We are in a dilemma. As a team we finally found a great company to work for over a year ago. They are a small outfit that treats us great, and the home time is awesome; HOWEVER they have dispatch that is on the lazy side. They only work with a few customers and if those customers don't have freight for us then we sit (at home so it is unpaid). The runs are to California, Arizona or Nevada and back home only. We have begged them to give us loads to any where in the U.S. but their excuse is "we can get you to XX state, however we have no idea how to get you a load back". The problem with sitting at home is we are on Tuesday dispatch which means we should head out on Tuesday. It looks as though we will be bumped to Wednesday dispatch due to no loads today. The problem with that is they don't dispatch on Thursday or Friday because they don't want layovers in California on the weekend (there again they seem to think there are never any loads leaving California on the weekend sheeesh!). So if no load tomorrow we will sit until Saturday dispatch (a new pay period) which means this week is no load, no pay. Because they don't dispatch on the last two days of the week we have missed four weeks of pay this year alone.
Due to the economy being on rocky ground still we don't want to jump ship only to find ourselves sitting out there at a truck stop, because we save a lot of money coming home every week since we can fix our meals to take on the road. Plus we do have it good. We can have our dog with us. We have a 1500 watt inverter, refrigerator, and microwave on the truck which we know most companies won't offer or allow. The trucks are well maintained and the yard is about 3 miles from our house so we don't have to pay for parking; but the lack of pay is getting old. We tried getting part-time jobs here at home to supplement, but as everyone knows you can never count on a certain schedule if you are OTR.
We would like to know from all of you out there, have your miles picked up to almost a normal level and have been holding steady? Are your companies hiring again? Teams, what kind of miles are you getting and are you sitting?
