Who is your ELD talking to?
Hi. I’m your ELD.
I know, I know. I’m not supposed to talk. And you’re not supposed to have gooey desserts, but when you’re on the road and nobody’s watching, you do it anyway, right?
So, here’s the thing. I know you probably wish I would just go away. A lot of you truckers do. But I’m here to let you know it isn’t going to happen. It’s because I’m making you and everybody else on the highways safer. Sort of.
OK, so I haven’t made anybody safer. But at least you don’t have to keep those paper logs anymore, right?
Remember how you could never quite find time for the logbook? You kept telling yourself you’d fill it out at the next stop, but there was always some reason not to do it. You had to hit the restroom. You had to get some coffee into your system. Whatever.
And when you were back in your truck, there was always a reason you couldn’t do it then either. That friggin’ cement truck over there was getting ready to leave, and you didn’t want to crawl behind him out the exit. Worse, you didn’t want to have to merge with him into 75 mph traffic doing 25. So, you’d skip the logbook, right? Instead of keeping current during the day, you ended up doing it all at once at the end of the trip.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad for you full-truckload guys, but for you LTL and multiple-stoppers? You had to try to remember where you were when, and it got really messy, didn’t it?
Well, you don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. I do it for you. No more remembering every place you stopped and when. No more carbon paper smudges. You should be thanking me, but do you?
No. You complain about my clock. You claim you always have to race it.
Hey, that’s not my fault. I didn’t invent time. It’s been around for a long – well, time. I can’t help it if you’re a crummy planner or if that jerk back at the Paranoia Logistics warehouse held you up for an hour while he looked for a pen to sign the delivery receipt. All I do is keep records for your boss. That’s all.
Well, maybe not all. In fact, definitely not all.
And that’s why you’re never getting rid of me. Ever. It doesn’t matter if I make things safer or even if I make them a little worse. I am a permanent part of your truck now, so learn to live with it. With me, I mean.
See, I do you the great favor of keeping your logs, but I do more than that. I know where you are, where you’ve been, when you were there, and for how long. Not only that, but I can report it all in real time.
Who gets all that information? Almost anybody, that’s who.
You thought it was only your boss, didn’t you? Ha! The data I collect on you has a much wider audience than that. Your boss probably has the option to share that information with all kinds of people, companies, and organizations. Maybe they get paid for it. Who knows? The point is a lot of people want to know all that stuff about you and your truck.
Who? For starters, there are all the tracking companies that can sell your information to shippers and brokers. Some haul in tons of data from lots of trucks and analyze it to see how efficient you and your carrier are.
In case you’re wondering, you’re never efficient enough.
They can crunch the data from zillions of ELDs like me and predict what the traffic is going to be like at 3 p.m. on Tuesday at the corner of Route 21 and Raymond Boulevard in Newark, N.J. At least they think they can. They definitely tell their customers they can.
It doesn’t stop there, though. Once they have the data from your boss, maybe they can sell it to someone else.
Who? Maybe insurance companies, commercial real estate companies, crime families. Hell, how would I know? After I spit it out, it can go anywhere.
It’s big business, so get used to it. I mean me. No matter what the crash statistics say, I’m not going anywhere. So, you might as well be nice to me.
And quit your complaining. LL
Read more by John Bendel:
FMCSA information on ELD regulation is available.
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