Complaint Review: Central Refrigerated Service - West Valley City Utah

If you look into it central is d**k simon its central ref doing buss as simon d**k trucking inc. this i know for a fact cause i have paper work stating it.

I went through Cenral refrigerated`s school on 02/2012 and went  OTR on 03/2012 after only getting 1:45 of drive time. I was unhappy with the school but was even more unhappy with my driver trainer who was a maniac, OCD, weirdo, compulsive lier, crazy man! His name is Mike and, he kept auditing my logs on qualcom and he made me do two 34 hour re-starts because he got $1.45 a mile with me on the truck and
kept trying to keep me on there as long as possible. I kept calling my DM, school, and recruiter to complain and get me a new guy but they didnt and finally he picked a real fight with me and I hoped off the truck because my safety MGR promised to get me a hotel, bus ticket and a new trainer but that never happened so I just quit. Even though I was called several times by different people trying to get me back to my home terminal. I filed for EDD and got it and thought everything was ok because they only have 45 days to dispute
it and 9 months later when I applied for a different trucking company I found they put terminated on my DAC. I was not terminated and I never got any such paper work from them. I now am going to sue for damages. They think they can put what- ever they want on there but I have news for them.

I get so tired of reading crap like this! C'mon! How hard can it be?????? If you can shift one you can shift the other. The pattern is right there on the dash or the sun visor. Look at it. Remember it. Shift it! This is the one real problem that I have with truck schools. They take anybody regardless of their mental capability. This sob story only serves to reinforce my opinion.

The frustration of a typical student in the author's scenario is common. Even though the difference between a 9 and a 10 speed may be trivial for an instructor or a professional truck driver (button up over and up for the hi speed range with a 9 speed and button up over and down for the hi speed range with a 10 speed), it is not trivial for a student or a recent graduate. Experience matters in truck driving, so it would have been beneficial for the trainee to have had experience with both transmissions since the 9 speed is a typical base pattern (i.e., for an 8LL, 13 and 18 speed, etc.,) while the 10 speed is a popular oddball pattern along with the uncommon Super 10. The DAC report is available free for the unemployed commercial driver and (last I knew), $9 for the employed. A driver may dispute what information an employer has submitted to the DAC that is contained in the driver's report and I would encourage the author to dispute what is contained in his report since that is the first place (besides perhaps the secretary of state), where an employer will look regarding information about a perspective employee.

Dac had changed the report to Quit and I just recieved a lot of job Offers, I wish everyone Luck.

Hey Everyone, I just wanted to let you know that I got The people at DAK to look into this problem and when they finish they will call me. Wish me luck.

OK Eric, I will teach you how to shift a 10 speed right here on line and you should be proficient without any practice at all. Ready? Shift it like it were a nine speed. There ya go! I wont argue with you about if there is a difference, because like I stated, there really is no difference in the PATTERN....key word being PATTERN. Yes the difference is one more gear, but the PATTERN is the same. I have had many students with the same complaint....it is a 9 and I trained on a 10 or vise-versa.....they both shift the same. If you were proficient at shifting a 9-speed, the 10-speed should have been no problem. If you had two trucks, one being a 9-speed and one being a 10-speed, but had no idea which was which and were truly proficient in shifting, you could drive both of them shifting the same way on each. For that matter, you could do the same with an 8-speed transmission.....they are all "H" patterns. I am sorry for your troubles with this MOYES entity. I too have dealt with the mighty Jerry and learned a valuable lesson in life, the most important is that life goes on. Good luck with your future.

If you trained on a patten in school and out on the road and they want you to take a test on something diffence and not give you anytime to pratice on it, it will be hard on you to remember the new patten even if its just another gear, its still diffence.

A nine speed and a ten speed really dont have a different " pattern". They are both a simple 'H' pattern with the ten obviously having one more gear. If it was a "super" 10...then it is a little different but not much. It is still an 'H' pattern with the exception of a 'button' shift in between stick shifts.

