The most important item your not taught in training

In a world of mostly 65 MPH trucks, some heavy some not, it's not wise to set your cruise at 66. Found another one today who hadn't yet figured this out

 

Things you weren't informed about in training :
Dispatchers are scum only to be outdone by brokers. They see u as a truck number on a computer screen. The harder they push uc the more they earn. They don't care that u are scheduled to be home for your kids birthday or whatever.
Download and keep a copy of your logs. Will help u at tax time.
If anything questionable happens, like you pick up a trailer with a deny or whatever, take pics before pulling out.
If you're not running flatbed, find a way to walk a mile a day.
If u get turned around and get flustered, find a place to pull off and regroup. It happens to everyone, especially early on.

CB stuff:
Valuable tool, wouldn't hit the trail without one.
Much more racism up north than in the south.
Besides what others have mentioned, use it to find decent food and parking close to a shipper /receive . Give a shout out to a passing grain or log truck in rural area . They have radios and will get u where u need to go.

Good luck

 

I've been driving for 11 years this year. Some local, some OTR. I'm all for CB's....and think it's an essential part of daily life on the road....both for safety and daily tasks. However, I do NOT think every rookie driver in the world needs to play "East Bound and Down" over the CB to become a "real driver." Haha 3 years ago I was behind a truck from Champaign, IL to Cincinatti, OH. He played it the ENTIRE way....everytime I turned my volume back up, there it was.

 

Exactly!

I frequently see drivers set their triangles at the exact wrong angle and they don't even need to be angled. However, if you're going to set them at an angle they should be directing inattentive drivers back onto the roadway, not into the back end of the truck.

I've seen countless triangle errors, like setting all three 10 feet apart or one in front on a divided highway.

The worst though is when I see one near the center of the width of the truck and the next one about half the distance closer to the fog line and the third one on the fog line. So anyone viewing this arrangement from the right lane sees them as one triangle as the ones closer to the fog line hide the others. But mostly it is the worst possible set up for the people it was meant to protect most. The inattentive driver who might be drifting onto the shoulder. When they look up and see this arrangement it appears as though they should steer right to avoid whatever is lying ahead, which will guide them right into the truck.

I know someone will probably chime in with things like how inattentive drivers deserve what they get. That's neither here nor there. If everyone paid attention perfectly we wouldn't even need to use triangles.

It could be your teenage child texting or the passenger of an inattentive driver. It could be a fellow trucker pushing to drive because the 14 hour rule doesn't allow them to pull over and take a nap like they should. It could even be any of us at some point, as none of us are perfect.

 

I've been in the trucking industry for 27 years on two different continents (okay, one continent_USA_and one island_Australia) and have found one thing to be true when it comes to driving a truck. You use all the tools at your disposal to achieve your goal.

We are suppose to be professional drivers. Not steering wheel holders, not children. We are, at any given time, driving a vehicle that weighs 40 tons plus and can do a great deal of damage to people and property. I personally don't ever want to find out what it feels like to kill someone with my truck due to the lack of using any tool which could have prevented it. I feel sorry for those who have had to find out what it is like, because it most assuredly isn't easy.

Yes, the cb definitely has its fair share of idiots, but I've used it and continue to use it. I also use GPS, road information apps, etc and so on. My job as a professional driver is to move the goods safely and efficiently from one place to another without harm to either myself or others (or property, either the truck, the load or homes / buildings). I've done that for 27 years, no at faults accidents since I was 17. I manage to pick up a speeding ticket once every 7 years, usually between 1-5 mph over the posted speed limit and only 1 in a semi during all that time.

No, I'm not really bragging, what I'm trying to put across is the responsibility we have to ourselves and others to perform our duties to the best of our abilities and use whatever technology and good old fashion 5 senses we require to achieve that goal.

As for training...I was a trainer for Horseshoe Transport out of Salt Lake City. I was offered that position after 10 years of OTR experience. That they are putting people with less than 6 months of experience in a training position is disturbing, to say the least.

 

Life and Death in a 40 ton vehicle was the very first rule pounded into my head first day of school. We had a "Heavy" from a nearby company at the time who was to us 24 students a world class Instructor, a Safety Master in his Company and responsible for several hundred rigs that ran into Jersey daily. Anyways, a few stories from him had some of us wondering if we wanted to cancel our federal check loans and go home forget the schooling that first day.

Every day in that trucking school Life and Death comes up. Looking back on that time I feel the instructors thought I was happy go lucky and needed to be shaved down, discovered what I was afraid of (Mountains) and then beat the mountain into me until I no longer cared about the fear itself. But cared way more about the things they taught me to keep that rig on the mountain and people from getting killed. If you ever see Cumberland Maryland on the 68, there is a massive wall at the bottom of Big Savage eastbound that runs and hangs over the city itself. In the past gasoline tankers would plunge downtown and light a big fire killing people. But that was ended by the wall. Higher than you and your 13'6" rig is.

As a trainer I pounded the same life and death lessons into my spouse and she learned it very well in fact she was a better student than I ever would be. But that is not all that went into the training. She did far more with me in our year in the rockies in the dead of winter than most students ever get to see if they are from the east coast. (Example, they don't get to run Donner or Eisenhower Tunnel without a few years good work experience first on the smaller mountains)

Going from a real mongrel in my early days with a chip on shoulder against dispatchers and running into the Law at the scales now and then paying for my mistakes until I learned. (Even then I would mash a scale now and then in the future... ugh...) The Law was good despite whatever the problem was, bad logs, no good weights or what have you. Maybe a bit of speeding. Yes Ive written in the past about the mid 90's dollar trucks. That was the high point of the speeding and ultimate making time in those days, putting away Pennsylvania from Ohio in 3 some hours making time for dinner and laundry before delivery into Boston later that day... was invaluable but no way loggable or legal. Maybe that is part of why the horrorshow of everyone being stuck at 67 mph or whatever it is across the USA.

I can tell stories and from them maybe you learn what not to do. Don't do what I did and tell about. Try to go the other way and be good.

Ive saved lives with that tractor trailer, same with the spouse. Sometimes Ive seen lives lost in wrecks that nothing man can do to put someone's body back together and live until EMT gets there. Cannot save everyone. I even had to take out a lab once under the rule do not endanger humans whatsoever in a driving storm on a severely crowded texas highway any sort of evasive action would have taken out multipule cars or the dog would have caused all three lanes to turn into a junk yard with injuries at a minimum. I tried to make it a clean kill. Ive killed animals before in a truck at night in the fog when you don't see them. Those are not what bothers me. It's People who put themselves into a life or death situation near my rig that pisses me off. Ive a few stories about that to tell. But they were teenagers and stupid. Bottom line, I managed to make a little more room for them to maybe get the hell out of there before being mashed into a smear on the interstate stupid children.... (And get a middle finger for my trouble... sheesh...)

 

Umm. It could be your attitude. I ran into very little of that when I first started five years ago.

 

It has been my experience that older more seasoned drivers will help out a green driver like you say. However most will make fun of them afterward.

 

So WHAT? If you are too thin skinned to take a little ribbing, then you are sure in the wrong business.

 

Me personally if all my mistakes made in my driving career were put on video it would be a long very funny video. However my comment was not to complain, it was to answer statements made by others that older drivers only want to make fun of green drivers not help them. It is just not my experience this happens.