Randy Grider
Editor
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I remember a game we used to play in elementary school. Our teacher would whisper a famous quote in one of her pupil’s ears. The student would turn around and try to whisper the same phrase into a classmate’s ear. The game would continue until the phrase was quietly passed to everyone around the room. Then the last child to hear the phrase would stand up and announce to the class what he or she had heard.
“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” (Ben Franklin) might turn out to be “In the worm, nothing is surfing but dudes and taxis.” The end result proved that in many cases word of mouth can be a fairly ineffective way to pass along information.
During the first week of January, our editors fanned out across the country to cover the first days of the new hours-of-service rule (see page 12). They witnessed a lot of confusion concerning the new regulations, much of it due to truckers passing along bad information by word of mouth. While most drivers were just trying to help each other, a lot of inaccurate information has been making the rounds.
On Jan. 6, Truckers News Senior Editor Sean Kelley found one truck driver sitting in his truck at a Simmons Truck Stop in Bracey, Va. He was already perplexed by the rule – two days into its implementation. The driver had driven 10 hours and then spent the next 10 hours off-duty, sleeping in his truck. But he was waiting for four more hours to elapse so he could start driving again. Other drivers had told him he could only drive 11 hours in a 24-hour period, and he thought he had to wait until that 24 hours was up.
While one of the new rule’s goals is to move truckers toward a 24-hour work cycle, the driver could have driven another four hours within 24 hours of when he first started his shift.
Some drivers complained of little or no training by the carriers on the rule. How to legally log the rule was a source of much debate. How different states might interpret the new rule was also a hot topic. CB radios were buzzing with both well-informed opinions and totally off-the-wall chatter. Just a few days before the Jan. 4 implementation of the rule, an eTrucker.com poll showed that less than a quarter of drivers who responded said they full understood the new rule.
