My journey with Swift begins tomorrow!

Heading up tomorrow! Orientation starts on Tuesday. I am PSYCHED!

 

Finished orientation in Fontana and got coded! Started with near 50 people in our class, lost about 20 for various reasons. Boring orientation to be sure, but mostly because we went over everything in the academy.

Got the weekend to myself and head out with my mentor on Monday morning!

 

At orientation they split us up into basically 3 categories. Drivers with brand new CDLs were going out with a mentor for 240 hours behind the wheel. You're not REQUIRED to run as a team but you get your 240 done faster than than if you don't run as a team. Sorry if I phrased that improperly.

More experienced drivers (not sure what the threshold was) were going out for 50-100 hours depending on how the mentor felt they were handling policies and the Qualcomm, and other experienced drivers were getting their own truck right away.

I would imagine the mentor would make a judgement call as to when/if to run teams, if you show you can handle it to the point they trust you with their truck.

As long as the mentor is teaching me and I'm learning, I don't have a problem being a second log book if we decide to run team for the last 100-150 hours.

 

I'm sitting here in Phoenix waiting for a new mentor.

I need to vent a lot with this post, and also get some advice.

I met my mentor on Monday. We got off to an ok start. He laid down the rules in his truck, no biggie, I was expecting it. He was using a lot of foul language about everything in general, but I'm not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. We go to the docks in long beach and instead of leaving me at the terminal, he wants me to come with him and log it as off duty so I have more hours to drive when we go out...since I don't have a TWIC card, I can't get in. He drops me off at the entrance under an overpass and I wait...and wait...and wait...for three hours. Not a good start, but he said there was an issue with the trailer and he had to get the load flipped.

Not a good start but nothing I can't handle. After four hours, he lets me sit in the drivers seat as we're heading to Phoenix. As soon as I get in the drivers seat and am trying my best to get used to the truck, hauling a load, and driving at night, the cussing at me starts. Every time I don't do something the exact way he wants, I get cussed at. Nothing I do is right according to him - not my lane changes, not my signaling, not my traffic checks, when we get off the freeway and I turn, wanting me to drive 60+ in California saying not to worry about it if I get a ticket since he's the mentor and it will be his responsibility...

He is saying things that threw up red flags from the start. The first was when I go to do my logs and show him the previous few days I was off. His first reaction is "forget how they showed you to do it. Here's how we ACTUALLY do it." I know people fiddle with logs but not by an hour! And we spent probably 10 combined hours on how Swift wants us to do logs!

Every time I would speak up to answer a question, it was never the right answer or I got accused of talking back. He went off several times on half hour tangents about how he hates to lose, he's the alpha dog, I'm just a robot to him, if I bring a knife he brings a gun, he'll escalate as far as he needs to win, etc. At the end of the first day when I finally got the truck into Phoenix, we have a sit down chat. He claims he wants to be a mentor to learn patience because he has none...and I tell him something I don't tell many people. When I was growing up, before moving out, a family member I lived with would drink constantly and every time she got drunk she would go off on the exact same tangents - cursing me out, cutting me down, etc. And when someone does that to me, it takes me right back to a place in my life where I don't want to be, and SHOULDN'T be while behind the wheel of a 40 ton weapon I'm not familiar with or comfortable with yet.

He claimed he would try to cut down on the language, but that I should just deal with it since that's the way it is with him, he even cusses out his wife and kids. I told him that I don't care about language, but when it's directed at me to put me down, I'm sorry, but it's impossible for me to not take personally.

Yesterday, we both decided that hey, today will be a good day and we start over. That works for about an hour and then it just deteriorates into the same thing. Every mistake I make, no...scratch that. Everything I do, whether I turn, stop, take off again, I'm doing safely and the way they taught me. His method for turning is to put the truck in neutral several hundred feet before, don't bother downshifting at all, and take the turn while downshifting halfway through it. (and missing two gears on the way down). This finally builds up to the point where I stop talking to him alltogether because every time I speak to him or answer a question, I get cussed out.

The worst thing by far was last night coming back from Tuscon into Phoenix. We blew a tire while I was driving and the mudflap tore off and creamed the hood of the car behind us. I pull off right before an offramp and we had to wait two hours for onroad to get out there and replace the tire. No biggie, it happens. Then when we get it fixed, instead of heading back down the offramp and merging back into traffic, he wants me to cut across the exit lane and floor it back into traffic with a load. When I apparently don't do it fast enough he accuses me of all sorts of things like slamming the gears, shifting too hard, etc...not realizing that I'm trying my best to merge into rush hour traffic across an exit lane! This spawns another hour long tirade about how horrible I am, how horribly I learned at my school, I'm not listening to him, etc, finally summing it up with "I guess you aren't a man of your word or don't live by what you say, you said today was a new day and it was just lip service, wasn't it?"

I'm driving a truck I'm not familiar with in an area I don't know with a person who's cutting me down at a speed I don't feel safe at at night...I can handle any one or two of these at once just fine, but when everything comes at once, I guess I'm just not picking it up fast enough or him.

I'm getting physically sick, running a fever from this stress, and last night he starts to relent and even try to joke with me. Tells me he likes my driving, etc. We did the same thing the first day, and I thought that it was ok...but this time, I just asked myself if I wanted to have this exact same conversation every day for the next six weeks. The answer in my mind was no.

So then he follows it up with "I can tell you one thing, you're going to be the last student I ever have. This #### isn't worth it." How do you think that makes me feel, as a student? I know that we don't have to get along to learn, but I would have hoped he would have waited longer than two days before he flat out admits he regrets it and does everything except flat out tell me he doesn't want me on the truck.

He's a micromanager, not a mentor. He's a good driver, claims to never had any violations, but I honestly believe its because he's never had his logs audited or that he's never been caught. He brags about paying 30 a month for a lawyer or one of those services that go to court for you if you get a ticket.

There were a few other things he had told me about how he skirts policy, but the biggest one was "If we're running team, I only need a few hours of sleep. If you need more or you get tired, I'll drive however much time you have left on your log and then do mine to get the load there on time." You can cheat logs, gain half an hour here or there, but I know that this is one thing you never, EVER do. And he's completely unconcerned with it, and says he wants to run teams now. He even admitted that when he opened the mentor book when we were on the truck it was the first time he ever opened it.

I walked into the office today after a long call to my folks discussing it, and thinking hard about it. I just asked for advice, and they told me to tell them everything. When I explained that I was concerned that I wasn't going to learn enough policy from him to keep myself safe the way Swift wants us to do it, they asked for more detail, so I told them what he had said about running on my log once we started to run teams. As soon as I said that, my DM told me to get my stuff off his truck, and that they would find me a new mentor today.

I know I need to take my lumps and pay my dues, but I don't care if you're the pope or the president or the worlds greatest truck driver - I don't have to sit there and take mental and verbal abuse for hours on end...because I try not to take it personally, but it causes my mind to just shut everything out as a defense mechanism...

Did I do the right thing? I don't like making waves...

 

By skipping gears I meant he was costing up to it in 7th, pop it into neutral, then try to shift into 5th in the middle of the turn, grind it, "####" and try for 4th, miss that too, and finally get it into gear in 3rd.