I am a successful truck driver and so can you

If you’re new to driving, you’re worried about backing. However, backing has been well-covered in other posts. I’m mostly going to talk about other stuff that can mess you up.

I’ve been driving on and off, but lately very much on, for about two and a half years. Before my first stint as a professional, I salvaged a pickup bed trailer busy rusting in the Nevada desert and practiced backing it behind my CJ-5 until I got used to its perverse reverse behavior. Then I took a two-hour, $250 course on truck driving at a local two-year college. I think the course description read something like, “We guarantee you’ll pass the CDL test because we’ll be the ones administering it.”

I’ve driven over-the-road for mega carriers and now I’m in the drayage business. Drayage is all lies, lying liars, long hours and truck repairs.

I’ve had a few accidents and some close calls during my short driving career. I’ve had a couple great driver trainers. I’ve been unlucky, but mostly I’ve been lucky.

I have nightmares about falling asleep at the wheel. I wake up in a sweat and can’t get back to sleep.

Here are some pointers:

Practice craziness: Freighters have historically been crazy because freighting has always been a crazy business. Today, driving an 80,000 lb vehicle in rush hour traffic is, in fact, crazy. Driving all night is crazy. Driving in California is stupid. Driving in New York is suicidal. Spending weeks or months away from your family is lonely and crazy.

As a professional driver, you will be asked to do crazy stuff and go crazy places. Your boss may be crazy. Other drivers will act crazy. You may have to drive a crazy truck. My advice is to step up to the challenge and be crazy from the start. You’re going to end up that way anyhow.

Here’s what I mean by “crazy.” Let’s say your boss tells you that you will have to maneuver your truck through a cave to make a blind-side back around a rock column into a dock a little wider than your trailer. Your “crazy” response should be: “$#@% yeah I will drive my truck through a cave to make a blind-side back around a rock column into a dock a little wider than my trailer! Let’s do it! NOW! HEEEEAAAMMMMMERRRRR DAAAAOWWWWWN!” (and then smash your coffee mug over your head, extinguish your cigar on your tongue, jump in your truck and race off backwards in the wrong direction singing, “Zip-ah-dee-doh-dah, zip-ah-dee-ay, my oh my what a wonderful day…” [Warning: you will be drug tested]).

Use your mirrors correctly: I used to go to the flat west coast mirror to see what was happening behind me and then switch to the convex mirror below it to see if anyone was in my blind spot. I’d check all my mirrors, including the round ones on my fenders, before changing lanes. One day a car came barreling down an on-ramp aimed at my right steer tire, its driver apparently oblivious to the existence of my truck. (Side note: You may think it’s impossible not to see a semi-tractor but it happens, especially when a driver is on the phone/eating/slapping the kids/drunk/all of the above. Any experienced driver will confirm to you that some people do not see trucks. Someone should start a publicity campaign along the lines of “Learn to see motorcycles.” I’d call it, “Learn to see 70-foot, 80,000 pound semi-tractor trailers, you mope.”) Anyway, this guy had an appointment with my steer tire and there was no time for him to realize his obliviousness because there was no merge lane. I should have let him bounce off my truck but I was young and naïve, or at least naïve, so I glanced at my mirrors, hit my signal and began moving into the lane on my left.

But it turns out, I really didn’t glance at all my mirrors. There was a Prius in my blind spot. Luckily, Priui can move it if they get a mind to and that one shot into the distance like a Chinese rocket when I started slowly (!) shifting over.

When people find themselves in dangerous situations, they subconsciously look for shortcuts. My brain’s shortcut, faced with an impending car-steer tire tryst, was to just check my big mirror before moving over.

The blind spot behind your big mirror is larger than Texas. If searchers were serious about finding all those ships and planes lost in the Bermuda Triangle, they would start checking the blind spots behind semi-tractor mirrors.

After my near-collision, I retrained myself to go to the little convex mirrors for a quick picture of what’s happening in my truck’s blind spots, and down the road, and then I consult the other mirrors.

When I’m in a truck stop and I need to see what’s coming down a row, I’ll check the fantastic wide-view mirror on the fender. I can see into last week with that thing. It’s also useful when I come to a sharp turn at an intersection and my view down the lane to the right is blocked by my truck.

Go slow: Unless you’ve got to cover a football field, just use your clutch and brake when backing. Also, don’t take turns in anything higher than fourth gear. Crawl through parking lots you’re not familiar with. If you smack something you didn’t see and you’re going at a good clip, you might wreck it or break your truck. If you go slow, you will merely kiss it and there may be no damage at all.

