Tale Of The Faith Ranch

Faith Ranch..I guess the pain has gone enough now to tell my tale.

 We had been sitting in Luling, TX. Waiting on work. We got a call from a company that wanted us to take a gate for them. I must say here that we had been waiting for nearly a month when we got the call. Thus some of the details may have seemed less important as wanting to get a paycheck.

 So we were offered a gate 22.5 miles outside of Carrizo Springs on Faith Ranch Road...Well the road dead ends directly into ...you guessed it …..Faith Ranch. Prior to our arrival at the gate it had rained quite a bit. Stay to the center of the road, we were told...there are some puddles...OK the puddles turned out to be low spots in the 9 mile dirt part of the Faith Ranch road. OK that being said one of the puddles was ¼ mile long and covered the entire road and I'll say 2 to 3 feet deep. If I had not had traffic in front of me and traffic behind me I would have turned around then. Being the dedicated workers we are we went on to the ranch.

Guess what the site we were to park on had a trailer on it that had to be moved.....red flag #2 lets say....W parked our rig close to the other trailer temporarily, hooked up to power and water then were informed........ Our supervisor wanted us to go to work right then because the guy on duty (one guy) had been on duty sense the day before....Red flag #3... 

We started work.....We are told that we can choose the sort of shift we want to work anything is OK so we think that 12 to 12 would do as it will give each team a busy time. Oh wait supervisor wants three (3) on duty at the busiest time which is around 6 to 8 in the AM...Well that sheds a whole light on how the shifts are gong to work... The shifts have to be 6 to 6 with us on days because there is only one of him...even tho there is supposed to be 4 thee is only 3....kinda funny (not ha, ha funny) here is red flag # whatever...lets say the pay is 150 per day for 2 people they pay 125 to this guy that is by himself go figure....

 Nuf of that.....Now this company uses I-pads with a modified stock program to log traffic....Sounds good if you say it fast.. here is the process
1. Take picture of vehicle.
2. Take picture of tag
3. Enter tag number (yes even tho you took picture)
4. Enter company
5. Enter person name
6. Enter location ( all locations were listed as “all locations” but rather than have it autoed in it had to be manually entered)
7. Enter vehicle type

 It is very slow process and there are a lot of "are you sure" questions plus the biggest problem ...you can't see the damn thing during the day.

I will say that the I-pad will work for slow gates say 100 vehicles per day...after that is is very much slower than paper.... The good thing is you don't have to look back for the vehicles when signing them out.....

 OK so to make this shorter we did (after 4 days) get moved into our perm site.....and to end it after 16 days (and with a weeks notice) we left the Faith Ranch.... It has been said that as of the last I heard there have been 3 couples come and gone after we left.....and the guy working the night shift has gone...... Faith ranch 300 vehicles per day and this is hunting (slow) season......