What's new

How was you're week?

MikeJ

MikeJ

TB Veteran
Credits
199
Well I'll start, we got our rumpuses kicked this week over at GFS. Today I got a good 3 hour late start. Was still at the yard at 7:00am slept in my car for an hour waiting for my trailer. They give us an idea when our trailers are going to show up, kind of, but today nobody really knew for sure so I said forget it went in and just bit the bullet till the trailer came. It's all I can do.

We are down a few people at our yard. Short trucks, I've been running pretty heavy the past 3 weeks. We have a ton of angry customers asking me why I am so late everyday. A good amount of goofy warehouse goofs. Which I get to hear all about.

So far our Friday track record has been atrocious, added on stops bad loads I had 21,000lbs 2 Fridays ago loaded right to the door and miss loaded to. Last week same thing bad load told the boss I had a customer threaten to leave us, didn't see them on my truck this week so who knows. Load at least today though was good, actually would have been an okay day if I got out on time, can't win for losing I guess.

13hour day at work today, and my eyes are all red and I need to shave ha-ha, I'll shave tomorrow. Yeah we got beat down real good, this week. Any how, how are you all doing?
 
We are getting whooped now that school is back in, with new school accounts and new accounts in general, we are running hard! Case count at the main house is up alot!
 
We had a couple routes that didn't go out at all Saturday. They left Sunday, 24 hours late. Two more got done, but left hours late, after guys got back that could run. Teamed up two and three drivers on those, so there were definitely customers that got buried.

Short on people. Extra board is run ragged, and those guys are out of hours at the end of the week. A couple call offs, and everything is fubar.

Really hard to find people that want to work. Must be a lot of good paying jobs out there.
 
Guys I want to talk to you all about something. I think in this country everyone has been taught in schools, don't go into labor you don't want to be in labor labor is bad. You want management and office and paper pushing crunching data jobs.

Well my brother and his girl friend (I guess they live together now, or something really I couldn't careless as they live an entire state away and I don't see them, but I digress) they work for a major financial institution and they don't really like there office jobs and hate how they are monitored tracked and worked very hard to perform and then it goes back to "well we don't like our jobs, but we don't want to work in labor and there's a line of people out the door who are gunning for an office job like we have so were kind of stuck in between a rock and a hard place." By the way I don't know how much more money they really make at this given time then I do and there performance is tracked a lot harder then mine because it certainly seems they are more expendable for the fact of everyone wants a "cushy" office job. Nobody wants a hard labor job, but there's a catch financial business can come and go and the skills you get in a field like that well lets just say I wouldn't necessarily know if being in finance is a job for life.

When I got my CDL the day I passed my CDL test the man who gave me the test when we got back to the yard and my road test was done he said to me "Good job, son you now have a job for life."

Well anyhow the fact of the matter is everyone is knocking the door down to get into an office job, but not to many people are knocking the door down to get into food service trucking. My yard is short people and the bosses don't want any more people to quit because if people do then eventually the business is going to suffer. For me getting into this business and specifically this niche of the business so far as been one of if not the best, business decision I have made.

I mean beer trucking was my first real job, but GFS is more of a career type company then where I used to work and you someone once said and I do think it's true "when you start truck driving you no longer have a job you have a career." I think at the end of the day there is some truth to that saying.
 
Screw office work. We have really nice middle class incomes, honestly make more than the average paper pusher but don't have to deal with all the politically correct office politics BS. As long as I show up and I'm clothed I'm good.

I know when I was in school it was "college, college, college". Did I mention college?
So lots of people went. Even the ones who had no idea what they wanted to do or would've been better suited learning a trade. Now the market's flooded with tons of people with bachelor's degrees that are near worthless and since no one wants to work hard...or find labor "beneath" them because of their education the pendulum's swung our way. My wife doesn't regret her degree necessarily, but could've easily gotten her job without it. My brother has school debt and works a crappy customer service job and part time at a restaurant repaying his loans while he looks for the job he wants. Everyone told me to go, I'd ask how to pay for it and the answer was "student loans". I thank God that I #1: Didn't like to listen then and #2: Hated school and hated the idea of paying to go to school even more. Tying up 4-5yrs and $$$ to make $40-$50k someday is stupid in my opinion. Absolutely no return on investment for the average person.

