Some questions.

Good luck, Being told to do illegal things in your jobs is a problem that spans from trucking to law enforcement. Your not going to get away from that beings how its in most jobs. Sounds like you have the drive to be a truck driver. But if you got burnt out in nursing in 2 years, This might not be for you. On the other hand you might love it as i do even with the bad economy and all the B.S. from shippers/rec other drivers, companies and so forth. Not sure if leaving your job to come here would be a good idea. However if this is something you really want to do then i would go for it. You could always go back to nursing. GOOD LUCK.

 

I've only ever taken the eye test with one eye at a time. So is there a reason we don't have glasses on? Waiver...no....glasses yes.

 

I appreciate what you are going through working in long term care . My stepson was in a vegetative state for a year before he passed away . But you have other options available to you as a nurse . From the questions you ask you have a pretty good idea what is going on in the trucking industry .
Yes , they check vision in each eye as well as peripheral vision . You must be able to correct the problem with corrective lenses .
There is no school I would recommend . While the course may meet standards the operators of these schools know the chances of graduates getting a job and keeping it a year are slim . But graduates quitting trucking generates the need for more graduates to replace them . Yes , training companies will starve you out then bill you for the schooling .
You can go to http://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/safestat/SafeStatMain.asp , enter the name of a trucking company (the DOT number is better if you know it )and check out their safety record . For an example the DOT number of U.S. Xpress is 303024 . Click their history and you'll see poor safety management scores for 2007 .You will also see an enforcement in December of 2006 . This was for falsification of log books . Do a search here on posts about May trucking and read about how their drivers manage
their log books . Remember that Crete driver that killed 7 kids in GA ? There are documented records of his dispatcher coercing him to violate hours of service . Going from nursing to trucking will be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire as far as being expected to violate regulations goes .
Now the ultimate choice is yours . You can tell a dispatcher no - then sit twice as long waiting for your next load .

 

when i did mine they checked each side, then both together. both with and without my glasses. your vision needs to be at least 20/40 corrected (mine was 20/30 in each corrected, 20/20 both corrected, and 20/200 each uncorrected and i had no problem.)

 

go for it dude, I am doing this job because i suffer from a bad case of wanderlust too, and ya can put your mountain bike on the catwalk thats where i keep mine (just bolted a fork mount on the grates) i have gotten to ride in so many cool places since i started driving. (9 months now) o yea and a little tip. if ya go into nyc or philly put your bike in the sleeper.

 

Local votech schools can be a good deal... you might want to check them out, but make sure they can find you a job.

I went to a SAGE driving school in Henderson, CO - they're a national company. I was very satisfied with their product, both in the classroom and the practical drive experience. All the driving instruction was one-on-one, except on the training pad where it was one instructor dealing with four students in individual trucks... no sharing.

As far as training via a company, there are some bad deals out there as you may have noticed from all of the whining. However, check out the thread...

http://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/prime/57246-prime-training-experiance.html

by U2Exit. He is very satisfied with his training experience at Prime. BTW, neither he nor I are recruiters... we are both company drivers at Prime - we share the same fleet manager.

 

************************************************************************************You are wise to check the BBB. I think it would also be worthwhile to check the ripoffreport website LINK HERE. And before choosing a company, check out their safety rating with SafeStat. When you cross scales, the DOT will type your plate into their puter and SAFESTAT (link here) will give them what is called the "Safety Management SEA value". This score is based largely on the results of inspections of drivers and equipment (each is scored seperately) High scores are worse than low scores. A score of 75 or higher means the DOT has to inspect you, no choice about it, if they have the available manpower to do it. By checking a trucking company at this site you will know what the DOTs predisposition to you will be. Also, in my experience I have found that the companies with lower scores had better and safer equipment and better hiring standards and better morale as opposed to companies with higher scores. Generally speaking I have found this to be true.

