Central Refrigerated Service mistreatment of employee truck driver West Valley City Utah

If this was all it took to get your sniveling little hubby to quit he has no business in this industry to begin with. Good god! What do you think trucking companies are anyway? A travel agency? They have a job to do to satisfy the customer. That is what trucking companies sell. Service. It don't get no plainer than that. I have been a driver for 36 years. I can't begin to count the number of times things didn't go quite the way I had hoped. You deal with it. I have been with Central for almost 20 years now as a company driver. They have treated me just fine. Why? Because I do the job. Thats what it is all about. Doing the job. We don't need no sniveling little boys here pretending to be able to do a mans job. Tell your little boy "Thanks" for not sticking around. I'm sure he would have just made all of men here sick to our stomachs.

If this was all it took to get your sniveling little hubby to quit he has no business in this industry to begin with. Good god! What do you think trucking companies are anyway? A travel agency? They have a job to do to satisfy the customer. That is what trucking companies sell. Service. It don't get no plainer than that. I have been a driver for 36 years. I can't begin to count the number of times things didn't go quite the way I had hoped. You deal with it. I have been with Central for almost 20 years now as a company driver. They have treated me just fine. Why? Because I do the job. Thats what it is all about. Doing the job. We don't need no sniveling little boys here pretending to be able to do a mans job. Tell your little boy "Thanks" for not sticking around. I'm sure he would have just made all of men here sick to our stomachs.

If this was all it took to get your sniveling little hubby to quit he has no business in this industry to begin with. Good god! What do you think trucking companies are anyway? A travel agency? They have a job to do to satisfy the customer. That is what trucking companies sell. Service. It don't get no plainer than that. I have been a driver for 36 years. I can't begin to count the number of times things didn't go quite the way I had hoped. You deal with it. I have been with Central for almost 20 years now as a company driver. They have treated me just fine. Why? Because I do the job. Thats what it is all about. Doing the job. We don't need no sniveling little boys here pretending to be able to do a mans job. Tell your little boy "Thanks" for not sticking around. I'm sure he would have just made all of men here sick to our stomachs.

You have to the trucking industry...Thank you!

You have to the trucking industry...Thank you!

These kinds of things are typical.

You have a pickup scheduled for 12:00 noon. You arrive at 11:00 with your trailer pre-cooled to the correct temperature for the load. Let's say that it's meat.

Unfortunately, the shipper tells you that the load won't be ready for another 2 hours. So, you sit in your truck and wait. At 3:30 they call you and tell you to back into a door. It's 4:00 before you even feel the forklift in the trailer.

By the time the load is all on and sealed, it's past 6:00. Or, six hours over the time you were supposed to pick up.

The load is due in the morning at 07:00 AM. You need to run it 500 miles. That takes about 9 hours to drive. You have 12 hours left before delivery time.

Here's the deal. You been awake since morning. You got about one hour of rest while you were waiting to load. Now, you got to drive all night until 5:00 AM.

You'll get two hours sleep after you arrive. Then, you need to wake back up and deliver the meat.

Your log will be illegal. You'll have to falsify it.

About 2:00 in the morning, you'll start getting super tired. But, you still have 150 more miles to go. All you can do is push on and keep the window open and try to stay awake.

I've been there many times. So much fun!

Here's another deal you'll like.

You pick up a pre-loaded trailer. It's frozen french fries. There's 46,000 pounds of them. So, gross weight is like 79,400. You hook up and run over to a CAT scale. First weight and you're 1,100 over on your drives.

So, you need to slide. But, the brakes won't hold. You pull the slider lock, and the trailer simply backs up with the tractor. That means the brakes are so far out of adjustment that they won't lock.

You need to adjust them before you can slide. And, you're probably over the 2 slack limit anyway. That means a ticket. So, you get out the 7/16 wrench and tighten em down.

