Here's one for you. You go to pick up a load from a shipper. You check the bill of ladings prior to loading and discover that the weight is very high and will be difficult, if not impossible to get legal..
You discuss it with the loader who informs you, not necessarily politely, that the weight is your problem, not his. Next you go to the dock supervisor and he tells you pretty much the same thing even less politely than the loader did. With patience quickly fading you call dispatch hoping for a reasonable solution. What you get is told how important this new customer is and that it will be your head if you do anything to screw it up.
Fuming and trying not to show it, you go back to the dock and try to atleast have some say in how the load is positioned so that you have some modicum of hope for getting it legal for the road. The loader essentially tells you to stay out of the way; that is unless they require you to do most of their work for them (a future article) And he loads it however he feels like. Whether you like it or not..
Finally finished, you get directions to the closest truck scale, which can be several miles away, and you head to the scale trying to remember the weight of a gallon of diesel fuel and figuring fuel mileage and fuel stops between D.O.T. scales.
One mile before you get to the public scale a D.O.T. officer pulls you over and decides to weigh you on his portable. You just cross your fingers and hope you are wrong. He weighs you and you are 1000 lbs. over on your drive axle. You try to explain that you just picked up the load and are on your way to the closest scale but guess what? He doesn't care. That is not his problem. You try to tell him about the five kids you are trying to feed and that you would have got fired for refusing the load. You also tell him about the acne covered forklift driver who told you he knew what he was doing and he still doesn't care. As he's handing you the ticket he's also telling you that you cannot move your truck until the weight is legal. This means that you have to find another truck and possibly a forklift to come out and fix the weight.
You get a little upset because you've been trying to tell everyone from the beginning that the load wouldn't work and you foolishly make a rude comment to the officer.. Very Bad Mistake... Now your brakes are out of adjustment and your math was wrong on your logbook hours.
Later you go back to the company who loaded you and try to get them to re-do the load the way you asked them in the first place and they tell you it's going to cost you $50.00.. You tell them they should pay your overweight ticket and they laugh then tell you they cannot fix your load until tommorow.
All of this sound a little ridiculous? It happens every day. A man asked me one time why truckers always have such a bad attitude. The man was a warehouse foreman who had just told me I was going to have to unload his freight off of my truck if I wanted to get out of there before the weekend. I told him that I only had 8 hours to sleep. Now he wanted me to use that time to do his work for him. After that I was going to be driving down the road short on sleep and tired from doing his job. Then I asked him if his wife and kids were going to be driving down the same road I would be trying not to fall asleep on....He found me a helper....
When are people going to start waking up? When is there going to be a lawmaker who understands that we are just working people. We are being forced to find anyway we can around the law so you get your bread and milk on schedule and our families get enough money to buy some themselves? You start making the shippers pay even half of every overweight load on the road. Then make it illegal for a driver to be on the dock, except in cases of hazardous freight, and you will very quickly have much safer highways. Think about it....