Rollin' 18 Podcast

Essential Strategies for Handling Dispatchers and Tight Schedules

• Walter Gatlin • Season 1 • Episode 32

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Can maintaining professional boundaries really be the key to a successful trucking career? Join me, Walter Gatlin, as I pull back the curtain on my 40-year journey in the trucking industry to share why it's crucial to keep your interactions with dispatchers, planners, and brokers strictly business. Learn why getting too close can make it challenging to refuse unreasonable requests and how this could impact your job performance. I'll also provide actionable strategies for handling tricky situations like tight loading schedules and misleading information—emphasizing the importance of documentation and swift resolution.

Facing an impossible load that disrupts your rest schedule? You're not alone. Tune in to hear about the critical need for adhering to safety protocols and conducting regular inspections of your truck and trailer. I'll discuss a real-life scenario where a driver's safety was at risk due to an unreasonable demand and share tips on how to communicate assertively and professionally with your dispatcher. Prioritize your well-being and family while keeping your career on track by mastering the fine line between professional and personal boundaries in the trucking industry.

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Email me anytime with news, suggestions, and stories at rollin18podcast@gmail.com. God bless, be safe, and keep it between the lines drivers.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Rollin' 18 Podcast. This 40-year veteran is here for anyone wanting to stay up to date with the trucking world. Grab your coffee, hop on board and let's get on down the road with Walter Gatlin.

Speaker 3:

Hello drivers and welcome to Rollin' 18 Podcast. I am your host, walter Gatlin. I appreciate you folks listening to and downloading my podcast. I want to give you a quick reminder, before I go into this story, about dispatchers, of the Top Gun large car shootout they are having on July 26th through the 28th. It's at the Rantoul National Aviation Center in Rantoul, illinois. So if you guys are in that area, go ahead and Google Maps it or GPS it and see how far you're going to be. If you get a chance to go to that. You really need to go because it is going to be awesome. Also, I wanted to remind you that the podcast before this one I interviewed Miss Flatbed Red. This gal is awesome. She loves classic trucks. She goes around and goes to as many truck shows as she can. She does art, she draws trucks. If you go to her website at MissFlatbedred, you will find her and she is just an amazing human being that loves classic trucks and she has so much to offer on her websites, on her YouTube, on her Facebook. Check it out. You're going to be highly entertained.

Speaker 3:

Now, today's story is going to be highly entertained. Now today's story is going to be about dispatchers. You know there's a lot of you folks out there that drive for companies that has dispatchers. I believe some of your companies even have planners and other people that get involved with your daily dispatching activities, not to mention the brokers that get a hold of you when you're assigned a broker load. So I wanted to give you kind of an example of what I went through throughout my career and how I learned to deal with some of those issues.

Speaker 3:

And the number one thing that I think I should mention right off the bat is I have learned not to develop a relationship, a close relationship, with any dispatcher, planner or broker, because that can lead to trouble. You know, when you develop a friendship with a boss, it is extremely hard to do your job without some bias and it's extremely hard to say no when you're put into a position that you need to say no. You know you drive for a truck company and the truck company should know not all of them do, most of them do should know that you're making one heck of a sacrifice by being out there on the road. To begin with, you're away from your family, you are dealing with a lot of stresses that you can't handle because you're not home. You're out there on the road dealing with all kinds of traffic, all kinds of people that do not respect truck drivers anymore. All of this comes into play. But if you develop a close relationship with your dispatcher, you must keep that relationship professional, which means you should not have any problem whatsoever telling that dispatcher no when they put an unreasonable request or dispatch on your table. And that is actually real simple if you think about it.

Speaker 3:

Now, the one thing I've learned how to do this is number one I don't develop a close relationship with these folks. Nothing personal. No Facebook pages. I don't join any of their social media groups. I don't connect with them in any way outside of the professional manner, and that works really well with me. I don't connect with them in any way outside of the professional manner, and that works really well with me. I do the same thing with the farm that I work with now.

Speaker 3:

I don't go to barbecues, I don't go to different things that my dispatcher may have or even the CEO or the owner of the company may have, and I do that for a specific reason I'm out there to make a living for my family and I do that for a specific reason I'm out there to make a living for my family. I'm out there sacrificing my time with my wife, my husband, my children, whatever it is you may have in your position and I am doing so in order to provide a wonderful living an amount of money that is different than the amount of money you can make at a regular job. So you're sacrificing quite a bit and we're not getting paid 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even though we're gone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So the best thing to do is, when a dispatcher gives you something and this includes companies that force dispatch when a dispatcher gives you a load that is unreasonable but you feel like doing it, go ahead and do it. Don't make it a habit.

