Werner & Me

I drive team for Werner, on Team Werner, with my husband. Since there are so many negative post I thought I would at least post my experience which is not so negative.

I actually started out the trucking idea with Schneider National, but due to creative differences regarding my son, I decided to find another company. I stumbled upon Werner accidentally, looking for information on logs. I am a computer person and their paperless log thing seemed really cool. So I called, and was promptly informed they do not do training for a CDL, but they could refer me to a school in the area that they work with. The school in question was TDI which supposedly was located in Waxachie(sp?) TX.

I contacted the school and after a few hurdles (mostly with financing) I and my then boyfriend at the time started school there. The first thing I realized when I went to the school is that by ‘work with’ Werner meant ‘actually sorta half own’. You see the school was located ON the Werner Dallas terminal’s property, and used Werner trucks as the on the road training trucks. Which made life easy since these trucks were equipped with the same 9 speed tranny I would later be working with.

First week was spent filling out applications, prepping for the CDL permit test, and pretripping. Second week was spent learning how to tear up a tranny… er I mean shifting. Now I had never driven a manual before so it was an interesting experience. To be thrown into a truck and told to put it in 1st and drive down an ACTUAL road. And then proceed to stall it out about 3000 times. During this week I and my current man called it quits, that seems like it has no place but trust me it comes into play We also learned backing, straight line, and coupling/uncoupling in this time.

The third week we learned to parallel park, or at least good enough to past the test, and alley docking. Though really the school in my opinion did a poor job of properly training backing at all, and just barely got you to the place where you could pass the CDL test in that regard. I still sucked at shifting too, basically you get 1 hour of drive time a day at most, because you share a truck and trainer with 3 other students. During this time I met the man whom would become my husband/teammate… and you will never guess who!


Moving on; At the very end of the third week sorta when we were supposed to take the test the school suddenly decided I needed to have 2 prehires in order to qualify for the loan I had been ‘preapproved’ for. I had to scramble to find someone else to prehire me even though I was 100% set on Werner. I was told when I set the date to start school everything was 100% in order. Lies! From what I understand this is a fairly regular event where people are constantly getting into issues with the school and leaving halfway through training because of loan issues that crop up long after training starts. Pay cash people trust me. Its less of a headache. So I had to rush get papers signed by my co-signer, and due to a miscommunication of people that work there, wound up getting pushed off the testing list until the next week. I was frankly pissed. Once that issue was worked out I took the test and passed, barely, and graduated. I immediately set my Werner start date for the very next Monday. TDI is not possible to fail, the school will pass you no matter what. They will work with you till the cows come home to get your CDL.

I was told by Werner recruiter Mr. David that I would start at .32 cents a mile on 48 states. He booked me a room at the Werner Roach Motel and I showed up the day before orientation and got a room. I shared room with my ex for the express reason that I was more comfortable with him then I was with some strange person I didn’t know (and I had a pet). You do share rooms there though, unless you pay a set extra fee. The motel was a former Quality Inn or something like that, now owned by Werner. Its an ok place, not the Ritz stuff is clean and all. The bad part is its in like the worst part of town (the whole terminal is) the kind of place you lock your car doors before leaving the terminal gates and make sure all the windows are rolled up. The kind of place the Pizza Hut guy didn’t even wanna come there.

I went to the first day of orientation where I met the safety guy I would later come to like, Blake, whom was quite the animated character. The sorta guy whom would say things like “I told you to come in Friday Mr. Peters, this is Tuesday, that’s different from Friday.” A sarcastic sorta over expecting guy whom made the long boring process amusing with anecdotes and of course making fun of people who were being dumb (myself included) with sarcastic banter. Of course, I happen to be that kinda smart behinded person so I get amused easily by such.

We got to hear such enthralling stories as the “Why I am a safety director and not a driver anymore.” Story, and my personal favorite “What happens when you throw the qualcomm out of the window because your dispatcher won’t stop sending you priority messages when you are trying to sleep, and it happens to rain that night.” I liked that story. It had a happy ending. And of course the class room favorite regarding never swerving for an animal when the inevitable stupid question came up; “What if its an elephant?”

