Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/687054
Voices channel 19 6 | Overdrive | June 2016 Visit Senior Editor Todd Dills' CHANNEL 19 BLOG at OverdriveOnline.com/channel19 Write him at tdills@randallreilly.com. It all started innocuously enough for Wes Memphis. That's the pseudony- mous moniker for a Midwest-based longtime former owner-operator turned company driver who's been documenting his transition to e-logs on the blog for weeks now: Not as bad as I thought. Took naps and walks en route every day. Not as hard-pressed as everyone claims. Suppose the quality of dispatch has a lot to do with that. Made 700 new friends on Facebook. But in week two, his company sent him out on two long runs to Texas and back. By the final return trip toward home, a tough reckon- ing for an operator who'd long tak- en pride in the ability to deliver was in the offing. "I had to call dispatch to tell them that, short of turning the truck up to 80, I just wouldn't have the hours to make Detroit," Memphis wrote. It all wouldn't have been so bad but for the reaction in the company's Texas terminal: The traffic coordinator looked at me as if I had just boxed his ears. He handed the paperwork over as if it was something that had been court-ordered. He was unlearning. I was unlearning. It was disturbing. By the time I reached the truck stop to weigh, I felt this primal anger arising from some long-unresolved grievance. I had never asked to be part of this pilot program. They called me. I said I would do so, as they had been good to me for the last eight years. They didn't want this any more than I did. But to let on that I was the goody-two-shoes who was throwing a wrench into things was bull. Catch future installments from Memphis on Saturdays in Channel 19, and to catch up on what you've missed, visit OverdriveOnline.com/ tag/wes-memphis. Trucker Neil Ashworth of Huddersfield, England, is now the owner of a 1985 Kenworth W900B he purchased from another U.K.-based owner. After researching the vehicle's history, he realized the truck had in fact been part of the Burt Reynolds co-owned Skoal Bandit NASCAR team back in the late 1980s. Reynolds, of course, played Bandit in the classic "Smokey and the Bandit" films. The movies inspired Ashworth's desire to own a truck "like the one in the film" in the first place, as reported by the U.K.-based Huddersfield Daily Examiner newspaper. Find links to all the stories mentioned here in the April 5 post to the blog. You can read just how Ashworth translated his old fascination with the movie into eventual ownership of the 1985 KW – and the uncanny nature of the fact of its prior ownership. Classic Burt Reynolds-owned W900B changes hands again Tracing a mixed e-log transition I had gone from Sonny Pruitt to just another downtrodden drone on the digital grid. — Wes Memphis in his May 7 installment of a series chronicling his journey as the No. 1 driver in his small fleet's transition to e-logs If you don't remember the Bandit rig well, these pictures do the original decent justice. This one's a Kenworth + trailer replica put together at the small fleet/custom truck shop of owner-operator Brad Wike, based in Lincolnton, N.C., from when I had the opportunity to visit the shop in 2012. It then also housed the dilapidated Evel Knievel Mack haul rig, now completely restored.