Speaker 3:

You know, make sure that you understand that there are a lot of things involved, a lot of things at play when they give you a severely tight load and then you get to the place and you find out that somebody misled you and told you that when you get there, they're going to it's a drop and hook or they're going to unload you rather quickly, and you come to find out none of this is true. All of this needs to be wrote down in your black book. So in the future, you know this company does not do things the way that is normally done and you know for a fact that you've been misled and all of these things. Anytime that a dispatcher misleads you, you need to bring that up right away. That's another thing I've learned. Bring it up right away and say look, you told me this was going to be a smooth, easy operation and it wasn't. And then I go to read the comments on their social media site or whatever, and I realize this has been going on for a long time. Why did you not know about this? And of course, they'll come up with some sort of excuse they always do.

Speaker 3:

But the point being is that if you don't develop a close relationship with these people, you don't have to be cordial with them. That doesn't mean you have to be disrespectful. It just means that you don't have to worry about hurt feelings on your end. They're not your friend, they're not your relationship. They are your work partner and you are to work together so that you can ultimately get the job done, which means pick up the load and deliver load. That's the main thing and to do so safely, without damage, without having accidents. Things like that. You don't need to go to their barbecues, you don't need to laugh at their jokes, you don't need to have a personal relationship on social media. All you need to do is your job, and that is one less stress that you have to worry about. And when they do come up with something unreasonable, even if they do it twice and they've done that before you can tell them no, I'm not going to do that. There's not going to be enough time. You're going to have to send me something else.

Speaker 3:

One of my biggest pet peeves out on the road was getting to a facility where they treated you like you were a zero. They would not let you use the restrooms, they would not let you inspect the loads. They made you use an outhouse when it was 104 degrees outside. They made you feel less than normal when you pulled into the gate to check in. I had an incident one time and I do not regret to this day that I handled it the way I did, and this is not a recommendation for you. It was something I needed to do to prove a point to this company and ultimately it got me fired from my broker. But that's okay, because they learned a valuable lesson.

Speaker 3:

I pulled in at 50 minutes prior to my appointment because I was told I could check in an hour before. When I got up to the gate they said no, you can only check in a half hour before. You need to turn around and go back out to the lot you were parked in. So I turned around. I wasted a whole 10 minutes going back to the lot. I waited the extra few minutes it took me to get to a half hour within my appointment. I drove up the line. The line was very long this time.

Speaker 3:

By the time I got up to the gate and you're not going to believe this, but it did happen I was one minute after my appointment time and they said I'm sorry, you're late for your appointment, so we're going to have to reschedule you till the next day. And I said no, that's not going to happen. And they said well, it's going to happen, otherwise we're going to have the guard usher you out of our property. So I got out of my truck. I set the brakes, got out of my truck, disconnected the airlines, dropped the landing gear and pulled the fifth wheel pin and dropped the trailer right there. I says if you're going to force me to be here for 24 hours, then I am going to leave the trailer with you. You can have your yard dog put it wherever you want. You can unload it at your convenience. I'm going to take my Bob tell to a hotel and I'm going to check into it and then I'm going to bill my broker and my broker is going to bill you and, uh, I'm going to go ahead and take the day off and I'm also going to bill your company $500 for loss to my truck because it was my truck and they're going to pay me $500 for that lost time.

Speaker 3:

They just scoffed and laughed you can't do this. You can't drop that truck, get that damn truck. Blah blah, cussing up a storm. I went ahead and whipped around and left. I left that trailer right in the center of their guard check and now their truck could not get through. They had to bring a yard dog over.

Speaker 3:

Ultimately they unloaded it that day, called me up, said come get the trailer. They actually dropped it out in the street because they would not let me on the property. They said I am banned from the property for good. They gave me my paperwork. It was all crunched up. It was signed erratically. It was just a nasty situation and I kind of felt bad about doing it, but I had to teach somebody a lesson.

Speaker 3:

Ultimately, I got a load back to the area where my broker was and he fired me, and that's fine. But the last thing I told him was you can't do this to people. You knew the situation there. You knew what was going to happen. They told me you knew what was going to happen. You treated me like a dummy and you decided to take advantage of me and my family. And when you get taken advantage of out there on the road, they're not just taking advantage of you, they're taking advantage of your entire family, because that is more time you have to spend away from your wife, your husband or your children, and that is not right.

Speaker 3:

I went ahead and went along with my deal. I went on and signed up with another broker and when I did, I told them exactly what happened. I said this is what happened when people lie to me. This is exactly what's going to happen again and again and again. And if you don't like that, do not hire me. And I found out that being upfront with brokers, being upfront with bosses, with dispatchers, with CEOs, all the way from the top all the way to the guy that cleans the restrooms. I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm going to say it the way I see it. If you don't like it, take a hike, because I'm not going to build a relationship with people that are unreasonable. I want you to hear this soundbite of a driver complaint, and this is just one of thousands out there, but it made a lot of sense to me. Listen to this.