Anyway, for the most part orientation is boring. The first day is mostly filling out paperwork, which has to be done a certain way or Blake makes fun of you. The more times you screw up the slower he will talk to you. Its funny really! If you have a sense of humor… Then there is the drug test, which you should know if you GO into the first day of orientation and disappear after you are counted there, you are forever marred by the ‘refusal to take a drug test’ stigma. Yes that’s right, the millisecond you enter the building and fill out your applications, you are expected to take a drug test. Regardless of whether or not you decide to or end up hired by Werner. You have technically ‘been notified’ of a requirement to take one so if you do walk off for whatever reason before you take it, they will report it as a refusal. Now I don’t like that policy, but they aren’t the only company that does it. And the whole drug test thing wasn’t properly explained until someone had walked off before their test.
You will do the test and a physical. Then some computer tests. They will teach you how to use the computer logs. The computers suck, half don’t work and most of the movies are long boring, and badly dubbed. The second day is more computer test, more movies, some long company policy ranting, map reading and paper logging info, and by the third day you want to kill yourself! The third day is mostly a formality in case they haven’t got your results back from the drug test, ours was a half day. If you finished all your required stuff by the third day you were home free to get off early.

Then you get to go back to the hotel and wait! In my case, just as I started orientation I started dating someone… guess who? My former instructor at TDI! We hit it off fairly well, but alas 72 hours later I was waiting for my trainer and off we went. It took me a slightly bit longer then my ex to get a trainer because I needed a ‘co-ed’ nonsmoker one, whereas he was on a trainer truck and several states away within 48 hours. The whole time you are waiting you are getting paid. You get paid 300ish a week as a trainee.

I didn’t really like my first trainer, at all. He was not vulgar or anything, but I am a fairly introverted person and I have a general ‘I don’t know you go away’ outlook on other people for the most part. Outgoing and bubbly I am not. So it was weird to be thrown onto a truck with someone I had no knowledge of. Now as far as hygiene goes the truck was in alright condition, there was no noticeable odor. He looked well kempt, though he was overweight I don’t know if that matters, it didn’t to me. The truck itself was a Freightliner short nose. Century I think its called.

The first day was a long one, where I was expected to drive from the moment he picked me up. We had a load going to St. Louis and he was out of hours (he picked me up in Dallas). They ended up splitting that load in Oklahoma and sending us to Arkansas to pick up a short load and then back down into Texas because he had home time that weekend. During this time I developed a sorta distaste for the guy. Now don’t get me wrong he wasn’t overbearing, but I didn’t mesh with him. I have a very low tolerance for bull (by bull I mean overt obvious fibbing), and most of the man’s stories were obvious fabrications as I had experience with many of the things discussed. This annoyed me. I mean if he has to lie about silly stuff…

Also there were several times he did things that made my life crazy hard. Like pull the truck out of gear randomly in the middle of traffic and tell me to go down like 5 gears when I had barely mastered going up and down in order. And then getting frustrated with me when I stalled out. He’d have a cow if my trailer drifted out of my lane even an inch, yet road the rumble strips like they were on the road. This made sleeping hard. Ontop of the fact he pretty much declared I was not to sleep in his bed and was to use the top bunk no matter what even when moving.

He also was sorta easily pissed off. At one point someone cut in front of him and slowed down and he freaked out, cussing, screaming, and blowing the air horn like a maniac. Three times he told me to run over cars, rather then slow down to avoid a collision when there was no real reason not to slow down.

Alrighty then I have to go for now I’ll finish this up later =)

 

LOL it gets better! You cannot judge the whole by the actions of one bad driver/trainer

 

Oh hush the trainer sucked what do you expect But it does get better! Name me 1 company that takes trainees that has not one single trainee complaint against the trainers

 

Alright continuing on;

I was on the trainers truck about 5-6 days, over the weekend on Saturday he had home time scheduled until the following Wednesday. Since he was going home so long Werner set me up in a hotel near his hometime location in San Antonio which happened to be about 4 hours from Dallas. Before we got to San Antonio I started to get sick, when we were passing Dallas I asked him to drop me off at the terminal so I could go to the doctors. He said something along the lines of he wouldn’t be able to get home on time if he did that and asked me to stay on till we got to San Antonio at which point I could go to a doctor there. I agreed, didn’t really want to ruin the guys hometime.

The hotel was a Days Inn and it was an okay area, and a nice hotel. I called my current flame, the instructor I had been dating, and told him I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go home for a little while and he came and picked me up. I let Werner know I was going on personal leave (unpaid) due to illness. Turned out to be stress and food poisoning the combo really did a number on me and I couldn’t eat right for a while. Once I got over it and was ready to go back I decided I really wanted to not deal with another guy trainer (and my man didn’t like the idea of me with a guy either) so I demanded a female and they put me back on the waiting list. This time however they let me stay home instead of their motel provided I called in every day to let them know I was still ready to be dispatched they paid me for this. It took them 4 weeks to find me a female nonsmoking trainer.

