Going Over the Road with Knight

I got the itinerary now. Sunday hotel and Monday through Thursday orientation and classroom stuff including drug test and probably DOT physical. Then off to Memphis the following Monday to start training there.

 

Day one all good. Watched some videos, did some quizzes, got the DOT physical and drug test done. I think I will be done by Wednesday.
Right now all their trucks are full but it will be 8 weeks before I will be all done and be ready for my own solo assignment. I was told they are getting 10 new trucks delivered. These will be Volvos and Internationals with automatics. This is at the Springdale, AR terminal.

 

Small world too. A former driver on my board at Maverick was at the clinic getting his physical done to work for Tyson so I talked to him for a minute. A driver that was on my board that now works for Knight at the Springdale terminal saw me and did a double take. He was surprised to see me there.

 

Not much do with me today. Just waiting on the hair test results to come back. I should be out of here tomorrow morning. Then hang out until Saturday to be at my hotel in Memphis for Monday training.

 

Stuck here one more day. Corporate is taking their time in getting them my driver code and the word that everything is 100% good to go. Sucks but it sort of works out for my time line. One less night I would have had to bum a couch somewhere.

 

Day one complete. We hit the range to drive in circles practicing up and down shift up to 3rd gear and back down. We were just creeping around at 5 MPH. We would end by pulling through the cones and doing a straight line back. I didn't hit any cones but it took me a few pull ups to get it right. I felt I was too close to the right every time and I think I was over correcting. I only got to do it twice so I am hoping to hit that at least 3 more times tomorrow to get it right.
We had an intro into the pretrip and will begin our day with that tomorrow. I am worn out out.

 

I didn't get to hit straight back again but jumped right in to offset. Offset, in my opinion, is the most stressful. In general I sucked at it and had to do several pull ups each time. We moved on to parallel. I enjoyed parallel; nice and easy. I continued to practice shifting as I drove around the yard to re position for each parallel maneuver. I feel much better about today's performance though.

 

Straight, parallel, off set all good now. 90 degree not so much. I will be hitting that again tomorrow. Slowly but surely picking it up. Tomorrow afternoon they will be taking us on the secondary roads for road training. That should be interesting. We are also testing out on maneuvers tomorrow. If I get the 90 down in the morning I might be able to get most of my testing in tomorrow.

I honestly think every new hire office employee should be taken out on the yard and attempt a straight line back; supervised of course. That was the first move we did and it was a big reality check.