drivers. Drivers were treated like shit years ago, and I’m not sure things have become a whole hell of a lot better through the years. One particular area of mistreatment concerns the weight that shippers load on trailers. Of course, all truckers understand the reason for shippers to load trailers up to the legal weight limits: because they don’t want to risk sending a shipment that is smaller than it needs to be. (For example: the legal weight limit for a five-axle tractor trailer, which is the most common commercial vehicle plying US highways, is eighty thousand pounds and if a tractor trailer weighs in at seventy-seven thousand pounds, then the shipper has left three thousand pounds off the trailer that it cannot get paid for.) Some shippers initially load too much product to err on the high side rather than the low side, but too many of them push that far beyond what’s necessary.

  When shippers load heavy products, such as sheetrock, plywood, cement, ingots, or any number of other commodities, many times they require the driver, after securing his load, to weigh it, and then return to the loading dock with his weight ticket to receive his bills of lading. Some shippers have scales on site, but many times drivers have to travel to the closest certified scale. Every driver, whether he pulls a flatbed or van, also knows what might happen upon returning to the shipper after weighing his rig. If the weight is low and there is room left on the trailer, more products will be loaded. If the load is too heavy, they’ll remove some of the product—and hurrah!—have the joy of returning to weigh the load one more time.

  In the past, most shippers gave little or no consi
deration to the countless hours that drivers wasted going back and forth to weigh their loads, since it was thought to be part of a driver’s job. Many a driver has weighed his load and found it to be either over gross weight or overweight on an axle. Quite a few drivers thought, To hell with it, and took their chances by running around, or bypassing the scales at state weigh stations using back roads. There were some trucking companies that would, if you got caught, pay your overweight fines. However, for the companies to pay, the driver usually had to first get his dispatcher’s authorization to “run the load.” If the driver decided to do this on his own, and then got caught, he would often have to pay the fine himself.

  Through the years, there have been several high-profile crashes involving overweight trucks. Ensuing lawsuits made shippers painfully aware that both they and the truckers could be held liable for knowingly overloading trucks. Because of these rulings, shippers today are far less likely to load a trailer over the allowable gross weight for a five-axle vehicle (eighty thousand pounds), although axle weights still need to be adjusted pretty often. Federal law stipulates that the steering axle, the front axle, cannot exceed twelve thousand pounds, and that the other two sets of axles, the drive and tandem axles, cannot exceed thirty-four thousand pounds. If an axle exceeds the allowable weight, then, most assuredly, the driver is going to get ticketed for his transgression. It was high time that shippers learned that, “Not my problem,” was now also their problem.

  Most deliveries today are scheduled for a specific time slot, and the standard practice, unless other arrangements are agreed to, is for a receiver to be allowed two hours “free time” to unload the truck. If the receiver takes more than two hours, most trucking companies will assess a “detention charge” for holding up the driver and the tractor trailer. Large trucking companies are mostly successful in receiving detention charges after two hours, and most of their drivers are paid a portion of these amounts.

  Owner-operators haul the vast majority of produce in the United States and, sadly, too many of these produce haulers don’t receive detention fees; despite the fact that they often have to wait several hours for their turn to load in the farm fields, and have to apply the KY Jelly, bend over, and grab their ankles when they arrive at their destinations, because they know damned well that even though the load was hotter than the blazing gates of hell when it was loaded, the lumpers really don’t give a shit how long it takes to unload the truck.

  A lumper is a person who unloads cargo. In the not-so-distant past, truckers were required to unload their own loads, but today practically all food warehouses ban truckers from even stepping foot on the unloading docks. Instead, on delivery, each trucker hires a lumper to unload the product. Lumpers’ rates depend on how much time they spend unloading a trailer. I have seen these charges range anywhere from $75.00 to $500.00 per load. It may sound like good money, but it’s not an easy job. Just try unstacking and restacking forty-eight thousand pounds of product when it’s ninety degrees outside and the sun is beating down on a metal roof.

  After produce haulers arrive at their delivery destinations, they often have to wait several hours before receiving a dock assignment and then several more hours, typically four to six, while the lumpers do their thing, and the owner-operator waits for the unloading to be finished. And while most large trucking companies receive detention pay after two hours, owner-operators are hardly ever paid for their detention time. The main reason for this is because the owner-­operators contract their loads through food brokers, and once the driver agrees to haul a load for a negotiated sum, then that is all the driver is going to get.

  –

  Everyone is aware that trucks are the only reasons buildings have loading docks. Trucks haul products in and out of businesses. Even a dunce could understand this, so why is it that so many shippers and consignees treat truckers like redheaded stepchildren? Truck drivers ask shippers if they can use restrooms or get something from a break room, only to be told that truck drivers are not allowed to use their bathrooms and that the break rooms are only for employees.