Truck driving training rip-offs are nothing new! Back in 1987-1988, one of my female cousins fell victim to a Recession and decided to go to a certain truck driving school in Fort Worth,Texas. I think it was called TNT TRUCK DRIVER TRAINING SCHOOL or something similar and it is NOT IN ANY WAY AFFILIATED WITH ANY TRUCKING COMPANY IN 2009 NAMED TNT. As a matter of fact, I checked the telephone book and the Internet and this company is NO LONGER IN BUSINESS --at least NOT under this name. There is one in Ontario, Canada but this was NOT the one that ran the class she attended. This one seemed to be only operating in Texas. I remember taking her to classes and I had a bad feeling about the place from Day One. They would be in class for so many days and then they would go to a location in Palmer,Texas, I think, where they would do the actual behind the wheel training and have the DPS trooper administer the tests to them to see if they were road-worthy and could get their training permits. She overheard a male student and the male instructor, both white, not that it matters but it shows you WHO was ACTUALLY GOING TO GET HIRED BACK THEN...discussing that it was too bad that there were three ladies in the class, one whose father owned a produce transporting company, one who had hooked up with one of other students, a white male, and they were going to co-drive together, and there was my Mexican American cousin. She overheard them saying that she was not going to get hired because nobody would hire a Mexican woman to drive trucks...or any other woman. She had just gotten her school loan papers to sign and give back to the school. After hearing this, she called the loan provider and told them why she was not going to take out the loan and shredded the paperwork and never went back to the classes.Too bad for them because they could NOT rip her off. I imagine when more people learned about how women and maybe minorities were treated there and by the industry in general AT THAT TIME, these people might have been reported because they are out of business now. A few years later, she attended a driver recruiting program presentation held in a La Quinta Inn in Austin,Texas offered by Stephens Transport which is also based in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. She was jobless and stranded in Austin,Texas and of course, she passed all of the requirements and was set to go but something gave her misgivings and she wasn't stampeded into leaving...I think her car broke down and they wouldn't give her a ride to the corporate training headquarters which was fortuitous for her as it turned out. She went back a month later and the same people who were so encouraging and nice to her acted like they didn't know her, certainly didn't remember her and were so rude to her she gave up the idea of ever being a truck driver! She mentioned that she was afraid she would get sexual harassment from her trainer since she would be working as a co-driver ( trainee) and she wasn't sure if it would be charged to her as training or if she would be paid trainee wages even though they would be hauling real freight. I saw one HELL of a SCAM here or at least the POSSIBILITIES for a SCAM, whereby you have a never-ending supply of CHEAP LABOR that thinks they will get this HUGE WAGES by being a trucker only to be clunked out somehow at the last few remaining weeks or hours. There is something similar at the state of Texas whereby state workers are put through a probation period and then,somehow, close the end of the probation, they are inevitably fired no matter what they did or how good a job they did.And no REASON has to be given either. The worst offenders are the agencies who are taking over other agencies which are being phased out and they want and get their own people that their people hire and rarely do they keep anyone who isn't politically affiliated with a powerful person ( the patron). So they get the cheap labor right up until the probation period or the training period expires and then something is staged and the person does not manage to pass the requirements to move on and up which are probably set way too high and not even relevant to the training that was given --rather sold. So now, the person who is unemployed and probably will never work in the industry will have to pay off a HUGE loan with HUGE interest that they now owe to the so-called Trucking Company School ... Sp NOW the company gets money from STUDENTS AND for HAULING FREIGHT! MORE MONEY,MORE MONEY,MORE MONEY! WHAT A BEAUTIFUL SCAM! I tried to find a truck driver for Stevens to talk to and see what happened to them when they were training and see if they were trained and hired direct from the company schools when I was driving but they were always too busy to talk and were always busy hustling loads of freight... I also noticed that almost all of them were white males. I don't know whether or not they were threatened with being replaced by somebody from all of these new driver recruits if they made any "mistakes"! I AM NOT ACCUSING THESE PEOPLE OF RUNNING A SCAM. IT IS JUST WHEN I READ ABOUT WHAT THIS COMPANY TRUCKING REPORTED HERE DID, IT REMINDED ME ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO MY COUSIN. I HAVE NO PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE AND ALL I KNOW IS WHAT MY COUSIN TOLD ME. MAYBE ONLY FEMALES ARE TREATED THIS WAY. MACHOS DO NOT LIKE TO COMPETE WITH WOMEN FOR ANY JOB. THEY BEAT WOMEN AS A RULE! I JUST SEE A HUGE POTENTIAL FOR ABUSE AND A RIP-OFF OF DESPERATE,POVERTY-STRICKEN, SCARED AND UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE AND THAT NEEDS TO BE PUNISHED!

