Beginning to get desperate, could use help/advice.

You are certainly excused for sooper noob questions if you can forgive my introverted novel-length answers. You can find time for ANYTHING, but probably not EVERYTHING. It s best if you learn to use the waiting time at customers for your needs as much as possible. You just never know if that waiting will be 30 minutes or 6 hours, no matter what the clerks tell you when you check-in with them. So, like finding a company, you may have to trade off one of the things you wish you could get for definitely getting the thing you just refuse to not have. So if you make exercise a priority it might mean getting 30-60 minutes less sleep, or getting the sleep and the exercise, but having to exercise at the customer during an indefinite delay whatever the customer's property is like or in weather you usually avoid, etc. The company you work for and the freight they haul determines a lot of whether you do a lot of live load/unloads or if you get to do more "drop and hooks" where you drop the trailer you have and pick up another trailer that now needs to be delivered. Most drivers want drop & hooks because IF the trailer you drop and the trailer you take are in good shape and have what they are supposed to have already in them, you can be in and out from a customer in 30 minutes. Live unloads can take 60 minutes to days, but usually 60 minutes to 1,2,3,4 or so hours, depending on numerous factors. Yes, Prime is mostly reefer. Yes, reefer has lots of waiting. But because Prime is sort of the King Kong of reefers I witnessed Prime SOMETIMES getting drop and hooks at the reefer customers where the rest of us are doing live load/unload. Prime also does a lot of waiting of reefer customers like other companies. Also, the topic of waiting brings up the issue of Detention Pay. The short course is Detention is pay you get for waiting. There are gimmicks and requirements for getting paid Detention, so Detention only RARELY means getting paid for all the time you wait. Some companies are a lot closer to paying you for all the time you wait. Lot's of companies claim to pay Detention for waiting, but they have many tricks and requirements that leave you getting paid for 10-25% of your waiting. And there are companies that claim they pay for Detention, but actually getting it is more rare than a card game with Elvis and Bigfoot on Friday the 13th.

I need 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep or my mood goes to heck and I create problems for myself and others. In my home daily job, I woke up, showered, made and packed my lunch for later, ate dinner and then brushed my teeth while I walked on the treadmill for 30 minutes. After working all night, I would come home make breakfast, eat it and answer emails/surf the web while walking on the treadmill for another 30 minutes. In trucking it's easy to find an excuse to not do what you need to do, just force yourself to start doing the thing you want and only quit after you start, never before you start.

Breaks and resets will seem a lot more complicated quickly because current Drivers can visualize what they have done for years easier than a newbie who is putting the words into a picture for the first time. There are the 70 Hour clock (about a week), a 14 Clock (a work day), and the 11 Hour Clock (maximum you can driven during the 14 Hour Clock). If ANY of those 3 clocks, run out you can't drive. Since the 3 clocks are not based on calendar days, 7 day weeks, and 24 hour days (trucking operates AROUND the clock/calendar) it gets complicated sometimes.

After your 70 Hour clock runs out, you cannot drive no matter the appointment times or schedules of customer or companies or plans. There are 2 options when your 70 Hours are going to run out, you can wait/rest/sleep for 10 hours and then see if after midnight you have hours added to your 70 Hour clock or not. The 70 Hour clock only considers a rolling 8 day period. If you were generally driving (11 Hour) and or working (14 Hour) to your limit in each previous day, you will not gain time at midnight equal to what you worked/drove 8 days prior. However, if you were pretty consistent in only driving and working just under 9 hours combined each of those 7-8 days you will likely always have almost 9 hours in which to drive/work today. So you might wonder why not just keep your driving and working combined to under 9 hours per day? Because each trip is it's own complete puzzle to solve. To meet the pickup and delivery appointment times you might only BARELY be able to make them by driving the legal limit each day going to pickup and delivery. In that case available hours are used up. So, in the worst case scenario you use up all of your 70 Hours in 8 day clock. Even if you take a full 24 hours off, and at least one day doing nothing will be required, the next day you might pick up 11 Driving/14 Working, or you only get the driving/working hours you worked 8 days previous. Maybe 8 days ago you had a bad day and only drove and worked 4.25 hours. Then you would only be able to drive/work 4.25 hours today. It's simple to learn if you consider always and only driving/working your daily maximums or only driving working 8.75 hours per day for 8 days. In the real world, your week will often have some days where you used up your legal limits and other days you only used some of those legal maximums. Rarely do YOU get to choose. MOSTLY you have to legally drive whatever is required to meet the appointment times. One customer's appointment times have effect you long after you leave that customer. This is some of the reason customer delays make some driver furious. Some jerk on a forklift or clerk to busy on Instagram could cause you to miss an appointment or worse, not drive home. !!!!!!!!

