My TMC Adventure

So I am a bit new on this forum. I have looked around on here a bit but haven't really posted anything as of yet. Ill start with a little about myself:

I am 34 year old country boy from Charlotte NC that used to work in a law office and hated it. Years ago, before starting that job I thought that I might want to become a lawyer. After working as a paralegal for a while and seeing the life of a lawyer first hand I realized that I wanted no part of it! That was the first and last office job I ever want to have. It lasted 6 and a half years, which was about 6 years too many LOL!
I really needed a big change in my life so I went to a local truck driving school "Charlotte Truck Driver Training School". I highly recommend this school! It was a very good experience and I learned a lot about the industry there, and also got ace instruction on how to drive diesel. I filled out a bunch of applications while I was there but really had my heart set on flat-bedding with TMC. I had done a lot of research into the different companies and TMC came out way ahead of the rest for a lot of reasons, but more than anything their training program stood out big time. I am the type of guy that likes to learn and know as much as possible about anything I get into and I felt that I would get more out of TMC than anywhere else as an inexperienced driver so I was ecstatic when I got the prehire call from them! All was going according to plan!
So, I graduated driving school and flew on up to Des Moines, IA to get going with their orientation program, which is 2 weeks long, and that's when my story officially starts.
Day one at orientation is basically a lot of paperwork where they ask you about your background before they run a big check on you. You best be honest and list everything you ever did because if they see something on your report that you didn't tell them about you're automatically gone. Then they do the drug test and the physical, and this is where my problems began. Not with the drug test mind you, because I don't do drugs. Before the physical they have you fill out a paper where they ask you about all of your injuries from the past and I had a mildly herniated disk in my neck a couple years ago from a car accident where a drunk driver t-boned me when I was sitting at a stop light, so I listed that on there. When I got to the doctor he grilled me about it. I told him that it was fine and healed and that I haven't had any issues in over a year, but he asked me to get a note from my neurosurgeon saying that I was OK to work with no restrictions. I set about getting this note from my doc. Now he was out of town until that Thursday so I couldn't get the note until then. In the meantime I wasn't allowed to do the physical assessment here due to them not having an OK from my doc. They did let me continue in the classes though. When I finally got my doc to send the note over on Thursday, he wrote on it that I was still under his care, which I didn't even know and if I had I would have gotten that taken care of before I ever came up here. Needless to say, that is not what they wanted to hear so I got sent home.

I asked them if I could come back if I got out from under my doctors care and he said that I should be able to, so I straight away set an appointment to get that taken care of. The bad news was that this appointment was not for 2 weeks. Its tough to get a spur of the moment appointment with a neurosurgeon, apparently!
Anyway, I finally got in with the doctor and he assessed me and released me from his care, had him fax up my medical records to the doctor up here at TMC and called the manager to see if I could come back up and he told me that they needed an FCE (Functional Capacity Evaluation) on top of the release I just sent them! So now I had to set another appointment with a physical therapist to get this test done! I lucked out though and found one that would do it on short notice. I got that done and as I expected, I did fine. He ran me through a series of tests for hand strength and lifting ability, etc. He told me that he never gets people in to do FCE's to get into a job. Most people come in and do it to get OUT of work or to attempt to collect workers comp! Not me. I actually WANT to work!

Anyway, so after 3 weeks and all of this rigamarole I got the FCE faxed up and then called again to see if I could come back now, and I finally got the OK to come back up after he tried to talk me into going with a van line first instead of getting into the flat-bedding industry. I told him that I simply don't want to and that the whole reason I want to flatbed is because I am in good shape now and would like to stay in good shape and that flat-bedding seems like it will give me more exercise than sitting in a cab all day dropping and hooking. There is a lot of work to do when hauling flatbeds and that is what appealed to me about it! The trucking industry is full of obesity and I don't plan on going there.
I guess people just aren't used to someone like me that actually welcomes hard work LOL! It isn't easy to convince people of that apparently! But in any case, he did give me the green light to come back up so all the frustration and jumping through hoops has paid off and I am writing this from room 110 at the Baymont Inn!

So now that I have fought to come back and won, my real orientation experience with this company will start tomorrow. I already got a taste of it before but I am really looking forward to using the simulators and learning all the ins and outs of load securement and not to mention getting behind the wheel of one of these awesome Peterbilts! I am really excited about the coming 2 weeks and I'll make followup posts about my experience here whenever I have time.
If there is anyone else that is on this forum that will be up here with me, come by the room or drop me a line on this thread. I'm all about making friends!

 

Thanks for the replies so far! I am just about the learning experience right now and am definitely gonna stick with the trainer for the full 5 weeks. I want to know as much as I possibly can before I get my own truck. There is a lot to know and a lot of things that I may not even think about until something happens on the road so the more time I have with an experienced driver that has seen a lot, the better.

@Travelinman: They have a percentage based option that most of the drivers here use. It seems to pay a little bit better than mileage pay, I will probably start off with that route. They do pay per mile if that's what you prefer, but all the drivers I have talked to about it seem to agree that the percentage is the way to go here.

 

Well day one went off without a hitch. Got A's on the general knowledge test and the green book test. Still working on the math test but it'll be done tomorrow. Lots of paperwork and they had Wells Fargo come in about opening up new bank accounts. Signed up cause its free and they give you $50 to do it.
They also had an Allstate agent come in and talk about short term disability insurance and other things. Seemed like a good idea considering the hazards of this job.
The physical assessment went well. The guy that led that is a physical therapist and he spoke about the importance about doing some kind of warm up before you go lifting 120 pound tarps. So he showed some basic warmup exercises and went through the proper way to pick up the lumber tarps (the 120 lb ones) and then we all had to lift one and put it on the trailer and then climb up on the trailer and heave it up onto a steel coil, walk around to the other side and pull it back down and then get off the trailer and get the tarp and put it back where we started. Wasn't too bad. the other part of the physical assessment was climbing a ladder onto a 13'4" steel box that was on another trailer and stick our toes over the edge and climb back down to show comfort level with heights. Nothing to it unless you're scared of heights LOL!

Other than that I can say that the food they serve for lunch is awesome! Hope you like gravy LOL!

I am off to relax and pass out now. Ill try to post again tomorrow.

 

I finally got to use the simulators today and also drive one of the Peterbilts for the first time! The simulators are really cool! Today was basically just to familiarize me with the 13 speed transmission which I absolutely love! I'm a bit sad that the company is switching to 9 speeds but that's still a ways off so I will have lots of time to work with the 13 after I get finished training. I was told that next week I will be put into a bunch of different scenarios using the simulator where they will have deer running out in front of me and cars cutting me off and whatnot to see how I will react and train me how to react properly to different issues that will happen on the road. I am stoked to get into that.
There is lots of yard training up ahead and once they feel comfortable with my ability to use the equipment, we will be going out on the road some next week as well.
Load securement training starts tomorrow as well. I am looking forward to that too, since that is really the meat and potatoes of flat-bedding. Good tarping and securement skills are what get you on the road to your next load faster, and that means more money, so I want to get as good as I can as fast as I can doing that.
That said, I need to go get my clothes out of the dryer and get to bed. I'm on the early bus for the remainder of my time here now so getting to bed early has become even more important! Ill try to take some pictures tomorrow and post them up if I can.