...but consider yourself sort of lucky. You even have to dig through their own website to discover the fact that Central Refrigerated Service, Inc. is owned by none other than Jerry Moyes, who also owns Swift Transportation Co., a company with an even worse reputation than this one. The Jerry Moyes business strategy is simple. 'Hire 'em ignorant, desperate, and inexperienced. Use them and abuse them, and when they start to squeal, throw them away like garbage.' These companies are in dire need of a class-action civil lawsuit, and there are plenty of victims that would probably line up to join one, with the hope of finding someone willing to listen to their own experiences that desperately need to be heard, and if something could be done to stop this. I personally have had no association with any of Jerry Moyes enterprises, but the man needs to be taken for every cent he has prospered off the backs of men and women who were simply trying to support families, and who are guilty of only one thing - resisting efforts of being exploited for profit, and being left in worse financial shape than they were prior to signing on the dotted line. Eric, your story is amazing for one reason. You were so close to achieving your goals, they were yanked out from under you, and there is no excuse for that. Many people have tried to make sense out of issues like this, to try and figure out why a company would put all the time and energy into training someone to drive a truck for all those weeks, and...to use a football analogy...just when the ball is ready to be kicked through the goal posts, they move the d**n things. Why? Well there may well be one reason why... Swift Transportation, and I am equally sure that Central Refrigeration Service as well, receives grants of cash from the Government intended to fund the retraining of displaced workers - victims of the current economy, and to fill empty trucks under the guise of a perceived shortage of viable truck drivers. They rake and scrape for those who have few choices in life, and exploit them. They do this by roping them into a contract for training. They receive funds for each person they sign up, supposedly to offset the costs of training drivers. The problem is that Moyes, and a few other companies out here who consistently advertise for people to come on board for "company sponsored training", have discovered that there are more bucks in flipping drivers, than there is to actually put them to work for long periods of time. And like everything else that the Government does, there are few, if any people who actually dig into the details to find out what is really going on. The Government writes those checks based on false and misleading information. The companies justify those checks by showing that they are in constant need of warm bodies, and plea that they simply cannot fill those jobs for any length of time. People quit and they never know why. Hah!!! Never mind the simple and undeniable fact that if these companies offered decent jobs to begin with, the applications would be piling up in droves, having been submitted by experienced drivers, who currently wouldn't touch such companies with a ten foot pole. The end result is that they found that they can make a fine profit by using people for as long as possibly can, getting them to haul freight as a co-driver during their training periods for next to nothing in terms of compensation, rope them into several thousands of dollars in contracts that are usually written off their business taxes as a financial loss, unless they are actually able to collect funds through illegal debt collection techniques, and they do all of this with absolutely no regard given to the humans they use to further their profiting goals. This cycle of abuse only stops, as things stand now, when people QUIT applying to these horrible companies. Most people can ill afford to be used like this and thrown away like garbage. Their recruiters are slick salespeople. They could sell a drowning man a glass of water. It's all a scam, and it's sickening. There has to be a special hell for anyone who makes a paycheck, or who files a corporate tax return as the case may be, by abusing people just looking for a way to make a living. Now Eric, as to what you could do to attempt to fix what has been broken, you need to first make a challenge to your DAC report, and fast. Google "USIS", click on the first reference, then scroll to the bottom of the page and look for "Consumers". When you click on that link, the instructions for filing a challenge is there. File your challenge in writing, and send it via certified mail, return receipt requested. Keep it simple, firm, and polite. In your case, I would simply write something like: "I am writing to challenge the entry on my DAC Report by Central Refrigerated Service, Inc., stating that I was involuntarily terminated by them on October 20, 2008. The facts surrounding my association with this company are as follows; 1.) I was a participant in the Central Refrigerated Service driver training program for 49 days. This period of time consisted of both classroom and over-the-road training in a truck. 2.) Upon the conclusion of my classroom training, I was paired with a driver for road training, who was in possession of equipment that differed exponentially from equipment in which I was demanded to road test in prior to being qualified and hired as a full time driver. Specifically, there were two very different transmissions involved between the two trucks. The truck in which I had been trained to drive had a standard nine speed transmission, and the vehicle I was demanded to test in at the conclusion of my training had a "super ten transmission." The shift patterns differed tremendously, with the shift buttons for each transmission operating in two distinct, and quite opposite manners. I had been afforded no time whatsoever within those 49 days to train and drive equipment having a "super ten" transmission installed in it. 3.) Despite a denied request to take my driving test in a truck that had a similar transmission to that which I had operated for the prior 28 days, I did attempt to take the driving test. I was notified that I had failed the test, because I could not shift the transmission correctly. I was afforded a re-test, which was I was told would be given to me three days later, but I was categorically denied any opportunity to train or practice driving the truck before the test would be given, for reasons that were not explained to me. 4.) Although I left my association with Central Refrigerated Service, Inc. at the very near end of my training, and at a point and time where I was potentially to be hired as a full time driver, I categorically challenge any statement that I was involuntarily terminated. I left the training program of my own free will and for the simple reason that without any opportunity to be trained, or afforded any time to practice driving the truck I would again have to re-test in, it would have been impossible for me to pass any driving test. I am respectfully requesting that this entry be changed to reflect the fact that I left my association with Central Refrigerated Service, Inc. voluntarily, as this is the absolute truth. At no time was I verbally informed, nor was I asked to sign anything informing me that my association was being involuntarily terminated by the company. This entry as it stands today is false, misleading, and it is currently preventing me from obtaining gainful employment as a licensed truck driver, in spite of the fact that I have, at my own expense, obtained further training not afforded me while I was associated with Central Refrigerated Service, Inc., and in spite of the fact that I am now fully qualified to operate a class 8 vehicle. This false and misleading entry has already caused me to be denied at least one opportunity of employment. I trust that no further action will be necessary to correct this information, and that the requested changes will be forthcoming within the next thirty days from receipt of this challenge, as is prescribed by law. I am further requesting that an copy of my updated DAC Report be forwarded to me upon conclusion of the investigation and such amendments having been made to my report, as confirmation and evidence that all future releases of information about my association with Central Refrigerated Service, Inc. will be true and correct. Sincerely, XXXXXX"

I will be contacting an attorney soon to see what can be done about this company.