Rewarding travel experiences overshadowed by poor training
Pros
Once you have the people in your car and you’re off, it’s brutally easy, boring at times but easy as long as weather is clear. No idea if it’s the same vehicle for all areas but if it is, the cars are really nice and modern and make for an easy experience. It is fun to go all to places you’ve never been before and see these towns you’ve never visited and meet these crews who are usually really friendly. Benefits are cool.
Cons
The training… or rather the lack thereof. I was taken along for a trip and an assist at a rail yard and the guy who trained me wasn’t even my boss and pretty much said “there’s so much more you should probably learn but I can’t show you with these trips and management probably won’t show you.” Speaking of my boss, talk about a lack of respect for days off. I get calls on my days off and just ignore them, apparently it doesn’t reflect well on me to the higher ups but it’s whatever. Some work weeks I’ll get next to no trips and then once the weekend rolls around the phone starts ringing and I gotta deal with the dilemma of blwing off my friends and weekend plans or get a mediocre salary, minimum wage for me. The hours are taxing as all heck. I’ll put in sometimes over 12 hours in a single trip which unfortunately just happens when stuff keeps popping up that the crew with me are supposed to do, or I’m supposed to assist with. After every trip the app offers to let you rest which is 8 hours where dispatch won’t call you, but I live a decent ways away from the vans so it takes me 45 ish minutes to get me Van (unpaid during that time) and then roadwork popped up recently which increases that to an hour sometimes. So by the time I get home I only have 7 hours of “rest” left before dispatch starts blowing up my phone, and I haven’t even gotten in my bed yet. A lot of the time the moment my rest period is up the phone calls start coming and I sleep through them after driving for 8+ hours from the previous night. By the way if you aren’t a great driver don’t even bother, if the train people you’re driving around call and complain, it’s your word against theirs and it doesn’t matter because you’re in trouble regardless. It’s no fun getting called out to pick up people in a town you don’t know well and the trip details just give you some vague name of the area that won’t pop up on any gps app, or sometimes you get no trip information at all and you just gotta pull up into the town and look around and make some calls, and you better pray the help line isn’t busy. I don’t know who is meant to upkeep the work vans but they do a bad job at it because they all always need an oil change makes you worry it’s gonna explode mid trip but hasn’t happened to me yet so maybe I’ll update this somehow if it does.