Calling all trainees/former trainees

Great topic Vin. Make sure the trainee deals with the shipper, the consignee and the Fleet Manager. Make them learn the driver tech and God help you, but make them do all the backing. I think helping them set themselves up for success by taking responsibility for their own attitude and how they treat others on the phone would go a long way also. Some people seem to think, wrongly, that yelling works.

 

Why does this not make any sense to me .. Please elaborate--- if some slides into me, what difference is there if I have chains on or not ?? ...


So if someone slide into me and I dont have any chain on driving over a snow packed Donner, its a non preventable, But if I do have chains on it would be a preventable ??

Sorry doesn't compute ...

 

Unless !!!! they figure if its bad enough to chain up, you should have parked it ..

 

BINGO!! You chose to drive. If you had shut down, you would not be on the road to get hit

 

well couldn't that be said about any accident .. lets say it is raining ... or night or foggy.. Seems pretty picky.. I would rather my drivers ,Especially newbies to be overly cautious rather than running barefoot over donner trying to keep up with the more seasoned drivers..But thats just me...

It seems snow could keep a truck stranded in some cases.. or push some Rookies over the edge..

 

on another subject.. How does the no idle thing work on team trucks ?? and what is the cell phone policy on a team truck ?

 

Maybe you aren't aware, or maybe you are, in some places out west they have signs with flashing lights that tell all drivers that they are only allowed to drive if they put their chains on.

When these conditions are present, USX does not require you to chain up and keep driving, they allow you to make the decision to just park until the roads are better. If you get into any accident with your chains on it is considered preventable because you were allowed to just stay parked but you chose to drive, therefore you could have prevented it.

In normal snow, rain or fog you have to drive unless the conditions are crazy bad and unsafe, but when the DOT says "chain up" you have the right to say "no" and park it.

 

Pretty simple class, mostly a bunch of slides going over things that you already know, some talk about policies and procedures, a run through of the paperwork and daily reports you need to do for your student and what they expect them to know when they upgrade. Kinda just an overview of everything, but its all in the hand book. I'm going to read through it before my girlfriend gets out here so I don't miss anything.

One of the guys I went to orientation with was back there doing all of the "pro treads" because they couldn't get them to work in his trainer's truck. It also seems his trainer wasn't real good at completing and signing paperwork either so the office people are going through all that and trying to figure out where they can fax the things that need to be signed by his trainer to because the guy just dropped him off and left.

So that's my advice to you as a trainer, Vinsanity, make sure your student gets all their stuff done while they are with you and make sure all the paperwork is done correctly before you leave them at a terminal. Its a whole lot easier to get you to sign something for them if you are still there and they won't have to sit around and wait for another week while it all gets taken care of.

 

Here are a couple of things I wish were different.

I would like to have had at least one sit down meal a day. I lost 15 lbs with my first trainer, (which was actually a good thing, lol), he never stopped for meals. Some how he got nourishment from cigarettes. The only way I survived was Subway sandwiches, and he'd always give me the evil eye when I would sneak over and get one during a fuel break. But, geez you do what you gotta do. And speaking of Cigarettes I said it was OK if he smoked, but I had no idea that he would smoke 24/7, never knew a guy could smoke so much but I bite my tongue because I was the one who said it was OK.

The other thing I wold have liked was some back up practice. I had two trainers who were always in a hurry. I would have loved to had one of them throw me the keys and say, "here, spend a couple of hours backing into that hole" . My school had smaller trailers, and those 53 footers were just different enough to mess me up. I would have loved also to have more city driving. Pretty much my driving experience was shift into 10th gear drive for 10 hours at highway speed. The thing with one of my trainers was he let me listen to any music I liked, his rule was who ever was driving controlled the tunes. The first driver never listened to any music, played the CB, or had any form of entertainment while driving, which was OK while driving through LA, but did not make much sense out in the Nevada desert.

So that's about it, I would like to have ate food once in awhile, and backed up the truck more often

 

There are two pages of things you have to sign off on for your student. If you go down through them and put the date for the first day on the truck on all of them, then initial all of them, then you can put the finishing date on as you do them. This really helps with the writer's cramp...LOL

In the back of the book is the BTW log.....I always used one box for each day (not one line per week because sometimes we didn't run or we were home) and then used the bottom two sections to record their backing hours......The backing can be incorporated into their drive time (just log in under Driving and then mark it as backing practice....I did this when they were backing into a dock as well as practicing in a truck stop)......You may get told that you don't have to record the backing as separate (on the paper log), but my TC told me we had to in order for it to show and get counted.