After Schneider orientation

My goodness. My goodness, gracious, Roger!

 

Wow, wet skid training, what fun! They had that at a state sponsored school here in ks and it was a blast for me ! We'd ride around in the truck in town and the instructor told me that he could sleep behind me. Then when we took the wet skid pan, which was them flooding the road way, the instructor looked at me and said you're the cr*ziest s o b that I've ever rode with! Hahaha

 

Washout rate is nearing 60%. Last month we brought in 15 guys to the inexperienced class, only one made it to the TE week.

My last guy had the attention span of a goldfish and a complete lack of object permanence. He backed into a spot, then hit the kingpin release button and started to pull away - airlines still hooked, landing gear up. The kicker? We hadn't even checked in yet, just parked in the staging area.

 

Again, when I went to cfi, it was all manual. I though I was ready to go with my shiny new cdl. Frankly, we never stop learning something. Over coming challenges.

 

Cfi had a polishes concrete with sprinklers. Flatbed tethered so it couldn't completely jack knife. Your partner would pull the trailer brake to put you in a skid, and you had to keep it between some cones. You learned to work the steering wheel. To stay on it. Instilled confidence. It was more fun than scary.

 

About the same for us, except it's "experienced" drivers. The failure rate is right at 60% on the pre-hire road test. Then about 30% are "ok" but will need some attention from the trainer. The last 10% of drivers are good solid folks who know how to drive and do it well with no particular issues.

It's crazy.

 

i actually had a guy come up and ask me for help.
He couldn’t get his “airlines” hooked. i thought he meant like some are tight and needed a rubber mallet to tap the bottom for good seal.

Nope, he was trying to straight in hook the gladhands.

 

It's been a while since I've been at Schneider. From what I remember, after completion of the orientation, it was two weeks at my home terminal training with the driver trainer. After that, my DTL gave me several sets of keys and told me to go pick the truck I want. I looked for the cleanest one, since I knew I'd be slip-seating with someone else. Nobody wants to slip-seat with a pig and be their momma and essentially be wiping their ### for them. Whatever you do, don't tolerate a filthy slip-seat. You don't deserve to work in somebody elses filth.

 

That's pretty bad. My first week on the job at JB Hunt, I saw a driver, a trainer actually, pulling a trailer from a dock and as he turned, the trailer dropped. Fortunately for him, he stopped right away and it rested on the 5th wheel ramps. Lucky for him it was empty and he was able to lower the landing gear and raise it slightly and get back under, but boy was he embarrased. I saw the whole thing. He even did a tug test, but he didn't get out to look underneath to make sure the locking jaws were fully engaged. I've always checked, and always will after witnessing that.

 

Are you guys trainers with Schneider? I started with Schneider here in SoCal. I only stayed for ~year because there was too much nonsense and lots of dispatch mistakes out of my terminal, but the training I received there both at the orientation, and with the trainer at my home terminal were execellent. The sense of safety they instilled during training has stayed with me to this day. When I went to work with JBH I was really surprised at how lax they were on safety. They just started getting strict on safety in the past year because of too many accidents, including installing driver facing cameras. I feel like they brought it upon themselves. They hired a lot of newbie drivers during the pandemic (me among them, though my rookie year was already behind me). Fortuntately, I haven't had any issues because I carried that safety mindset with me to JBH.