Thirty minutes later, you finally get the trailer slid back 4 holes. Now, the drives are good, but you're 300 over on the trailer tandems. That means you have too much fuel for this kind of load. The weight wasn't on the qualcomm, so you didn't know.

All you can do is move back one hole and run 300 heavy on the drives. Fifty gallons takes 300 miles to burn. Besides, they give you some leeway anyway.

Personally, I enjoy the hell out of nursery loads. You get thousands of plants. In pots. It says driver assist. That means you pull up to a big-box retailer and move 36,000 pounds of plants to the rear of your trailer. The trailer is 53 feet long.

Push hard, because some of the plants are more like small trees. By the time you're done, you're dead tired and all dirty. But, you can't go to sleep yet. This is your morning delivery. The next load is waiting.

Running reefers is lots of fun. Sometimes the driver who dropped the trailer didn't fill the reefer tank up, and the thing runs out of fuel while it's precooling. They shipper won't load it. And, you won't have any idea until you go to use the trailer that the engine has sucked the tank dry.

It takes like an hour to go get fuel and prime the engine. You end up all stinky like diesel fuel. Fun, fun.

Winter is my favorite time of year. You know, there's nothing like running the 80 after a fresh snowfall. At night, the temperature drops and the slush freezes solid. There aren't enough trucks running to heat the road up.

So, you grab a gear down, and the torque increase breaks the drives loose. With the trailer pushing you, you start to jackknife. You push the clutch in quick before it gets away from you. But, by the time you get straight again, you're almost at a complete standstill. Now, you need to get started again. On a small grade. You try second, but the tires just sit there and spin. Stuck!

All you can do is lock the axles and burn through. f**k the chains. I ain't screwing around in the dark.

Do you know what my favorite load is? Hazmat flammables. Why, you wonder? Because you run all those extra miles out of route for free. No tunnels. No thru cities. Plus, I just love having my papers inspected by every DOT coop along the highway.

This is all part of the job. Hey, I can handle it as well or better than the million-milers. But, why? For chump change? Pay me $20 an hour, like a real job. I'll go back and do reefers or hazmat day in and day out.

But, for the kind of money the job offers, I have to say thanks, but I'll pass.

to continue with my report, on March 18, 2005, my husband quit Central Refrigerated, his last load was to take it to Fort Worth, TX and he decided to leave the truck at the Irving, TX terminal. This decision was done when he tried to call Nick Nordquist, (the terminal mgr.) on his cell phone but never returned his call. He wanted to speak to him in regards to getting paid for his layover (at no fault of my husband)the dispatcher told my husband that he was NOT going to get paid for the four day layover and to top things off they upgraded him with a run down trailer that had a misaligned steering wheel and the lights in the cab were not working either. Apparently the truck was getting ready to be sold, (which explained the reason why he had to wait in Colorado for 2 days for his stickers and permits)...talk about UNPREPARED and putting the driver at risk! He later learned that they did not have a trip ready for him when he was supposed to get to Fort Worth, SO being that it was a Friday when he was going to get there he already knew that he was going to have to wait until Monday to see if they even had a trip for him heading home. The night and weekend dispatch crew in Irving, TX is the worst. They don't care whether or not you have the right directions to where you need to get to and they do not cooperate at all with the driver's requests, I mean ...who trains these clowns? So after leaving the company we had to make several calls about his pay and go above Nick Nordquist and speak to his boss, Carl Disharo, Director of Fleet. After explaining the situation to him, he got paid for his down time after all, but it shouldn't have taken this much trouble to fight for getting paid, ANYWHERE. And I won't even want to talk about the endless calls to the Payroll dept. because of the mistakes that they did on his paycheck....again this is due to the lack of communication thru the company departments. My husband did not have high blood pressure before the got this job..he had a physical done prior to being hired and he checked out fine....and now he does and has to take medication probably for the rest of his life. This experience has left a very bad taste in his mouth and because it was his first OTR job may not want to ever work in the trucking industry again, thanks to Central. Don't ever work for these people unless you value your health and your time.