The Reset or the 34 hour reset or just 34 is the number of hours of not working and not driving that legally creates a brand new 70 Hour clock. With a new 70 Hours you can drive and work as the schedule, the driver, or dispatcher wants. What you did 8 days ago isn't a limit with a new 70 hour Clock that is produced by 34 hour reset. The downside to a 34 is IF you take that day and a half in an undesirable spot, just any old truck stop with little or bad food options, no entertainment options, no place to wash your clothes, etc. The times I ran out of hours, or saw I would run out of my 70 and need to take a 34 reset were mostly on long trips from the Nashville area somewhere in the Rocky Mtn states or coastal West Coast. I had plenty of hours to drive there but I would run out of my 70 Hour limit a little over halfway back to TN. I learned I would decide where that 34 would happen, not ask my boss, and not drive until my 70 had 1 minute left and park wherever that happened to be. I usually drove about half of the distance/time I could drive and choose to take a 34 reset in Flagstaff. AZ at the Little America Sinclair truck stop. Flagstaff is beautiful, cooler usually than the region around it, had good food at the truck stop and walmart/Best Buy, other stores within a cheap Uber/Lyft or long walk, plus great great showers. My last job out West allowed me to drive my 70 out every week, and do a 34, and there were some OK to good spots for a 34, and at times I could "run on re-cap hours", sometimes called running re-cap. That doesn't mean tires with new treads glued on every time you hear it. I much prefer running on re-caps. I could work that way until retirement. However on long trips like Salt Lake City to D.C. or Atlanta, since my only duty after the day I get loaded, is to drive I like 11 hour days across the country before getting into the dirty third of the country in the East.

The point being, nobody understand all of the clocks quickly. Especially when I explain it. The topic of all of those Clocks are called Hours of Service HOS. The Feds have a chart that explains the HOS and the CDL school and your trainer at any first company will explain HOS and you will take tests to make sure you understand the basics. Now that ALMOST everyone has and uses an Electronic Logging Device ELD that automatically keeps track of your 3 clocks it won't be as difficult as you think, no matter how confusing I made it sound. Summary of Hours of Service Regulations | FMCSA

 

It would be better if you post non-school questions in the New Driver section. That way you get everyone's answers, not just my long-winded personal answer. Lost of others on the board have answers. We have former DOT types, company regulation experts, plus every flavor of driver, including retired and new, owner-operators, lease-op drivers, etc

 

Not a conventional path, but if you're looking to pay bills...

Consider a class b job?

Propane delivery is about to get busy in a couple of months. You can earn a decent paycheck and be home every day.

All you need is a class B CDL. If you don't have it, I would apply for a school bus driver job or transit job. Most will train you to get your CDL pretty quickly, then you can test the additional endorsements on your own - tanker & hazmat to apply for a job requiring a class b.

There are a ton of propane places and I'm sure you'll make bank up north. It's not terribly difficult work. Amerigas is offering a $5k sign on bonus up there. Most places will probably be competitive.

 

If you are going to Prime I think you are wasting money and can avoid your state DMV (driver lic office) issues. I think Prime has you get your CLP in MO, then train, get MO CDL or some deal you take back to your home state, or whatever state you return to after school and trade paperwork angbget your CDL. Prime is a CDL producing factory. They know the procedure of coming from X, training in MO, and returning home with CDL. Lots of other forum users did it and know how it works. Your situation is not unusual. There are answers. To any newbie getting into trucking is both learning a new language and learning a physical skill on top of dealing with a lot of govt red tape. To Prime & other trucking companies they deal with your situation 25 times a day, week, month, or year whatever your situation is. I tend to feel any situation I don't know everything about is too big, too difficult, may not be solvable. EVERY problem is routine to someone. It could be faster and easier to show up without the CLP, since that is usually more waiting to be called to do your tests than doing your tests.

I give long answers wherever I write. I'm not great at reading people, so I explain more than most anyone needs. But I moved around a lot and know how much just a little help from a local could make things so smooth. There are usually experts in the forum on each big company's Orientation & "Onboarding" process. I spend most of my time in New Driver & Experience because the School forum doesn't get a lot of new messages. It'll work out for you. The timing or something else may be different than you expected. Try not to stress. We've all been there.

 

As I said HOS is complicated, but it sounds super complicated to everyone when listening to an explanation. You will be shown and have to demonstrate you understanding. HOS is mostly looking at your ELD and seeing if the time remaining, as shown on the ELD, is enough for what you need to do. If you already knew how to do it you wouldn't need CDL school. It's not as confusing as it seems, except for Split-break operations. That confuses everyone like me, unless they use it often. Its easy to make a mistake and most drivers don't use it except rarely. It's like "the infield fly rule" in baseball. It's a rule but you won't need it much in most every situation but one.

 

I strongly suggest you ask the question about your home state delays getting your CLP and Prime's current procedure with regard to home-state CLP and going to school at Prime in MO in the New Driver section. I wish I knew 10% of what the various experts in the forum know. Dealing with your DMV (Drive license office) and Prime, since they don't and never applied to me are details I haven't pushed aside other things I do know so I can remember what I do know.

Everyone is eager to help. The New Driver section is where these types of questions are routinely asked/answered. Nobody is going to shame you for asking question.