Headed for Indianapolis for Orientation August 7th...

Made it to Indy tonight for orientation that starts tomorrow first thing in the morning. The hotel is very nice, and about 1000% better than were I stayed for driving school! I am currently in a single room, but tomorrow a roommate will arrive and I will be sharing. However, from what I have seen, the double room will still be very nice and spacious. The hotel has an indoor pool and gym which both seemed clean and well maintained. There is a Damon's restaurant here. I may only be able to afford to eat there once (maybe twice), but this is a very good first impression of Schneider.

I am still a little nervous about tomorrow, with the agility/pre work screening. I know I can handle the learning and mental part, and the driving will come to me. IF I make it past tomorrow I will celebrate with the steak and ribs at Damons. I have also been off pop / caffeine since I went to driving school (to help with BP), so I will enjoy drinking some tea or Pepsi. I will save my second Damons meal for the day I get my driver number.

The only negative I see, and for now it is a very minor one that can be solved with $4 worth of styrofoam from wallyworld, is there is no fridge. Since we are staying at least a week, it would have been nice to have had a place to store some drinks or snacks.

I will update tomorrow after my first day, for now I am hoping I can get some sleep before tomorrow morning.

Raid3r

 

Nerves got me up early. I wish I could have taken the pre work screening last night so I could have gotten a good night sleep. I m have to check out of my room because they are moving me today , and then shuttling off to the INDY OC.

Raid3r

 

Exciting and disappointing day today.

Class started on time today at 7:00. The rest of the week we are starting at 6:30. We had a bit of trouble with the shuttle getting 4 different loads of people there on time. I myself waited 20 minutes waiting for a ride. There are 7 men and 2 women in my class. There was about 2-4 that did not show up for whatever reason.

I was disappointed the pre work screen did not happen today. I have been waiting to cross that hurdle for three weeks or more, and was assured it would happen today. The screenings will start tomorrow at 6:30 AM, and I will try to be the first one in. I even wore special clothes to allow my big body some more flexibility. The second disappointment came (although it is out of chronological order) is in the afternoon when we were doing mandatory testing on the computers and the power kicked out about 40 minutes into a 50 minute session and I will have to redo that.

So to briefly summarize the day....We started out going over Harassment and Sexual Harassment. WE went over Safety, then the drug and alcohol policies. We started filing our paper work such as the I-9, the drug and alcohol statements, the Moving Violation releases. We then watched a very lengthy video on the benefits, which quite frankly I appreciated since SNI has 3or 4 medical plans and even after reading I did not understand. We watched another safety video that focused on actual work related injuries most notorious to SNI drivers. Afterwards we watched a movie on the Atlas Ergonomics which is basically a PT from an OC helping you find the most ideal position for your seat, steering wheel , armrest, etc, and recording the numbers that you can duplicate in any SNI truck. Before lunch we spent about an hour on log books. However, I was told that we are the last class that will be doing a segment on paper logs, and starting with next weeks class, they will only be teaching the electronic logs. We then we sent to lunch. We got a meal ticket for the OC cafeteria with 13 meals on it. BY my math that means we are either getting out early on Friday, or someone owes me a dinner somewhere outside of the cafeteria! After Lunch, we took a test on the log books. Wen we were done we were sent to cunicles to sart taking what amounts to about 10-12 test on the computer , broken up into different safety and informational "classes". We finished the day by reviewing what would be required in the morning for the pre work screening and watching the video they have online for it.

The hotel still does not have any double rooms available, so most of us are still staying in King rooms. Since tomorrow is Sunday, I would suspect this is the last night of that privelage.Since there is an odd number of males in this class, I still would have a chance to keep it.

Raid3r

 

whew!. Made it through the pre work screening. My max heart rate was 112, and I could have went to 166. However, three of my classmates were not so lucky. We are down to 6 left in the class.

Today more than half of the day was pent waiting for everyone to get through the PWS. We individually finished our computer modules. After lunch we did some studying onweight distribution on tandoms and sliding 5th wheel. We did a couple of lessons on map reading, and were given what I would guess is a few hours of trip planning homework. We will start driving tomorrow with Driver trainers , so we are also suposed to read and take a "test" on coupling and uncoupling.

Pretty excited to get on the road tomorrow, and over what I saw as the "hurdle". On a good ending note, the hotel is still running low on double rooms, so I am sitll ina king size room. I sort of politely complained that I am tired of moving rooms each day, and the lady told me I could just unpack in this room and she would let me stay here alone the rest of the week.

On a side note to something PCDoctor said in his post/thread/blog. I really have to agree that it seems they are trying to put 12-14 hours of work on us a day to weed out some lazy people or people who are not willing to put that much effort in, or just simply can not handle that work load, even if it is just paperwork. They are weeding out some people , as others in this class are complaining already.
Thanks for reading.

Raid3r