What's new

ABF | Breakdown

canaryinthemine

canaryinthemine

Retirement....The Job I Was Born To Have!
Credits
0
Here I sit at a customer's dock
Twiddling my thumbs and watching the clock.
The Ol' Mack's broke...
And so's the dispatcher's heart...
All those pickups he'll miss....
Now he don't feel so smart....

I talked about maintenance
Til I was blue in the face.....
Now I sit like an anchor...
Stuck in this place.

Plenty of time for rhyme.. .
No reason....
I'm only glad it's warm..
No freezin'.....

How Long Oh Lord?
Will they keep pushing their luck?
About preventative maintenance,
They don't know...

Ahhh, dang it..,lost my train of thought....
 
canaryinthemine said:
Here I sit at a customer's dock
Twiddling my thumbs and watching the clock.
The Ol' Mack's broke...
And so's the dispatcher's heart...
All those pickups he'll miss....
Now he don't feel so smart....

I talked about maintenance
Til I was blue in the face.....
Now I sit like an anchor...
Stuck in this place.

Plenty of time for rhyme.. .
No reason....
I'm only glad it's warm..
No freezin'.....

How Long Oh Lord?
Will they keep pushing their luck?
About preventative maintenance,
They don't know...

Ahhh, dang it..,lost my train of thought....
Click to expand...
The idle mind is the Devil's workshop.
 
That's what happens when they go with having vendor's do the repairs,I know when they took over Carolina they did away with many shops and have vendor's repair their stuff. Not as good as doing this inhouse,but let's keep the non-union hack shops open with their quick fix repairs
 
Corporate stock portfolios must be very heavy with chewing gum and baling wire futures........

Seriously, a bad repair on a routine breakdown led to a worse breakdown in an embarrassing spot at the most inopportune time. They'd've been better off fixing it right the first time , and then setting fire to a large pile of dollar bills in the parking lot. Would've saved them,........and me,....,the embarrassment of tying up a customer's only dock for three hours......while a different vendor scrapes off the gum and unwinds the baling wire put on by the first vendor......

Who's the corporate genius who figured out trucking companies don't need an in-house mechanic,........with a vested interest in keeping the equipment running,.....to do routine preventative maintenance?

All factories have in-house maintenance departments.......I guess trucking is the exception to the business model......

You can call up Larry, Daryll, and Daryll Truck Repair and Bait Shop, and some eighteen year old dropout in a 78 F-150 with most of it's fenders,.......and a large assortment of tools from Harbor Freight......will come and fix your truck....right after he drops his pregnant girlfriend off at the clinic......

Meanwhile, you can explain to the customer whose dock you're tying up,....about how much of an A-1 class carrier we are.....
 
canaryinthemine said:
Corporate stock portfolios must be very heavy with chewing gum and baling wire futures........

Seriously, a bad repair on a routine breakdown led to a worse breakdown in an embarrassing spot at the most inopportune time. They'd've been better off fixing it right the first time , and then setting fire to a large pile of dollar bills in the parking lot. Would've saved them,........and me,....,the embarrassment of tying up a customer's only dock for three hours......while a different vendor scrapes off the gum and unwinds the baling wire put on by the first vendor......

Who's the corporate genius who figured out trucking companies don't need an in-house mechanic,........with a vested interest in keeping the equipment running,.....to do routine preventative maintenance?

All factories have in-house maintenance departments.......I guess trucking is the exception to the business model......

You can call up Larry, Daryll, and Daryll Truck Repair and Bait Shop, and some eighteen year old dropout in a 78 F-150 with most of it's fenders,.......and a large assortment of tools from Harbor Freight......will come and fix your truck....right after he drops his pregnant girlfriend off at the clinic......

Meanwhile, you can explain to the customer whose dock you're tying up,....about how much of an A-1 class carrier we are.....
Click to expand...
It's sad that so many carriers today can't be bothered with preventative maintenance. And they don't seem to realize that paying Bob the builder to fix it with duct tape doesn't count.
 
Being broken down at the customer's dock is second only to be broken down in the middle of their only entrance gate. It feels like the magnifying glass is held on you...make it the telescope and you can only escape the feeling by hiding in their bathroom, their break room doesn't cut it. And to make it worse they have designed these trucks so we can't even take a nap whilst we wait. If I'm not seated upright behind the wheel my old creaky bones tell me all about it for a couple of days and I am unable to just sit at the wheel as if I'm driving if I'm not. Did you go see the doctor about that pain that you are suffering once you got going again?
 
