Hi, everyone I dont post very often mainly my husband does, but I felt the need to reply to this one. When we started driving 4 1/2 years ago we signed on with this company. They had an add in our local newspaper and we went to a seminar at a local hotel and they set us up with them. We knew absoultly nothing about trucking but we wanted to do it. We went threw training and they set us up in a truck with con-way now. What the first person said about the equipment was very true, if we would have known what we do now we would never have drove any of the four trucks he had us in over the one year and 2 days we worked for him. There were many times we had to drive in violation equipment and were told not to stop until they told us to. We drove in two of the trucks with tires so badly cupped that our arms would hurt from the shaking and fighting the truck to stay on the road. We had oil leaks so bad the we out of our own pocket were putting in 2 to 3 gals a day and were still told not to stop and the motor eventually blew and he just put us in another truck with its own problems(though not as bad). The last truck we were in for the last 2 months he was trying to get us to leases purchase this truck for a huge payment, plus all the normal fees, and a percentage of our profit after that to put into a maintence fund everv month. He was upset that we would not fall for it. The truck was 4 years old with 600,000 miles already in bad shape and he wanted us to lease purchase for 4 years and basically pay more than the cost of a brand new truck.
On the financial end they were ripping us off. Being new to the business it took about 6 months to figure out something was wrong. In his defence he did not do the payroll his right had girl who basically did everything did all money transactions. The biggest problem was they paid out every week even before they got paid from the company, so every week we would get our 50% of load pay minus fees (fuel, qual-comm,trip pak, workers comp, ect). Once a month they would issue a check for all extra money that they received from the carrier fuel surcharge, new englad fees, haz-mat, and anyhting that was negoiated for a load , ah and dead head. Also on this check would be you bonus, if you ran more than 10,000 miles a month you got a 2% bonus. THis is where all the problems were they just wernt paying. If you ran 20 loads a month your bonus check they called it might have 3 small fuel surcharges a couple of deadheads a not much more. there was never any deadhead pay or negoiated pay. If they were only skimming the fuel surcharge we may not have figured it out because con-way did not tell you on your load offers that you were going to get a fuel surcharge.
Anyway we caught on and went in and confronted angela about it and ahe went back and said they shorted us 400.00 but that was all. We still had about 4 months on our contract so we stayed to fufill our duties.
The day our contract was up a tornado came threw and hit the campus and destroyed there buildings. Ha Ha The next day was payday and because they had no office angela had to load the pay from home, I dont know what she did wrong but she loaded our 2200 in pay 3 times to our t-check. They next day we showed up at c-1 (thats what they call there campus) parked out truck in the debree, fixed our personal vehicle (the tornado cracked our windshield and flattened our tire) and left.
A couple of days went by we are home in texas working on the purchase of our truck and Kyle calls very angry. He cussed us called us theives and so on. We told him how we felt about everything and how we felt like they still owed us more than the 4400 we were overpaid. LOng story short he finally went back over our pay for the year called us back and said he still owed us 700 more dollars. We said it was still short but we would call it even for 700. He asked us to come back we said no. In about a week we got a check and a letter for 188.00. The letter said he looked over everything again decided thats all he owed us and if we cashed it he had no more legal responsibality to pay us any more money. We did not cash just hung it on our wall to remind us of our begining and also how lucky we were to recoupe what we did.
Also people dont realise he has investors that he answers to so some of the reason he lets the equipment get so bad it because its all about numbers to him and none of his own money involved in the process..
Sorry its so long but its hard to tell a story in a few sentances..
April Moore