There are many chances to get into trouble while pulling a 53-foot trailer. Having inaccurate directions on Qualcomm messages was a particular sore spot, with me. When I learned first-hand, that many of the company-provided directions were wrong, or perhaps even hazardous to the safety of company drivers and company trucks, I wanted to help other drivers avoid the same aggravations that I had experienced.
I mentioned this to one of the upper-management types in the Utah headquarters, who encouraged me to send in my corrections. That’s what I did, many times, to many different dispatchers. A few dispatchers – and I mean few – were very helpful; they accepted my corrections in Qualcomm messages, and added the information to the database, so other drivers could benefit from it. My assigned day-shift dispatchers have reacted with more of a stubborn-mule-mentality; as if to say, “I’m a dispatcher, not a clerk typist”. It would go something like this:
- I send a simple Qualcomm message to dispatch, by way of introduction, that the directions for customer WXYZ were non-existent or wrong, and I would be sending corrected information.
- I send a second message with the actual corrected information for customer WXYZ.
- After at least 1 hour has passed, I request directions for customer WXYZ, and receive a Qualcomm message with the same wrong directions that were sent to me yesterday.
- I send a reminder to dispatch, in a courteous tone, to please correct the directions for customer WXYZ.
- The next day, I check the directions for customer WXYZ, and find that the directions are still wrong.
- I send an irate message to dispatch, inquiring why they are blowing-off my corrected directions for customer WXYZ.
If any dispatcher bothered to respond to me after this routine, it was usually to insult me with remarks like, “You already delivered to customer WXYZ. Why do you need those directions?”
Where do these wrong directions in the company database actually come from? One time, when I stood in my dispatcher’s cubicle, I watched him copy directions from the Google maps & directions, on the internet. Another time, after I already sent good driving directions to dispatch, someone in my company called a customer receptionist via telephone, and took directions from this receptionist; the receptionist gave directions to the customer’s postal address, which was not even on the same street as the delivery truck entrance. Another time, my dispatcher retorted – in a Qualcomm message – that dispatchers don’t enter directions; customer service does it. I took a picture of that retort, because there is no way – in my company – to send any Qualcomm messages to our customer service agents. Most office-desk people in my company (including dispatchers) are not sensitive to the need for accurate driving directions for their truck drivers. I suspect this is true for most trucking companies.
I carry a laptop computer with me on the truck, so I can get some driving directions from the internet; however, internet information is not always accurate, and I cannot always get online when I want driving information. After about 15 months of driving, filling up at least two different notebooks with an assortment of my hand-sketched maps to customers, getting put off by telephone answering machines, no answer at some customers’ telephone numbers, some telephone numbers being out-of-service, my cell phone being out of range of any carrier signal, I decided to try using a GPS device.
There are many good GPS devices made by Tom Tom, Cobra, Magellan, and Garmin. I purchased a Garmin c530, and it has relieved me from a lot of stress and anxiety; however, it does not always provide accurate information.
For example, it has often tried to send me on a detour, on a non-existent road near the Bosselman Pilot truck stop in Grand Island, Nebraska. The road in question has been closed for at least 3 years (as long as I’ve been driving trucks), and the only visible evidence that there ever was such a road is a derelict bridge across the marsh; yet it still appears on my Garmin c530, after I installed the 2008 map update. That may not seem so terrible, but there are more serious incidents.
When the c530 finds itself on a road which has not been mapped yet – no matter if the road has been there over 3 years – the screen shows me driving off course, and it goes into a hiccup mode of recalculating ... recalculating ... recalculating ... during which time it tries to send me on whatever bogus roads appear along the way. This happened to me on US 34 east of Ottumwa, on US 63 around Bono, on Highway 50 near Malin, on US 78 near Cordova, and probably hundreds of other places. Using a GPS device is no excuse to stop using your own maps, and your own brain.
After using this Garmin GPS device for about 15 months, I’ve discovered that I’ve been missing one of the most useful features of all: POI files. Many GPS devices can accept custom points of interest files, or POI files, over a USB cable, using a special POI loader program. Garmin has POI loaders for both Mac and PC computers. POI files are usually stored in plain-text CSV (comma separated values) format.
My c530 has a “Favorites” category, which is similar to custom POI lists, but these favorites cannot be enhanced with extra details directly on the c530 itself. The only way I know to do this is to convert the Current.gpx file (from the Garmin c530 device) to a CSV file, on a personal computer, then edit it with a text-editing program. While I’ve been saving the most common customer locations as favorites, this Garmin c530 has a mysterious limit to the number of favorites it will store. When it gets close to the limit, and I store new favorites, some of my older favorites disappear from the menu, without warning.
I recently discovered a fantastic resource on the internet, for free custom POI files :
http://www.poi-factory.com/
Custom POI files of popular truck stops, and all interstate rest areas are available. I have enhanced some of these lists, and added them to the “Extras” menu on the c530. Now it’s not a chore to find places to park and rest, after a long drive into an unfamiliar area.
I have also converted all my surviving “favorites” to POI lists, which also appear under the “Extras” menu. This codex of information has made the Garmin c530 device more useful to me than all my notebooks.
¿How did I do it?
1- Coordinates of my favorite places were collected or mapped as "favorites", using the Garmin c530.
2- These coordinates are stored on the c530 in a gpx file format:
/Garmin/gpx/current.gpx
The best way to convert this file to a CSV file is with a good text editor. I understand that some people use Excel to edit CSV files, but Excel caused me more trouble than I wanted.
I developed a free script for BBEdit, which converts the gpx file to a POI-friendly CSV file, and preserves all the address details.
3- The converted CSV file was enhanced with some desired details, using a text editor (I prefer BBEdit from Bare Bones Software).
4- The enhanced CSV file was saved on my hard drive, under the same folder where I kept my other CSV files (truck stops, rest areas, etc.).
5- I connected the c530 to my Mac, using the USB cable that Garmin provided.
6- Using the Garmin POI Loader program, I loaded all the CSV files onto the c530. This combines the POI records in all the CSV files into one proprietary GPI file:
/Garmin/POI/POI.GPI
If there are any format errors in the CSV files, the POI Loader program will report it.
7- I restart the c530, and all my POI records appear under the “Extras” menu, with the same sub-menus as indicated in step 4.
I actually purchased an optional 512 Mb SD card for the c530, thinking I needed it for loading custom POI records. In fact, these cards are intended for extra maps. I found that my resulting GPX file, containing all my custom POI records, was less than 500 kb in size. This easily fits on the c530, with no SD card needed. After a restart, the c530 asked me if I wanted to copy the “Extras” it located on the SD card.
If you try including too much detail in any of your POI records, the information may not all show nicely on the 3.5” screen. If I wasn’t quite satisfied with the appearance of a custom POI, I simply deleted the GPI file, and repeated the process outlined above, as many times as needed.