Watch your behind: Your trailer will track to places you can’t anticipate. Whenever your cab and trailer are at an angle, keep one eye on the road in front of you and one eye on the little red light at the back end of your trailer. That little red light is your beacon. Beware of anything that tries to come between you and that little red light.

Check that your fifth wheel and tandems are locked: You will hear a satisfying “clunk” when your fifth wheel engages on the kingpin. You will hear a distant but unmistakable “kepsprunk” when your tandems lock in place. BUT sometimes, and especially in cold weather, the fifth wheel bar will only slide halfway across the kingpin. Also, tandem pins have been known to make tricky engagement-type sounds when knocking against the rail and not engaging in any fashion.

If your tandems come loose while you are traveling, they will slide to the back of the trailer loudly. It will sound as if your truck smashed into a Jersey barrier. Everybody will point at you and laugh. Your children will not respect you. Your accountant will run off to Bermuda with your retirement money. So always check to see that your tandem pins have engaged.

Even worse, if your trailer slides off your fifth wheel while you’re underway there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth. So for the love of Pete, always check to see if your fifth wheel lock has engaged. If your co-driver says the fifth wheel lock is engaged, check anyway. If the pope swears on a stack of bibles that the fifth wheel lock of your truck is engaged, check.

Watch your shoulders: By “shoulders,” I mean the front edges of your trailer. Here’s why they’re dangerous. Let’s say it’s late at night and you pull into “Bob’s Wrecking Yard, All-You-Can-Eat-Buffett and Down-Home Dirt-Lot Truck Stop” with 5 seconds left on your electronic 14-hour clock. It’s freestyle-parking night at Bob’s and the lot is full up but you spy a slot on your left between two Chicken haulers that you might be able to pull through. You jack the truck way over and nose into the spot. Your driver’s side California mirror barely clears chicken hauler trailer number one. Your passenger side mirror is less than an atom’s width from chicken hauler trailer number two but not technically touching so you ease forward. The trailer thins in your mirror. It’s lining up. It looks like you’re going to make it. Then: KRONK.

What happened? When your trailer is at an angle, its leading edge will stick out a few feet beyond the side of your cab. So in the above scenario, you really didn’t have enough room to pull through, taking the extra width of your trailer into account.

But the back of your shoulders can also cause havoc. Let’s say you’ve been ordered to (non-blind-side) angle-back into a narrow dock between two chromed-out Peterbilt 379s. After a couple pull-ups and back-ups you’ve got the back of the trailer between the two rigs. It’s still angled a little but the back end isn’t going to hit the Peterbilt behind you. You’ve got plenty of wiggle room on your driver’s side but you will have to swing the front of the trailer hard over on your blind side to line your doors up with the dock. You roll your steering wheel right and ease it back. Then: KRONK.

What happened? When you jacked the front edge of the trailer right to line up with the dock, the outside edge of your right shoulder smacked into the chrome-plated California mirror of the truck on your blind side. You should have done one more pull-up and then backed straight in.

Make sure you are in the correct lane: This has caused me problems more often than everything else combined. Whenever you come up on a turn on a surface street or off-ramp, you will have to look ahead and maneuver your truck into the outside turning lane. Otherwise you will have to swing wide into the other lane and, potentially, into traffic. Meanwhile, your outside mirror will be blocked by your trailer. It will be the perfect fustercluck, and you will feel like a fool because you will be a fool.

Stop your rig and get out before proceeding into the unknown territory: This is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Let’s say you’re lost and your navigation system tells you to take a right into that residential area / school zone over there. You pass a sign warning “no trucks” (these are always placed about 50 feet down the road from any intersection). The road narrows and the sky darkens. Tree branches start banging against the top of your trailer. You pass a checkpoint manned by armed insurgents. But the map shows this road going through to an interstate highway. There’s a line of cars a mile long behind you. What should you do?!

You need to stop and scout on foot or ask a local tribesman whether a truck can make it through. You won’t be doing the swearing, honking, frothing-at-the-mouth motorists behind you any favors by getting stuck in the mud bog or low bridge a mile ahead. If you can’t make it through, you’ve got to play traffic cop and get the folks behind you to turn around or make room so you can back out. That’s the whole sucky truth.

There you have it: all the misinformation I’ve gathered so far in my misguided trucking career. For all new drivers: best of luck and happy trails! The job is really not as bad as I’ve portrayed it. It’s worse! If I see questions, I’ll try to reply to them in the five minutes I have available between staggering home after my 14 hour shift and falling dead asleep in the hallway, only to awaken later from a terrible nightmare. However, when you are considering my answers, just remember: I’m in the drayage business.