  I have been that driver who has eaten too many apples and needed to use a restroom, and quickly. I have also worked in shipping and receiving facilities and observed my employers do these very things to truckers who were delivering to, or picking up from, our facilities. Is it any wonder that shippers ask questions such as, “Why do truck drivers have to take a leak alongside their trucks?” or “Why do drivers throw their trash, their banana peels and their chicken bones, out on the parking lot?” The shippers and receivers could get an earful of answers if they would just ask the truck drivers.

  While on the subject of bad shippers, truck drivers often walk into shipping or receiving departments and are greeted by the sight of someone’s back. It is as though those folks are thinking that if they ignore you, you might go away. When truckers get tired of standing there being ignored, they often clear their throats loudly several times. Eventually, without even turning to face the drivers, the shipper finally says that they will be with them in a minute. And the hell of it is, if truckers say anything at all about being ignored, especially if the trucker calls the shipper out on it, the driver may end up being the last truck unloaded that day or even get banned from going back to that location.

  When there is a scheduled time for a pick-up or delivery, the process should work better, but with a bad shipper, this is far from guaranteed. There are numerous ignominious examples of truckers who have suffered despite having scheduled times. On many occasions, drivers run hard, and even forgo meals, in order to arrive at a customer’s business before his federally mandated on-duty driving time3 runs out, only to hear, “You’re too early. Wait until thirty minutes before your appointment and then we’ll let you through the gate,” or “The conveyor line went down, and we will get to you when we can.” A driver might also arrive tired as shit only to find an extremely long line of trucks ahead of him. He might think he’ll be able to get in a nap while he waits, but then realizes that if he tries for some shut-eye, one of those other sons of bitches will drive around and get in front of his truck or, the company’s dispatch office will call him on the CB when it’s time for him to load and if he’s asleep, he might not hear them.

  You could write an entire book about bad shippers. Thankfully, you could write a sequel about the good ones who look at the truck driver as an essential component of its supply chain.

  Unless they work in the transportation and logistics fields, most folks wouldn’t give much thought to the job of a company’s traffic manager (TM). Well, John Q. Public couldn’t imagine the power of a large company’s TM, as he dictates all transportation decisions, whether inbound, outbound, global, or warehousing, nor could John Q. fathom how this power directly affects trucking companies.

  Before deregulation led to lower freight rates, many carriers spent enormous amounts of money literally “buying” their freight and, sadly, there happened to be some TMs who were ripe for the picking. Most TMs were, and still are, honest and hardworking folks, however, there were some memorable fellows who thought that carriers should pay for their loads, and these TMs lived very high on the hog. I know of TMs who never, ever paid out of pocket for their own family’s vacations, even though they took several trips each year. One TM drove a new Cadillac each year, compliments of a trucking company. It was astounding how much freight could be bought with a bottle of good bourbon or a case of tolerable wine.

  Traffic managers negotiate—or dictate—freight rates with carriers. TMs often supervise large numbers of employees, including dispatchers and related clerical staff, and it used to seem that a TM’s entire staff mimicked their boss’s behavior when it came to freebies. The line of thinking went like this: If he was getting his, they were getting theirs.

  Most steelmakers’ transportation personnel were quite upset when carriers missed picking up steel loads. They were not in the least bit sympathetic concerning the reason(s)
for these no-shows, and they would cuss you like a dog in addition to withholding a carrier’s freight for a day or two. Shippers hate no-shows because when a load has not been picked up, the customer does not have its product, so the shipper loses revenue—and, yes, the carrier does too. Usually, there are good reasons for no-shows, such as driver sickness or equipment breaking down, but as a traffic manager once said, “I don’t give a fuck if the driver died—a no-show is still a no-show.”

  A traffic department dispatcher called me one morning, just as the clock struck eight, and greeted me with, “Way to go, asshole, you missed a fucking load last night.” He didn’t even let me explain, he yelled and then hung up on me. Well, I think I gained a bit of his respect when I returned his call and told him that I didn’t give a shit who he was, he had better never call me an asshole again. He never did, and we maintained a professional business relationship for several years after. I knew I wasn’t the only one who shared this kind of beautiful moment with him, because soon after I started hauling loads he assigned, other carriers asked me if he’d cussed me out yet.

  When I was running the WMTS Pittsburgh terminal, it was only fitting to take the TM of one of our biggest flatbed shippers, Art, out to lunch from time to time to maintain a good relationship. This TM controlled shipments from four or five plants that manufactured mining equipment, and also imported shipments from the Port of Baltimore. Those were the high-flying days of the three-martini lunches, and Art fondly embraced them. I would pick him up outside his office at 11:30 a.m., and we would head downtown to one of the Tambellini restaurants. There were several Tambellini’s around Pittsburgh, and they were all excellent. Art would order a vodka martini with pearl onions, and I would enjoy a gin martini with olives. As well as I can remember, our conversations must have been very engaging, very lengthy, and, to be sure, quite debauched, because the end of our lunches always coincided with just barely enough time in the evening to pour him onto the last downtown bus to take him to his home in the North Hills.