I am most interested in your post and point of view, because I am kind of in an opposite situation. I have about 15 years experience in trucking, both as company driver and as owner operator. I recently left trucking forever, and am considering nursing as an option for my future. Wow, how have you managed to last so long in long term care nursing, as it seems to have the reputation for being the hardest i.e. staffing shortages, overtime and double shifts if relief is a no-show, pressure to violate rules and laws to save time, etc. You will be tough enough to make it in trucking,no doubt. I think it would be interesting to pick each others brains over a cup of coffee? Well, since you are too far away for that, I will offer my opinions on your questions here. You say you like roadtrips, so do I. The thing is though, with trucking, you get to see a lot of country, but only through the windshield, and by that I mean there will seldom be any time to stop and see any tourist sights, so keep that in mind. "Just in time deliveries" are the usual scheduling nowadays, as the corporations shipping and receiving want to cut the overhead of warehouse space, so this makes for tight and rigid schedules with a premium on being on time.

As for the good side of trucking, when I would finally get that load on and get out of the city and onto the open road, and get that satellite radio tuned to my favorite station, and the cruise control is set and I just kick back to enjoy the ride with that big hood out in front of me (and hopefully you have some chrome on your truck, as it's hard to go through life without chrome, lol), then it just doesn't get any better than that. No office politics, no boss looking over my shoulder. This is what I will miss; it got into my blood so that I endured the bad for the good.

But as for being tired, you will live your life through a fog of fatigue that is layer upon layer (it takes about 4 days of R&R to recuperate, but you normally don't get that many days off back to back). The fatigue was not as bad for me when I pulled flatbeds, because I slept at night and worked during the day; most shippers and receivers of flatbed freight were dayshift only operations, in my experience. Toughest was the reefers, as the picks might be any hour of the day, but the drops were usually between midnight and 5am, especially with produce, so reefers for me were a lot of sleeping in split shifts across many time zones, so the jet lag never left me. But some drivers live with it better than me; some like reefers (masochists, lol). My natural body clock is to sleep at night, so I don't do well with erratic sleep schedules and all night driving, so I leave the reefers to others who like it. And yes, you had best do this while you are single because you won't see much hometime for time with spouse and family.

They test you one eye at a time. I suggest you find a doctor that is qualified to administer the physical for a Class A CDL, just to be sure what you may be up against (costs around $75+). Be aware that some limitations that the CDL doctor can legally allow, may not be acceptable by all trucking companies. In my experience, the small companies will accept you if you have the CDL and med card and a pulse, lol, but the bigger companies can get picky and would be the ones to go to more testing and stricter requirements than the law requires. And perhaps you can get the DMV to give a CDL vision screening just for the asking, before you commit to school.

. I think you would be better off avoiding the trucking companies schools, and go with private schools, for a lot of reasons. The main reason being that in all the various careers I have been into, (factories, construction, oil well drilling, logger, gov't worker, photographer, trucker) I have never seen the lying and bait and switch recruiting like I do with trucking companies. They are lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut. Fraud is rampant, but you will have a hard time proving it as so much is NOT in writing. Just remember, it ain't never as good as they say. What is the turnover rate where you work as a nurse. The best turnover rate I ever actually experienced in trucking was 90%. The worst was 250%, and I stayed with this company 9 years, whew! Compare this to the Boeing airplane factory near Seattle, WA, where it is reported to be an average of 5%. These stats tell the story better than the opinions of the posters at this site. Now that the economy is crashing, the stats will be deceptively showing improvement, so keep that in mind. I am just saying that, if you want to know what the morale is, or job satisfaction in any given industry, a good indicator I think would be the turnover rate.

