407, I didn't come off my last trip for almost 5 years straight until they "cut" it. "Cut" meaning the runner next to me absorbed most of my work, so they just got rid of it. Sweetest trip I ever had. Two things though. I've been looking at bid sheets actively for a year now. I need to get out of package cars because my body isn't gonna take much more. Just turned down Feeders last month due to my family obligations, and I can't take a job where I don't have a set schedule. The Q List won't work for me right now. The days I took off were necessary, physically, and that's pretty much that. The other side to this coin is that the "kid" that has been running my trip is a close personal friend of my best friend at work. We both thought he was getting his seniority. No one, including him, knew he wasn't these last three months he's been in and out. He got his 30 days on continuously, but that was in August. In a perfect world no driver would ever come off of his bidded trip. In reality it happens every week, to a lot of senior drivers in my center. They will not send a rookie out cold anymore. They would rather take a grievance, tell you to "do as you're instructed", and put the most knowledgable driver on a call out. That's the reality here. Paper does nothing. Management laughs at the Union, and our Contract. They do whatever they want, whenever they want. This is the World I am living in here my friend. Totally blows. Not making side deals, but doing whatever I can to survive in Package Cars until I can take a different bid. Love it or hate, this is my life.
Tomorrow they're hearing my first three grievances. I'm turning in a record fourth in a row soon as we all sit down. I'll be told that I'm covering my old trip until Peak is over. I know this because my center manager already said it to me. The paper will pile up, we'll sit down again, get told the same thing, and I'll be out there with 280+ trying now to blow out my knees. I just hope when they wipe their butts with all my grievances they get a papercut and it gets infected.
