How nervous were you your first time?

Just don't make a mistake. 80 k down the road doesn't react well with hitting things. What town you in, in west Texas?

 

did they not make you parallel park for your driving test? or did you learn to drive AND parallel park in 40 minutes? here, parallel is what fails most drivers. if you so much as brush the curb you fail. if you park too far from the curb you get major points docked and probably fail. needless to say i had no problem, but several people from my school failed

 

The guy we did the CDL test with had brought us a pup trailer. Fairly easy for anyone with no prior exp to parallel that in, but yea we learned it in roughly 40mins. 28ft trailer maybe? And as i've said, there is some shady stuff, but i wont go into it.

 

I was nervous as hell
it was my friends mom....she made me make noises I never knew I could make

 

So let me get this straight. In 40 minutes, this guy teaches you the brake tests, how to parallel park, what lanes to be in, where and when to make your turns etc, and then turns you loose. Then, you get your cdl, load up with 45,000lbs, and head to NYC. Boy do I feel safe knowing that my family is on the road with truck drivers with 40 minutes of experience.

And just fyi, not all Stevens guys fail. I personally made a 98 on that Garland road course and nobody in my class failed. Furthermore, the Stevens driving school is way more than getting behind the wheel of a truck. They teach you HOS, trip planning, driver fitness, proper pre and post trip inspections along with numerous other classes. Like them or hate them, they have just about the best driver training program in the industry.

I mean it's your choice and all, but I wouldn't be going around bragging about your utter lack of driving experience and how you "faked" things in your driving test...especially on a truck driver forum.

 

1st off, let me apologize as my post was on the harsh side. Like others, it is upsetting to me that there are so many inexperienced cdl holders on the road today. One of my best friends drove team at Stevens for 2 years. They both went to class with me. She is a downright scary driver. She should have never passed the driving course at Garland, but they passed her with a 70. Her and her husband teamed for 2 years until he quit. She tried to stay on, but Stevens fired her after 1 month because she was unsafe. There are tons of stories along those same lines...just take a look in the newbie section.

The point of that story was that, as companies lower their standards more and more in an effort to find warm bodies to fill their seats, it hurts everybody out here. For every good driver out here, there are 10 drivers who couldn't care less about driving. It is a plague that has infected this industry. We are the most hated people on the road, and the most heavily regulated industry in the Nation...primarily because we have inexperienced guys that are too busy playing with their iphone and run over a school bus full of kids. I could post video after video, and picture after picture of horrible accidents that resulted due to inexperience.

Again, I apologize, and understand you being pissed at me. I would be pissed too if somebody came at me like that. You just happened to get my soapbox.

Anyways...was I nervous my First time? Yes...very much so. I learned how to drive a semi on a road construction job site. It was a 1976 Mack half cab, and it was a piece of ####. I was pulling a 5000gal unbaffled water tank with a gravity bar and had to turn around on 6:1 slopes. It scared the crap outta me, but made me a better driver.