By this time my relationship had blossomed into a full boyfriend/girlfriend thing, and he had a serious issue with me going off for so long. He said he wanted to go back trucking anyway because he was barely getting by as an instructor and missed driving. He was fairly hesitant however about my trucking company choice, and decided to try and find another company that would take us both and let him train me. Well, strangely enough, despite his driving about 7-8 years, the two years he worked at the school counted against him, and he had to work for a minimum of 6 months before anyone would even consider letting him train me.

We tried a lot of different companies, but none wanted to allow him to train me at all or until he had several months experience so we were pretty much resolved to the whole we’d be apart for several weeks thing. Or at least none that he would consider working for, because JB Hunt called and offered BUT he had worked for JB Hunt before and he flatly said no to that one. In any case I finally convinced him to call and ask Werner what they offered. To our surprise Werner not only offered a better payrate then most of the others (.42 cents a mile), and less time with a trainer for him, but they also offered to let him train me provided we were married immediately after finishing his training. This is not typical we actually had to go through several managers and they had to review his work history and his time with the school and so on.
It went thru some review process at the safety department but given his impeccable driving history; no bad stuff on his report, no accidents, no tickets, and the schools very high praising referral, and the previous driving experience they said they would allow it. The only issue was we were not married and they needed official legal marriage license. Which I figured was the end of that because my lovely boyfriend had already balked at marriage with his previous girl from what I understood. Nevertheless I was proposed to within the week, accepted, and we were married. Two weeks later he started his training with Werner.

They put me on unpaid leave while we waited for him to finish. He started out needing 70 hours but due to lack of available trucks he wound up doing close to 125 hours. He was fairly unhappy about that (as was I). Then once he got his truck he went through their train the trainer class, we gave safety the marriage license copy, and he was setup as my trainer.

The first several months really sucked, he was on Southwest Regional, they tried to run us like a full team at which point he wound up telling them off. They quit that, and ran us okay to train miles. Something around 3500ish But he wasn’t making 42 cents a mile because the Southwest section was on a sliding payscale depending on miles. Still the paycheck was around 700 a week which was more then he was making at the other place. My paycheck sucked at 350 a week but it paid for our expenses on the road.

It took me forever to finish training, I started in September and didn’t get done until the end of November early December. The truck we were assigned broke down within the first week. It was a older 379 Pete from like 04, with well over 300k miles on it. It ran poorly, though it was in good condition on the outside. It was redtagged the day we were assigned to it. Alignment issues, which were clearly illustrated by the fact the wheel pointed to the right while the steers were straight. Even after they fixed this several days later it STILL was this way, they never did fix the wheel being so off.

A few weeks later the truck started to randomly bog down, and would go insanely slow, at high rpms and we took it to the terminal (we were still new at this point and didn’t realize terminals are evil) my hubby told them what was wrong, the fuel filter was clogged, they said they would look at it. They had it for five days. When we got it back about 2 days later it started the same thing and we were no where near a terminal we had emergency maintence done at a Peterbilt and sure enough it was a fuel filter. Once that was fixed the truck ran like a champ.

One thing everyone that is going to Werner should know is never go to terminals if it can be avoided, and from what I understand this is true of most big trucking companies. Especially the Dallas terminal! Also no matter what they say, in most causes 275 hours will turn into like 300+ if your trainer goes home you aren’t driving and it doesn’t count to your time. Only line 3 time counts.

I was actually finished my training mid November but there was a log issue due to our electronic logs going down and logs department for some reason just never got a legible copy of the paper logs. So I just gave up and went back on the truck for another 2 weeks and finished my hours that way. December 12th I graduated from trainee to full driver and we moved to Team Werner. They stole our Peterbilt because it was too old for Team Werner and assigned us a 2006 Peterbilt with 160k on it.

 

Yup thers more I just got to Dec of 07 lol, I still have to get to may 08 I can only sit down and write large bits of information for so long before getting bored...

Plus I had a WOW raid >.>

Yes we are still in the Peterbilt, aside from a minor issues its run good, I believe its at or a little over/under 230 k atm.

 

Depends on your expectations. If you are looking for a company to bend over backwards for you they are not it. Perfect they are not.

But they are fairly easy to get along with, get you miles, and are willing to over look past issues. Never had an issue with a reimbursment that was properly put in and they have never not paid what they owed me though there were a couple times paychecks were missing trips and a missing trippak it got fixed within a couple of weeks.