ABFer said:
Being broken down at the customer's dock is second only to be broken down in the middle of their only entrance gate. It feels like the magnifying glass is held on you...make it the telescope and you can only escape the feeling by hiding in their bathroom, their break room doesn't cut it. And to make it worse they have designed these trucks so we can't even take a nap whilst we wait. If I'm not seated upright behind the wheel my old creaky bones tell me all about it for a couple of days and I am unable to just sit at the wheel as if I'm driving if I'm not. Did you go see the doctor about that pain that you are suffering once you got going again?
Click to expand...

You mean the pain in my posterior reflex aperture?........Or the pain between my shoulder blades from the tension of having to apologize for corporate stupidity and short-sightedness?

Or maybe the pain in my legs? I decided while I was waiting to do something healthy, so I power-walked around the customer's building while I waited for the...."repair" truck........1,482 steps around the perimeter,......and I did it seven times........ Healthier than sitting in the cab and reading 2 year old Mad magazines I found in the permit holder....
 
vongrimmenstein said:
And those days off are paid by the company, right?
Click to expand...
Comp, of course, provided that he takes 15 days or more to recover.
joes bar and grill said:
I would add therapy and counseling and of course a doctors note that states you're in a very fragile frame of mind , that any unforeseen outbursts would be a result of that.
Click to expand...
And I'd say that the discomfort of the rayon uniforms aggravates the situation, 100% cotton clothing is in order.
 
FleetNet which is a subsidiary of ArcBest is a breakdown center which uses non union vendors to make temporary patches to equipment for ABF & other companies. Some stories I have heard from drivers about breakdowns & the cost of temporary repairs are ridiculous. A driver said he was broken down a little over an hour away from a major company shop waited for 6 hours with a leaking water hose. A vendor finally came & charged over $900 dollars for patching the tractor to get to the next terminal. Many times drivers had long waits for tire repairs from a vendor when there was a company shop with a tire bank nearby.
Many shop foremen don't want to go to the trouble of going down the seniority list for road calls or they don't like the top seniority men so they just call a vendor. Too many supervisors will spend a thousand company dollars to keep a Teamster from getting a hundred. That mentality is not limited to the maintenance department.
 
DCM_Doc said:
That mentality is not limited to the maintenance department.
Click to expand...
That short sentence is more than a mouthful. I can't count the times I've passed other city guys headed the opposite direction to make pickups in my area while I was being dispatched into his. All because dispatch couldn't stomach the though of both of us sitting in place until our own pickups were ready. I, for the life of me, can't see how it benefits the company to add equipment mileage to that situation. I know I didn't feel like I owed the company because they gave me 30 minutes of down time afterwards.
 
DCM_Doc said:
FleetNet which is a subsidiary of ArcBest is a breakdown center which uses non union vendors to make temporary patches to equipment for ABF & other companies. Some stories I have heard from drivers about breakdowns & the cost of temporary repairs are ridiculous. A driver said he was broken down a little over an hour away from a major company shop waited for 6 hours with a leaking water hose. A vendor finally came & charged over $900 dollars for patching the tractor to get to the next terminal. Many times drivers had long waits for tire repairs from a vendor when there was a company shop with a tire bank nearby.
Many shop foremen don't want to go to the trouble of going down the seniority list for road calls or they don't like the top seniority men so they just call a vendor. Too many supervisors will spend a thousand company dollars to keep a Teamster from getting a hundred. That mentality is not limited to the maintenance department.
Click to expand...
Back when I worked for CFCC they had a breakdown number you called and if you were in a 50 mi of one of the shops they would send the shop guys to get ya going. But then again times have changed just like they did when ABF bought us.The company I now work for has kinda the same policy of sending guys from the shop ahead of a vendor. the shop foreman that can't seperate businees from personal is a bad foreman just because he don't like the senor guy oh well get over it. "nuff said everybody stay safe
 
Aging fleet,........so they're saving money there....(..in fact, in our little terminal, we have one truck that looks like it was used for bazooka practice during WWII......real impressive to the customers, as they sometimes think a garbage truck has pulled up.......)( Most of the others are only marginally better, appearance-wise....)

And you would think the money saved by pushing older trucks to the million mile level would reasonably be put into preventative maintenance to insure those trucks are at least dependable,.......if not pretty.

But, no....run it till it breaks......,.then make three or four expensive abortive attempts on the side of the road to fix it.
 
joes bar and grill said:
I would add therapy and counseling and of course a doctors note that states you're in a very fragile frame of mind , that any unforeseen outbursts would be a result of that.
Click to expand...

Sorry Joe,..........the general consensus around here is that sending me to therapy would be like sending Attila the Hun to a convenience store.......Pointless.......and messy.....

As far as unseen outbursts go,....I have them so often that the TM usually just sighs and cradles his head in his hands.....

And.....a doctor's note saying that I have a " fragile state of mind" would be farcical and mendacious ......as the material presumed to be "fragile"........is conspicuously absent.......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top