Yet another orientation, experience thread from knight.

Hey drivers,

First off I would like to say thank you to everyone that has given advice and words of encouragement. A little about myself, name is Dave and I'm in Reno, NV 21 years old and I have always wanted to drive, recently obtained my cdl from what I learned to be a "cdl mill". I was never taught how to couple or uncouple, chain up, check slack adjusters or any other fun stuff. I do have a family of drivers uncle and dad, and they say that the stuff I didn't learn in school will be taught right off the bat and I know it's not difficult to do anyway but I feel that schools should be more in depth.

nonetheless, I'm a legal driver and ready to start my journey!

i have chosen knight because the trainer at my school is a casual driver and safety manager for knight here in reno, and has made the company sound awesome, way better then the options my dad and uncle drive for. I have not traveled much other than AZ, NV, and CA, which is why I want to drive all 48, I want to drive as much as possible and be a top driver, I don't plan on turning down a single load, I want to stay as motivated and positive as possible. As some of you may have read in a few other posts I do have orientation tomorrow at 9 am. I have no clue what to expect, other than I have to drug test and I should be assigned a truck/trainer Thursday.

For anyone that wants to follow this thread and my experiences I will update this thread daily.

thanks for reading, any advice or scolding is much appreciated.
drive safe.

 

i got into trucking to get out of the warehouse and I want to see the country. I'll go to a ltl after some time OTR

 

So an update on day one of orientation. This may come off as a ramble but I don't know how to structure my thoughts.

today was SLOW! There are five of us in the orientation, 3 of us are experienced drivers from swift, c.r England and celadon. Me and another guy just graduated cdl schools. Today was drug test and a tour, mostly just b-s ing while watching a movie while the safety manager tested other drivers. I take the drive test and physical tomorrow and learn smith systems, which sounds interesting. The safety manager bought us all subway and he will buy lunch as long as we have orientation which some of us might be through Friday.

so far I don't really have a "feel" for how things are going to be, I know we haul a lot of k-mart, a lot of hay, yes hay is for horses, and some kind of mineral which is a bi-product from the mines in Elko and winnemucca. Our yard is TINY! Maybe fits 20 trailers. A few promising pieces of info, the reno yard is the number one yard in the west, whatever that means, and we are looking at moving locations to a way larger facility, enough to accommodate a " port of call" so a lot of containers I'm assuming.

everything is going good, but one minor negative. Our safety manager was very busy all day with other drivers, leaving us to b-s and not finish some safety tests we were supposed to do.