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Getting back into driving question
I have some questions. I’ve been out of trucking since April 5, 2007 and am ready to go back into driving again. Anyway, in getting my ducks in a row I sent off for and just received my USIS (DAC) report. I want to make sure that there isn’t anything on it that shouldn’t be on it since I used to work for Swift.
Anyway, even though I worked for Swift for a little over 2 years and 3 months, my USIS (DAC) report says to the effect that at the present time, we have no information from your previous employers. So I’m curious, since there is no information contained in my USIS (DAC) report, will that hurt me when trying to get another driving job?
Although I have no preventables and no tickets on my MVR, I was terminated from Swift. So the fact that my USIS (DAC) report has no information is perplexing me. The reason I was terminated, according to the new fleet manager that terminated me, was insubordination, but in reality I was really royally screwed.
Just prior to getting fired I was involved in an incident that resulted in the inside of my truck catching fire and burning up. I also lost all my stuff that was in the truck.
It all started when my truck was put in the shop at the Lancaster, TX terminal just before I was to take home time after being out about 4 weeks because I had a bad driver’s side drive tire and I was getting a lighting module fault when I would start the truck. To make a very long story short, they ended up keeping the truck in the shop for 12 days and then late on the 12th day, they finally gave me the truck back but told me that they had disconnected the front marker lights because there was a short somewhere they couldn’t find or fix. I called my DM and asked him who was going to pay my tickets should I get one and he told me to go talk to the shop manager about that. Typical pass the buck Swift bullshit.
Anyhow, I had to bobtail to Ft Worth to pick up an empty and then rush to the shipper about 5 miles down the road to get loaded on time, which was supposed to be my load to go home for long delayed home time, so I didn’t have any time to go talk to the shop manager if I didn’t want to be late to pick up my load.
Anyway, I drove to the location where the empty was, found and hooked up to an empty. Then I started driving to the shipper to pick up my load. After driving a couple of miles down the road, I noticed my eyes and my throat started burning, so I looked down, and when I did, I saw smoke billowing into the cab from the lower dash.
So I hurried up and found a safe place to pull over and after I set the breaks and shut down the truck engine, I hurried up and jumped out the truck, disconnected the pigtails from the trailer because I figured it was the extra draw from the trailer that was causing the fire, and unhooked the fire extinguisher in case I needed it.
Then I called 911 and gave them my location and asked them to send a fire truck ASAP. Next, I called the terminal and on road and informed them what was going on and about the same time I hung up with them, flames started shooting out the top of the dash. So I climbed on the steps and emptied the fire extinguisher on the flames and managed to put the flames out.
Anyway to make a long story short, about five minutes later the flames flamed back up and the inside of the truck burned up before the fire department finally arrived and put it out.
Okay lets fast-forward a little bit, after taking home time and going out one more time in another assigned truck, I was treated like I had the plague. When I asked about being reimbursed for the stuff I had lost in the truck, the fleet manager said he would check with the terminal manager and get back to me. He never did, even though I left him numerous messages on his voice mail everyday. As a matter of fact, when it was time for me to leave to go out again, he got another fleet manager to call me and line me up with my first load. The excuse was that my fleet manager, who was brand new, by the way, was tied up in a meeting.
My DM had gone on vacation the day following my incident, and when he came back about a week after I had been out, I told him what was up and he was very apologetic and empathetic of my plight and said that he would do all that he could to help me out. Then two hours later he called me back and told me that he was ordered not to talk to me about the incident because the fleet manager that refused to call me back or take my calls had told him that he had already told me everything I needed to know and ordered him not to talk to me about the incident, even though he never did call me back or even return my calls.
Anyway, another couple of weeks or so went by of me being treated like I was radioactive when I finally decided that I had enough. I sent a qualcom message to my DM and told him what the fleet manager had told me, which was I’ll check on it and call you back, and that he had never called me back and that if he couldn’t tell me what was up with me getting reimbursed for my stuff in the next day in a half that I was going to call the terminal manager personally and find out for myself. The following morning, the fleet manager called me and fired me for insubordination and told me to leave the truck I was driving at the Albuquerque, NM terminal. So I did, I unloaded my stuff and rented a car, then drove home over 1100 miles at my expense.
In any event, I never ended up getting reimbursed for my stuff. As a matter of fact, the receipts for my 12-night stay in the hotel burned up in the truck along with all my stuff and even though I called the hotel and had them resend the receipts to the terminal, I never got reimbursed for that long hotel stay either. In other words, I got screwed about as royally as a person can possibly get screwed, even though I was an excellent driver, never had any service failure, preventables, or tickets.
Oh, while I was still on home time that last time and before I left to go on that last outing, I received a call out of the blue from another swift driver who identified himself as a former trainer of one of the drivers that had also stayed at the hotel at the same time I did while his truck was also being worked on. He told me that he had been with Swift off and on for over 20 years and was participating in a committee consisting of drivers and management and wanted to know if it was okay for him to use the story of my incident in that committee. He explained that the driver that was in the hotel at the same time I was there was one of his former students and had told him about the incident. I went ahead and gave him permission. Then after chit chatting with him for a few minutes more before we hung up, he told me to be careful and warned me to watch out because he had seen a lot of drivers in my situation get fired in order to cover up for incompetent shop managers, and apparently that is exactly what happened to me.
Hence, my questions, since my USIS (DAC) report has no information on me, will I have a problem going back to driving? I mean…how will my 2 plus years of driving history be confirmed? Further, since there is no information on me on my USIS (DAC) report should I put down my reason for leaving as being terminated for insubordination, or should I put down that I resigned, since it isn’t indicated? Finally, since I haven’t been driving trucks since April 5, 2007, 2 days before Easter, (yeah…they were failing to get me home in time for Easter too, not to mention that all I had was a whopping 600 miles for the week) how will that impact me getting a job?
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