My Journey To Becoming A Schneider Driver

Ahhh, I see. I thought I heard someone say something about two guys missing the bus. I stand corrected. Nobody has been cut. That's a good sign!

 

I'm hauling vans. I want to haul tankers but was told I had to be employed at Schneider for at least a year

 

Ok, I have read a lot of threads about the Schneider orientation and I have not read anything about what I'm going to talk about on this post.

I made it through week one without any problems. We were assigned to our TE's on Friday. My TE contacted me that night and told me we were going out Saturday afternoon. Great! The sooner I go out the sooner I get in.....I hope!

Well, dude showed up at 4:30pm on Saturday. My first impression was ok, although he's pushing 400lbs my first contact was good. He's a nice guy. We fueled up. I jumped in his truck, looked around and was pleasantly surprised that he kept a clean truck. We head out.

I'm driving up the 5 over the grapevine towards our destination for a load drop. No biggie. The conversation is the typical to start. You know, where are you from, whys you start trucking, got a girl, got any kids? The typical questions. After an hour dude wants to start telling me dirty jokes. I'm cool with that but after an hour I was getting tired of hearing them. Some of them he repeated twice. Oh I forgot to add, in the first hour we stopped twice so he could grab food.

The second hour involved WOW talk. It was basically him talking about WOW as I am not a gamer and know nothing about the game. I'm bored to death so I try to change the subject. He insists on talking about WOW. There is also another food stop in the second hour. The 3rd, 4th, 5th hour was about the same as the first two.

We arrived at our destination, dropped the trailer. There were no empties to pick up and no preassignment so we parked for the night. This is where it starts to turn....

I close out my log, catch up on my paperwork and jump on the top bunk for the night. As I'm rolling out my sleeping bag I start to smell something. I look down and dude is pulling off his boots. GOD ####, his feet are foul. Then he decides to start ripping ###. Within 10 minutes the truck smells like ####. I pulled a few fabric softeners out of my bag and hang them around the top bunk to try to mask the smell. I put my head down and try to sleep as I am exhausted from week one of orientation. My TE opens up the laptop and puts on his favorite season of Babylon 5. I fall asleep.

At 1am I am awoken by the rumbling roar of this grizzly bears snore. It's so freaking loud. Why didn't I put two and two together? I've never met an overweight dude who didn't snore. This went on for 2 hours. I finally put my earbuds in and cranked up the music to cover his snoring. I got little sleep that night.

Day 2 with TE. We were assigned a load to be picked up at the OC. We drove there, hooked the load and parked for the day as our delivery date wasn't scheduled until the following day. We got to watch the Super Bowl which was a good thing I guess. Dude ate all day! He even did his laundry but that last night when he pulled those boots off he stunk up the truck again. He even decided to pull out his piss jug and use it in the truck. GROSS!! There's a bathroom 100 yards away.

So here I am laying in the top bunk at 6am listening to this guy sawing logs. It stinks, I'm tired and according to him I'm stuck here with him until at least Friday. I'm not going to try to change TE's. I'm going to stick this out and make the best of it. I hope I can survive. This has been the worst experience of Schneider orientation.

One more thing. Dude has been ######## about how broke he is for 2 days. Should I tell him that if he didn't eat every half hour he might have a little change in his pocket?

 

I never said how much I think he makes being a trainer.

 

I asked about that and basically the trainer has to be in the passenger seat web I'm driving. I'm on driving status and the trainer has to be "on duty". I think I might get some luck today. We're picking up a load then heading back to the OC. My TE is due for a 34 hour restart and then he's heading to Texas. Since I have to be back in class Monday he said he may just leave me at the OC but we'll have to talk to RTA.

The good news is he finally showered last night!!