If high school counselors told kids UPS guys make as much as dentists how many would have their butts in there applying for those part time jobs to get their feet in the door? I think their intentions are good but from what I see the people who benefited most from my generation attending college were the colleges themselves and the banks providing the loans that follow you forever because they can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
Don't know what I'll tell my kids. Want my son to have an easier go at life, but if he came home in 10yrs and told me he wanted to borrow money (or worse yet wanted some of MINE) to major in English or Psychology or Business Administration I'd probably smile then smack him with a frying pan. Have a feeling Mom would do the same to him.
 
Lazlo's absolutely right as usual and really they say college grads have the chance to earn a million dollars more in there life time. Of course those statistics are bias and not really accurate because after the debt and everything else that comes along with it i.e. time in college you were not working earning money vs those 4-5-6 years you could have been working earning money which translates into lost income while you were piling up debt! My brother has a 4 year degree, but he went to a state school lived at home and my folks helped him out so he wouldn't go into debt.

My folks didn't really pay for any of my schooling it wasn't as elaborate as my brothers, but I have some, but anyhow I make good money at GFS now and live at home and save about 85%-90% of my take home pay.

Around the time I was getting ready to finish up getting my associates degree which took me 4 years to earn by the way ha-ha!Anyhow though I had realized the college game and it is a game is absolutely rigged it is a very unfair system that is totally set up to fail. It is a meat grind set up to fail to keep students there longer paying tuition. Well anyhow what happened was I figured out that a bachelors degree was not for me I was burnt out on school and had, had enough and wanted to get to work also there was nothing at a four year school I was really interested in studying and in my opinion I was out of time I did not want to invest anymore time into school because I knew school could only teach you so much. Trust me there were also other people in some of my classes at the community college I went to who felt the same way as I did about school, but at the same time I was very close to the end of graduating and you don't quit something or drop out right at the finish line so I buckled down got some help and got it done and now I can say yeah I did it, it's over and done I do not have to think about it any more.

I'll be honest with you I don't think that sitting in an office is what it's cracked up to be it's one of two things it's either mind numbing and extremely boring or like where my brother works a boiler room where they basically hold a metaphorical gun to you're head and give you more then they know you can do or any of them can do just so they can always have a reason to get rid of you.

You know at the end of the day college can work for you if you study the right things and do you're do dillagence as far as what to study and what career to get into, but you wouldn't spend thousands of dollars and get into debet to buy some expensive tangable good, yet people throw thousands of dollars at college because "it's what you do."

Well the bottom line with college is, it is a buyer beware kind of thing. No ifs and or's or buts about it.
 
We are still running hard here every day, gaining alot of new accounts, we even got some new schools, I'm tired at the end of the week. For a fat lazy steering wheel holder thats saying alot...well there are all those drops and hooks, plus I hook my guys up at the shuttle yard I run to, I figure they work harder than me and if I can do something to start their day off better I will! I was always tickled to death when I came in and my tractor was hooked.
 
Things this past week at GFS have stabilized and this was a better week as far as work goes. Tuesday was a fine day, Wednesday was alright for a Wednesday, Thursday was good too, and Friday wasn't bad either. I hope Monday goes back to normal that would be cool and things hopefully are starting to get back to normal I hope. The warehouse was better this week, I think there trying to get there house in order at the warehouse, because over all the trailers seemed to be coming in on time and the loads were pretty decent over all.

My Friday which was hysterically during the Summer a heavy day for me has started I think to calm down a little bit. I have some places that are seasonal on the lake and they get busy during the summer, but this Saturday was grey and 60 degrees with rain all day and I absolutely loved it, I can't stand the heat ha-ha! Anyhow the seasonal places by the lake there days are numbered there orders are getting smaller and probably by the end of this moth they will be packing it up. One of the other restaurants I go to said to me "Oh yeah those guys, once the weather turns there pretty much done."

Now my biggest stop on Friday they have slowed a little too, there no longer open for lunch they are open year round, but they are now only open for dinner and there a sea food place and they do a little into clam bake season, but there peak time for the year is defiantly past them as well.

However other places have increased I do a bar and grill on Friday and they were 70-80 cases now there over 100 and that's because foot ball is starting up and they get busy with that.

You know I felt bad this year for the kids going back to school, but it's that time of year where as Dar Williams said in 1997 "We push our selves ahead." Now that we had a blast of fall weather I decided I'm over it, to bad kids you're back in school and it's the end of the summer, falls right around the corner now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top