I've been staring out the windshield navigating one of these highway beasts across our two countries (Canada and the U. S. A.) for the better part of thirty years. Few jobs around offer the freedom this one does and few ask as much from its people. In recent years the advent of the cell phone and satellite communication has brought family and dispatch a lot closer to us than in the past. Though nothing brings a driver closer to their family than the front door to their home. A dispatcher to us can be a good friend or one of our worst nightmares. They can help us earn our livelihood and see the ones we love or help us into bankruptcy and divorce court. Extremes you may think but truer than you know.

In the new world of ground based transportation the effort is to effectively reduce bottom line and therefore time and cost are the buzz words when it comes to moving freight from point A to point B. Little consideration is given to the men and women who actually operate the vehicles that move the freight. The illusion of a caring management team is lost on us when we are fourteen days on the road and dispatch loads us in some hell hole with a load resembling a dogs breakfast going in the opposite direction from our home to a receiver who has absolutely no desire to see us in an area that hasn't seen an outbound load in God knows when. Think that doesn't happen --- it happens with a lot more frequency that most company recruiters would have you believe.

To us a dispatcher is someone who rides a desk with a keyboard in front them a phone in one hand a pocket atlas (in which no town or city is more than six inches from any other) in the other hand and a calculator at the ready. With the deftness of a magician he can cut your paid miles and increase your hours of service all the while proclaiming he is looking out for your best interests. There are a flock of new drivers out there now who come to us from driving schools and barely have the knowledge to pass their drivers exam let alone operate a truck over our highways with anything nearing competence. For this reason the industry has had to dumb its self down by creating no touch trucks – no touch loads and no touch dispatch. Dispatch has gone somewhat the same route in that schools now turn out dispatchers instead of them being garnered from the ranks of professionals who have spent a goodly portion of their time actually moving loads up and down our roadways. They put their load information on a form on a computers communication screen and send it to the driver via satellite. A fair number of these dispatchers have never been in a truck and their closest experience with a load on one is the sight of one traveling down the highway this morning and getting in their way. They have no idea what the load your getting is or what it looks like. The sales department has told them it would fit and so it must fit --- right. To a customer they are only to quick to let them know that the load would have been there by now “if that driver hadn’t taken too long at the last coffee stop”. Time constraints on load deliveries and idiotic hours of service rules have locked us in the cabs of our vehicles for longer periods. Dispatch looks at the equipment we drive today and has a hard time fathoming what we have to complain about with all the conveniences that surround us. Well lock yourself in an area smaller than most bathrooms for eleven hours with the knowledge that if mother nature calls and you stop to take care of business the time you spend works against you in your ability to earn a living that day. The same goes for the time it takes to load and unload your vehicle or any meal stops you may take. We get told by dispatch that we get paid extra to load our vehicles – well the time we spend at a shipper or receiver plus the actual time we spend securing and protecting the load whittle that extra pay down to less than minimum wage in most cases and I don’t know as you would hire someone for that pay to do it without having someone who earns a lot more checking it.

I worked in dispatch for a very short period of time and so most times I let myself cool down before I call in and rant and rave to my dispatcher as I am aware they are not always to blame for the crap I just went through moving the load. They are stuck in a very unenviable and most times thankless position of being middleman between management, customers and drivers. They are the one at the other end of the phone line wearing the brunt of our displeasure when things go wrong and seldom receiving thanks when things go right (cause it’s their job right). No I’ll stick to hustling my steel coffin down the highways and byways and leave dispatch to those with a lot stronger constitutions. My hat goes off to the good ones --- you know who you are.