Speaker 2:

Or if you're allowed inside, you're still limited. You might have a bathroom, you might not. Some of the places we go to don't have public restrooms. They don't have Val houses or these little Port-A-Johns. We're treated like you know they need us there but they don't want us there, you know, and it's just. Those are the places that put us in a pissy mood. You know we got to deal with that because it's not quick in and quick out. We get to a place like that. It seems like we're there four or five hours trying to get loaded or unloaded. You know our time's just as valuable as anybody else's, because now we can't go pick up our next load and get down the road you know, the sad part about all this is I've been driving since 84.

Speaker 3:

And the sad part is we continue to go through the same problems every single year. It's like some of these problems will not go away because we're not learning from them, we're not dealing with them properly. And I'm on the side of a CEO, I'm on the side of a dispatcher, I'm on the side of a planner, I'm a truck driver. We're all on the same team, we all have the same goals. But it's you know. You can't treat your dispatching job like a nine to five banker job. You can't do it. You have to go above and beyond, just like the truck driver does Same thing with the planner. I still, to this day, do not understand why planners are not directly linked up electronically with dispatchers. Because they will plan something, they will give it to the dispatcher. The dispatcher will not think twice. They will contact the drivers that are in the area. They will set up this impossible or this totally unprofessional load on somebody knowing. And let me give you a perfect example guy unloads at eight o'clock in the morning. He gets on the board for dispatch at nine o'clock. He's done, he Trailer's washed out, he's ready to go. Planner gives dispatcher a load. Dispatcher sees the load, gives it to the driver that just got off at 8. He's got to drive 100 miles to pick up another load, but it doesn't pick up until 9 o'clock that night. So that driver's going to be up all day because he just slept all night. And then they're going to expect him to drive all night to get that load somewhere the next day and that is unreasonable. That is not professional and the planner is not obviously looking at the electronic logs to see who slept all night, to see who's been up all night, you know, vice versa, in order to make sure that that load can be transitioned smoothly by somebody that likes to drive all night long and did sleep all day long. And that's the point I'm trying to get out. You can't give mixed nights and mixed days to somebody unless they're just crazy enough to do it, because I know a lot of people that will sleep all night and there's no way they can sleep during the day. They can take a nap, but that's not going to do them any good. Their eyes are going to be closing between 12 and 3 o'clock in the morning and that's a very dangerous situation.

Speaker 3:

So do not build a relationship, a close personal relationship, with anybody in your company that you work for, even if you're an owner operator and you work for a broker. You don't need that headache. It is very vital to understand that you are working for you, you are working for your family and you are working for a company that has to keep things professionally and you can't do that when you have a personal relationship with somebody at the company. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is and it works out well Once I started setting my foot down, even with the job I have today. If it's unreasonable and I feel like I'm not going to be able to do it, I'm going to tell them. I'm not going to do it, period.

Speaker 3:

I've always said, you know, a truck driver may be a dime a dozen, but I can get two dozen truck driving jobs for the same dime. I'm not trying to discourage you to have an open and valid relationship with anybody that you work for, open and valid relationship with anybody that you work for, but I am trying to discourage you from having the fun, laughing type of relationship you have with those people because it intertwines with your ability to be able to say no. It intertwines with your ability to separate those people from the people you're actually out on the road for, and that would be your family. Yes, I want to do you a favor every once in a while, but I'm only going to do that favor for you if it's great for me and my people and if I can do it safely within reason of life. I have a life and we need to figure out a way to stick together as drivers and realize that this making us use an outhouse, not being able to inspect the loads, unreasonable situations with dispatchers that try and get you to do things that they know you shouldn't be doing in the first place. And let me remind you, drivers, of another thing too there has been a lot of drivers pulled into the scale houses here in Iowa that are getting red, tagged and shut down, and that is completely unnecessary.

Speaker 3:

Always walk around your truck and trailer twice, three times a day. Every time I stopped on the when I was on the big road, I walked around, took me a minute and I used every known mechanism in my visual, my hearing to look for anything that could be a problem. And it's very simple to do Once you get to know your truck and your trailer inside and out. You know what to look for. Look for those vital items and make sure that you are in tip-top shape. And if you notice a problem, do not put it off because you want to try and save the company money or you want to do this. You contact somebody right away and you let them make that decision and if they make a decision that's unsafe for you, tell them no. That's the whole part about being a truck driver. Whether you work for a company or you're an owner operator, you are the captain of your ship, and I've said this other times on my podcast. Do not build a personal relationship with the people that you work for, because it doesn't work out. Your ultimate goal is you and your family.

Speaker 3:

I have all the links down below of all the places that I do business on. You guys can check me out on Facebook, on Instagram. I do put out a lot of funny videos on Instagram. A lot of it's not even about trucks, it's just having fun. Check out Roland 18 Podcast on Facebook. Join my Facebook page. I do put a lot of things about trucks on there. I'm having a great time doing this podcast, so I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am. As always, god bless, be safe. Keep it between the lines. Driver.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to Roland 18 Podcast. Please visit my website at mediaiowacom or the podcast page at roland18podcastcom.