Another CRE school horror story

I went to CR England's school in Salt Lake City, UT for a short while. I got the hell out after witnessing a pattern of bizarre practices and deficient instruction. I had to learn, for myself, that sometimes the internet is absolutely right.

I got into Salt Lake City within five days of talking to a recruiter. Being from northern Arizona and relatively close by, I only had to spend about 18 hours on Greyhound buses and in Greyhound terminals. I had heard some folks from places like Nebraska and North Carolina say they'd been on buses pretty much for the last two days to get to the facility. Once we got to the SLC terminal, they sent a Toyota Prius shuttle to pick up seven passengers each with a week's worth of luggage. Even the shuttle driver knew that was not going to work, so one of us got to pay for a cab to get there. Little did I know that this was a sign of the incompetence to come.

We get to the CR England school/terminal/thing, and it seems alright at first. Noticed that the truck leasing facility has its storefront inside the building. We get told to "walk around" because the bus to take us to the motel we would be spending our first four nights in would not be in for another hour. So we walk around and immediately upon talking to two or three drivers roaming the building we became aware that the recruiters probably had made promises they had no intention of keeping. One kid, bless his poor heart, had been told that once he was driving for them they would route him through his hometown so he could pick up his wife and infant children and take them on the road with him! Yeah, that wasn't going to happen.

We get to the Ramada Inn and after 20 minutes getting all of us checked in at the front desk we head to our rooms. The motel is kinda bare-bones, just two beds, a john, and a television. The restaurant on the first floor is overpriced and generally pretty underwhelming. I ordered a half-rack of ribs only to find that the meat was tough and a little bit gristly. I resigned then to just eating at the Subway down the street.

DAY 1
First day is just registration and in-processing. With 80 people all in the same room (some of whom have, ahem, questionable hygiene) it quickly becomes very testy and after a few hours in here filling out form after form, a distinct pungent odor I can only describe as the "CR England funk" begins to enter your nose and lungs. It smells like a cross between body odor, dime store cologne, and onions. The medical personnel that do your physical are generally pretty cool, and they got me in and out with little fuss. It was nice to be out of that balmy room, too. We got told by the admin staff that those of us that were staying in the hotels would be having our classes there too until such time as they found room in the second-floor dormitory for us. Once our paperwork was in order, we got sent back to the motel.

Now the worst part about being at CR England is that you spend all #### day waiting for their "shuttle" to take you to and from Walmart to get necessities. This "shuttle" is actually a reconfigured 1990s school bus. When you get on this "shuttle", you never know if the driver is actually going to get you where you need to go or if you're going to be spending half an hour watching him stare at his iPad in the back of the bus for 30 minutes at some point during the trip. I'd love to have this guy's job because it seems like he gets about 30 minutes of paid breaktime for every 60 minutes of driving. When we got to the Walmart, one man was beside himself in panic and heartbreak: he had left his wallet on the bus and it had been pocketed by someone else.

DAY 2
Day 2 was all classroom instruction. The instructor at the Ramada, a guy named Andy, wasn't a bad instructor, but he seemed more interested in his phone than in actually teaching anything. The quizzes are easy, open-book stuff straight from the Utah CDL manual, and if you get too many wrong Andy gives you your old answer sheet with the ones you got wrong marked off so you can change the answers and resubmit it on a new sheet. It was about this time that I noticed that CR England was less about training and developing professional drivers and more about getting warm bodies with verifiable SSNs into their trucks.

DAY 3
Day 3 was our trip to the Driver License Division to get our CDL permits. The DLD staff was very professional, even though CRE's resident physician had done something incredibly dumb by making us check NO on the CDL box on our DoT medical cards. At first the representative was going to turn me away for it, but then saw that more than one of us had made the same mistake and thus his boss decided they were going to let us test. I passed, many others failed. I paid for and split a cab with two other students back to the motel to avoid having to wait for the "shuttle". We were told to clean out our motel rooms after that night because we would be heading back to CR England for the backing portion of the school.

DAY 4

Day 4 was a class on logbooks (read: Andy reading a PowerPoint word for word). After that we had lunch and a quick brief on the rules for the backing range. I read up on a class action lawsuit against CR England for violating various truth-in-leasing laws with their attempts at strongarming new drivers into leasing trucks.

We were informed that once the instructors went home in the early evenings it was up to students to continue practicing maneuvers until 9PM when the range closed for the night. There would be no supervision or instruction at these times, driving trucks late at night with headlights off. Their attitude is summed up as "Here's the keys, give us a holler if you kill somebody or back your truck into a fence!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

These road instructors were by and large not interested at all in teaching the maneuvers. After one brief demonstration with six students crammed into each truck trying to watch the instructor put the vehicle in motion and then perform a straight-line back, they piled students into the trucks by themselves and had us attempt the maneuver. The instructors laughed and got their jollies off of the students' mistakes, when they were paying attention. The other 75% of the time they were watching their phones (which we were forbidden to do on the range), horsing around (also forbidden), and otherwise acting completely unprofessional. They were not in the cab with the student driver, which I would imagine ought to be their place during a student's first attempt at executing a maneuver in a $140,000 vehicle. This was my first time attempting to work a manual transmission, so my first backing attempt was especially rough as I was not only focused on keeping the trailer straight but also on the different gears I had to be in and trying to not let the engine stall. I struck a barrel and immediately received a royal earful from the instructor, calling me everything but a child of god. After landing the maneuver, the instructor told me I "looked like didn't want to do this anymore". Well, after seeing how you and other instructors are acting on the range, no wonder!

That night, we were going to the dorms, right? Wrong! Apparently the math of (Beds in school) - (Students in school) = Available beds is too hard, so we got to pick up our bags and get back on the shuttle to the motel! After that night, I had seen enough, and decided to get the hell out.

I'll be going to the community college in my state to get my CDL. I can't drive for a carrier that thinks these practices are ok! Listen to the folks here! AVOID CR ENGLAND!