Pressure to run illegal is rampant in trucking. It may be spoken outright, or it may that you have to do it realistically to meet expectations but on a "don't ask, don't tell" scheme. It is very important that you know, before you jump in, that log violations are felonies in many if not all states. From memory of trucking magazine articles and newspaper articles, some of which I clipped and saved, and all of which you can easily google, I can say for certain that over hours or falsifying the log book is a felony in NV, CA, IL, and about half a dozen other states that I don't recall at the moment. There are undoubtedly many more states that I have yet to read about. Maybe they all do. And other things you would expect to be just a traffic infraction and a ticket are, for truckers, a misdemeanor. As a grandfather I had hoped to always set a good example for my children and grandchildren as a law abiding citizen, but I have an accidental criminal record because of trucking. I got a misdemeanor from Idaho for missing a scale. It was on I-15 up in the northern panhandle. I didn't actually blow past the scale; it was a situation where I was on a rural 2 lane road and was supposed to divert off my route to a nearby scale. The sign wasn't lit, but they said it was. I hired a local lawyer who has defended other truck drivers on the same charge. He said that with the local juries are so right wing that there is no chance to fight successfully (I'm just sayin' what he told me). He said I should accept the plea bargain of $175 and a misdemeanor on my record, because if I went against his advice and fight it, I would lose like all three of the drivers who did not take his advice and fought it and lost, and they got the misdemeanor plus a fine of about $700 plus 3 days in jail. So I copped a plea (Maybe I can even things up someday when I serve on a jury). The misdemeanor disqualifies me from having a concealed carry license in my home state of Oregon, and disqualifies me from some of the careers I have considered of late, and I'm sure I will find other pains it causes me as I go through life. Another consideration is your vulnerability to lawsuits as a trucker. If you are involved in an accident where there is serious injury or death, then an intensive investigation will always be done, which will include your cell phone triangulations, fuel purchases, personal credit card purchases, etc., and so they will know where you were and when, and if they can find any problem with your log as a result, then you have a felony for over hours or falsification, as well as being a big loser on the lawsuit, and this is regardless of who is at fault in the accident. They don't tell you all this when you talk to recruiters at trucking schools, but I know this from 15 years of devouring trucking magazines. But now we have the net, so you can google all this yourself if you want. If you do go into trucking, and if you have assets, then you would be wise get an umbrella policy for perhaps a million dollars to as to protect your assets. A final note on logbooks, the laws have been changing, and it takes years to sort out each change as to correct interpretation. It never seems to get settled, as even the rules that are really old still get mis-interpreted by schools, carriers, drivers, and even DOT. But if DOT interprets differently than you learned, correctly or incorrectly, then odds are you have become an accidental criminal. I have been there, done that accidentally and even intentionally before I learned better, and the only reason I don't have a felony is because the DOT officer cut me a break. But I don't count on getting breaks. And I don't like spening my hard-earned money on legal defense. But it goes with trucking if you decide to do it. I really recommend you join the INTERSTATE TRUCKER legal defense plan for only $13.50 per month. This will allows you to receive flat fee legal services for moving and non-moving violations. You may choose to enroll in the Plan ffor only $13.50 per month, or 6 months or one year by pre-paying $80 or $150, respectively. That is only 41 cents a day to protect your driving career. Or there are other such legal plans you can join.
Jim Klepper, the attorney who runs Interstate Trucker, does nothing but trucker defense, and he has a recent article saying that he is having about twice as many violations coming across his desk as he did before the economic crash. He is warning drivers to the effect that they are being targeted for revenue as never before. So you have nearly double the violations, but yet you have far less truckers out there to absorb all those violations since the economic crash. I thought it was tough enough before the crash. I would be very curious to know how all this compares to the legal risks for a nurse? Any advice or comments would be appreciated. Please feel free to contact me offlist if you like, at zilla4fun at gmail dot com.

A committment to trying to attain driving perfection and safety. A tough, rough and tumble person does best in a sometimes sleep deprived environment. If you make a 200 mile drive in your car and feel tired the next day, that is normal. Just consider that in trucking you will probably do 600 mile days as a rule, and then the next day you feel runover, but you do it again and again the next day, and this is what I mean by laying fatigue upon fatigue. You should have above all else, I think, a lot of self-discipline, to make yourself keep on schedule, make yourself do the periodic trip inspections, audit your own logs before you turn them in, keep watching the trade magazines for legal changes, and keep hacking away at the DOT rulebook trying to internalize as much of it as you can. Good customer skills help, especially if you pull reefers because they too often have customers from hell. You need to be able to keep a cool head with the lies by recruiters and dispatchers, and cool head with Barney Fife. Be able to sleep with the noise that will be around you at truck stops; you always try to pick a good spot at a truck stop, but it seems like when you wake up you always find a cattle truck on one side of you, with stomping noisy smelly cattle, and a reefer with a bad muffler on the other side of you (humor here, but sometimes kinda true).

And thank you and to all nurses for all that you do. Good luck to you and God bless.