Sharing my experience at Averitt (July 2014)

ORIENTATION - DAY 4

Sorry im a day late on this but its been crazy. The last day of orientation was a breeze. You start by going over more operations. This is pretty much Elogs, Qualcomm, and Macros. Nothing fancy really, just more or less a taste of what you will learn out with your trainer. Lunch was a salad, lasagne, corn, and apple pie. The special thing about this lunch is that your fleet manager will come have lunch with you. It was pretty cool meeting in person and going over what you expect from each other. You also got the information for your trainer. I have to call mine soon in fact to get setup with him.

After lunch, you finish up the operations stuff and then you go home. Since I drove, we were done around 1:30 and I was home in about 3 hours after that. Spent yesterday evening and most of today sorting through everything. Getting ready to meet up with my trainer so I had to get my clothes ready. Also had to sort through all the papers and information they give you throughout orientation. You will just about need a briefcase by the time its all said and done!

Ill let you know how my actual training goes. Probably wont post every day like I did with orientation, but Ill post every 2-3 days or so.

 

Basically its just going over your application in brief along with some customer service questions. Nothing you wouldn't get at any job interview. How would you handle a difficult customer...yada yada That kind of thing

 

Going good but I only have my phone with me and typing on a phone sucks. I'm due to be home over the weekend. I'll update then. Everything is good though!

 

Alright im home and I have a few minutes. Trainer is pretty cool and we ran pretty hard this week. If we are counting from Monday to Monday, we had just over 2300 miles this week. Load times were great, drop and hooks were easy....which has me wondering why the hell I did flatbed in the first place.

You pretty much fuel at the service centers so you are spending the nights there or on the customers property to make the most of your time. The service centers so far have been decent. Could be better, could be worse. General rule for any public shower is to wear flip flops right? I cant tell you how nice it is to run as long as you want and not having to worry about finding a parking spot in a full truck stop. We normally ate out of the truck for one meal, and then we ate out one meal each day as well. The trucks have 1500w inverters so its really no problem for it to power a microwave, fridge, laptop, tv, or anything else. APU works like a champ and we kept our sleeper birth at 61 degrees during the night.

Next week wont be as good on mileage, reason being is that my trainer said they try to start pointing me towards getting in my own truck around mid week. So instead of 2 full south to north runs like we did this week, We will probably only do one of those, and then do short runs so I can get to my truck. Again, thats just me assuming.

You only get 600.00 even during training but if you do the math, 2300 x .40 cpm = 920.00 gross Not too bad especially considering Im a trainee and I need more time to do stuff. I think honestly the most confusing part is the macros for the quallcom. There are a lot of them and coming from another carrier, I still have THEIR macros in my head so its hard for me to flush that out and learn thier system. Its not really complicated or anything, its just a matter of finding my groove.

Anyway, I got home early on saturday morning (1AM actually), but I dont have to leave out until Tuesday morning at 0600 so I got some decent hometime as well.


Ill let you know how my next week goes, but I expect it to be pretty smooth, just like this week was.