Liars and damned liars

I once sat at the counter of a Flying J restaurant and listened to an old gas bag convince a newbie driver that he had made the trip from Atlanta to Boston in ten and a half hours. Sounds pretty good I guess until you figure out that he had to average 107.428 mph over the whole trip. Now I’m not saying he couldn’t have averaged over 107 mph… wait… yes I am. Liar.

Another time I listened to the CB while an old boy told a newbie, who was nervous about his first time driving on snow and ice, that what he needed to do was simple. The old guy insisted that the thing to do on ice was to get up to about 50 mph or so. He told the kid, “the faster the better because the faster you drive the hotter your tires get and that will melt the ice.” I mean honestly.

Yet another time an old boy tried to convince me that he was making a killing leased on to Swift for 82 cents per mile. I said I didn’t see how he could be making much more than a company driver if he was only grossing 82 cents per mile. But he insisted that he was raking it in hand over fist. So I asked him how much it cost him per mile to run his truck. He had no idea.  Sigh. He was probably bleeding cash every week but wouldn’t even realize it until he was virtually out of business because he couldn’t afford to buy new drive tires. Trucking requires investment.

My point is that trucking is chocked full of liars. When you combine the honest-but-clueless with the out and out liars, there’s very little chance of finding any information about the state of the industry that you can count on. The newspapers tell us the economy is at the beginnings of a 1930s style depression. Our company tells us freight levels are horrible so they are regretfully going to have to cut driver benefits. Then the next week our company tells us that freight has picked up and we are going to have to start running more miles and quit staying home extra days. Who knows what’s actually going on?

I walked into owning a business once with too little information and no game plan. I’ll be damned if I’d ever do that again. But we need to buy our own truck. Now more than ever. We have always planned to buy one someday mostly because I don’t work well for others. It’s not that I’m a bad employee. I mean I always do a good job for my employers, but I can’t stand working for idiots.  I. Just. Can’t. Stand. It. I’m far from perfect and lord knows I make my mistakes. And I’m always willing to pay the consequences of those mistakes, but I get really damned tired of paying for some dispatcher’s mistake when it’s the third time that week that he’s made that same mistake. Also, frankly, I’m pretty damned smart and feel confident that I could handle my business way better than some punk in Georgia that I’ve never even met and who could care less about me and my needs. Those are a couple of the general reasons I have always wanted to buy our own truck.

But now we have a more pressing reason to buy. It’s quite simple… you can’t control your habits, your routines, or your health if you’re not in control of your loads. Plain and simple. If we run two long back to back FedEx loads that are timed-transit, there may be no time in three or four days of non-stop running to shut down and get decent meals. There’s no time to shut down and exercise… not to mention the hours required to recover from said exercising. There’s no chance for a decent night’s sleep. We have to start controlling our lives if we want to control our health. That’s why we’re going with a self-dispatching company when we buy.

But before we could buy our own truck we needed accurate information on freight levels and freight rates. Have rates tanked? Is there still freight available out there? We needed a real solid idea of the expenses involved in running your own truck. We needed some idea of the length of the learning curve within a self-dispatch system since there has never been any debate that when we bought our own truck we would be going to Landstar. Basically, we needed a ton of nitty-gritty  –  and fairly personal  –  information from someone intelligent, honest and successful so that we could begin to formulate our own plan of attack. Oh hell… I ask you… what’s a driver to do?

Call Salena and Eddie, of course. We talked to them during the debacle of trying to get home so Stace could see the doctor and honestly they couldn’t have been more helpful. They came across with tons of really important information and guided us to more info on the web that they thought would be helpful. They pointed out a few things that I hadn’t thought of that are now included in our start-up plans. Basically, thanks to them we both feel much more relieved about the whole situation and confident that our plans are shaping up to be solid. So… thanks Salena and Eddie… we owe you one.

What we are going to do is buy a Freightliner Columbia with around 400,000 to 500,000 miles or so on it. We can pick up a Plain Jane truck (that hopefully won’t be Mary Kay Pink) in that mileage neighborhood and in good shape for around $29,000 to $34,000. So we are looking at a minimum down payment of only about $7,000 which we can do easily. We haven’t decided yet but will probably put quite a bit more down in order to get the monthly payments as low as possible. It’s a balancing act between getting your truck payments as low as possible and reserving plenty of cash so that you have operating funds if a problem crops up. This is trucking after all so problems will crop up. We aren’t going to buy a trailer right now, so we will just use Landstar’s trailers. You make a little less per load if you use their trailer, but that’s ok.

We will have to get health insurance for ourselves now, but thought we would check into the insurance plan that OOIDA members have available to them. We are already paying close to $50 per week each cause we’re smokers. Obviously we will be joining OOIDA. We also need to file the incorporation papers so that we’re all nice and legal. Then there’s just the permits, licenses, truck insurances, and such to worry about. How exciting!

I am thinking of maybe a quit date at TWMNBN of the third week in October if we can last that long. That would give us plenty of time to get Stace’s blood sugar firmly under control, get incorporated, get all the insurances set up, and buy the truck and get it road-ready. Also, that will be at the tail-end of high fuel prices season so we will have had a chance to see how high they are planning to let fuel get in this economy.

Quitting the third week of October also insures that TWMNBN won’t be able to screw us out of the penny per mile “safety bonus” that they are now holding out of every one’s checks. Out of the blue a few weeks ago they decided to enact a “safety bonus” program. They keep a penny per mile of your paycheck and only pay it to you on the third week after the end of each quarter — if you had no preventable accidents during the quarter. Now you might ask, “Hey Hedon, how is it a bonus program if they are just giving you back the money you’ve already earned?” I would have to respond that you are awfully clever, my young friend. How is that a bonus program? What it sounds like to us is a way to hold back a ton of cash from around 12,000 drivers and draw interest on it for an entire quarter before finally paying it out to the driver who earned it months ago. As a bonus for the company, any driver who has even a minor wreck or quits before the end of the quarter can kiss that money goodbye. With 200% turnover every year, you just know they are counting on a lot of drivers quiting and leaving that bonus check sitting on the table so they can just keep the cash. Screw that. It’s not that I desperately want my $500 it’s more that I don’t want them to have the satisfaction of keeping it.

But we probably won’t make it that long at TWMNBN without heads exploding. I guess we’ll have to see how it goes. I have to say that I couldn’t be happier with the whole process now that it’s finally starting. We have been talking about buying our own truck for so long that we could have already run one into the ground if we had bought it back when we first decided to do so. Oh well… as the trucking mantra goes… better late than never.