I have a bit of a rant and maybe a little venture startup idea.
I’m about four months into steady CDL work. For many reasons I quit otr flatbed mid training and got with local beverage. It has been a very big hit or miss as I get better where the hell I’m supposed to go for venues like hospitals, sports arenas, universities, etc for the first time. Luckily a career beverage guy with the company almost always picks up the phone to fill me in, although I try to make sure if I spot something I ask around before I leave.
Between rookies, being rookies, and difficult destinations being hard to get facts straight, this is much different than the few months before in my sprinter van with Amazon.
There are pictures, dispatch notes, driver notes, customer notes, dispatch on call, an Amazon help desk on call, and customer contacts. If you use it right it takes less than five minutes to figure out even the most bizarre delivery problems.
My company certainly has nothing like this, and it doesn’t seem to be in a lot of the industry, little that I know. Word of mouth seems like part of the trade.
Would truckers use something public or more likely sell a private chat app (to the company) to document the best relevant knowledge for a destination, especially those “oh I know that spot” kinds of places.
There is an underground loading dock at the downtown hospital that thank God I asked a fellow driver if he had been there. No signs, you back down a curved hill and alley dock in a spot along with three trucks. It took 30 seconds for him to give me (less than a month driving then) a snapshot of the delivery that would have given me a crap ton of anxiety figuring it out.
Is this a newbie anxiety thing, as now I figure things out as I need, or do you guys think this is a problem that a service could help with. A chat app could be “user driven” by drivers helping each other out. It’s just an idea, and a rant. Thanks.
