Schneider Paid CDL Training - Ohio

Well, you won't have to do that on a dedicated account. Walmart is 6 days on, 2 off- though you can stay on a 7th day if you want and just take a 34 restart, and around holidays it's mandatory to do so. But we run pretty hard and couldn't stay on without running out of hours. And you really can't run this account on recap hours, so you need that 34 each week. In other words, you don't have to deal with TAH requests and not getting routed home when you need to be there; it's a set schedule.

 

I'd do that full time and never bother trucking again if the monies that good.

 

1. No - at least not for a Walmart load. The stores we cover are Western PA (Indiana, PA is the farthest east - about an hour beyond Pittsburgh), Eastern Ohio (western edge - in the north, Sandusky or so, and in the south, almost to Columbus), and about the northern half of West Virginia. I pretty much never have a load that's over 200 miles to the first store; I say "pretty much" because I think I did once - so, once in eight months.

2) I've done the store in Middlefield a few times; it's right in the distribution area. You could take a 10 here if, say, Middlefield was your last stop and you were out of hours for the day. You wouldn't take a 34 because your time at home (whether the full two days or just a 34) is from the distribution center - you start your week at the DC, and leave your truck there when you go home. Couple reasons for this: 1) Because you deliver to stores and then return to Wintersville, you always have a trailer, so you can't just drop the trailer somewhere and bobtail home, like an OTR driver might. 2) Even though you (eventually) have an assigned truck, it gets used while you're at home. The account has a number of part time "flex" drivers, who may run as few as one load a week, and they slip seat. It's not as bad as it sounds. When I go home, I just make sure the stuff I keep in the truck is packed away (cabinets, under-bunk storage), and that I leave a cabinet empty if the slip-seater needs it. And of course, I don't leave anything of great value in the truck (laptop, etc.). I've never had a problem. It also helps that because I go home every week and not really living in the truck full-time, it's not a big deal to load-in and load-out each week. But back to the 10: there's a store near my house that, if I had to shut down for the night there, I'd just have my wife pick me up and go home. But I also live in Pittsburgh, so the one time this was actually a possibility, I chose to run out my hours and shut down at a store west of the city instead, because going home would have meant starting the next morning during Pittsburgh rush hour. I love my family, but no thanks.

3) Yes. I still run directions on Google Maps, even if I know exactly how to get to a store, just to make sure I've got the correct actual mileage to calculate the trip time (And yeah, I know Google Maps doesn't specifically give truck-specific routes. I know enough about reading maps to tell if Google's directions are okay, or if I need to adjust them. But the mileage is really helpful to plan drive times). But you do get to know directions and routes pretty well - maybe a few months to start getting comfortable with it all, I'd guess. Even now, I still occasionally get a store that I haven't been to before. And, I get sent over to the Washington Courthouse DC (outside Columbus) to run a week every so often, and I don't know their stores at all. But I've found that the way I do my trip planning, it hardly takes any longer to plan routes that I don't know than the ones I do. We're talking a few minutes before I go pick up the trailer and go - maybe 10 at the most, usually less. I know drivers who just grab their paperwork and go (which I don't get), and I know drivers who pick up their paperwork and then sit in the break room painstakingly planning out their route (which I also don't get), but the point is to do whatever works for you so that once you get on the road, you're confident and comfortable to get to your destination safely.

And hey, the vast majority of our destinations are WALMART stores. They're generally in the suburbs, on major streets, are built with truck-specific entry/exit routes, and have big dock areas with plenty of space to maneuver. That's why it's a great account for new drivers with little experience.

 

This makes a whole lot of sense... driver shortage this, driver shortage that. Pay out the wazoo in advertising campaigns and the recruiters spend all day making cold calls. Yet when an interested driver calls in seeking info he gets the run around through 3 separate recruiters. I was lucky I guess. I got a girl named Kayla from GB on the first call and she was the only person I ever talked to until orientation and we talked daily for like 2 or 3 months. Really a nice and informative person. Alot of other companies left a bad taste in my mouth just because of the recruiters but no problems with Schneider in that regard.

About your height if it wasn't answered yet, the mattresses are twin XL. I lost my tape measure but Google says the twin xl is 80" long. so just about 6'7". But there is about 6 inches of room on both ends of the mattress before you hit the walls of the cab. I guess you could always stuff some pillows in the extra space to give you a little more bed space. As long as you don't stand straight up out of the driver's seat, you'll have no problem walking around the cab.