COVENANT -- From a wife's perspective

Thanks Rocks, I got them. Only have a few more posts to go before I can reply in PM. Almost there.

I do have one other question. Do the trainers you recommended actually sit beside the student while they are driving? I'm guessing they probably do but I'm trying to resolve in my mind how a company that supposedly prides themselves on safety (!!!???) allows other trainers to team drive their students. It's like Redcoat says, they HAVE to know that it's going on based on how many miles the truck goes each day. If these people you recommended only drive the max of 11 hours that limits the truck to roughly 600-650 miles in a 24-hour period. If a truck is going over a thousand miles, how do the safety and training people resolve that discrepancy??? If one trainer and their trainee are only averaging the short miles while another pair are averaging long haul miles, why don't they start asking questions about who is doing what??

Obviously this question isn't directed specifically toward you but for ANYbody out there who might know the logic behind why it's allowed (besides the obvious that the company makes major bucks with a wink and a nod).

 

Lurch, your post was very insightful. And your fourth point gets right to the crux of the matter. Right now Redcoat is trying to decide exactly that.

I asked him if he can remember exactly when he started feeling the panic. He said he was OK on the trip from Dallas to Kansas City and back to Ft. Worth. The traffic going out of Dallas was bad but he managed. He didn't care for driving at night but for the most part he was OK.

But on the third day of driving he was up there by himself on his way to California and somewhere (I'm not sure where) he found himself in a single lane construction zone going down a grade on a long curve. He said there were dozens of cars behind him and the lane had one of those drop offs near the shoulder that would jerk him toward the barriers. He said it seemed like it went on forever and he was drenched in sweat by the time he got through it.

I asked him why he didn't call his trainer to come up to help him and he said he kept thinking that soon he would get out of it and it would be over. When they got to their destination, Redcoat told his trainer how bad he felt coming down that grade by himself and the response was, "Those weren't even real mountains; they were just little hills." So instead of listening to what Redcoat was trying to tell him, he invalidated him. After that Redcoat saw how it was going to be and that's when he stopped trying to communicate. From that point on, things just got worse.

Another time while they were hanging around waiting for a load, they went out and Redcoat said they spent about 4 hours practicing backing up to a loading dock. Redcoat said that when he was going to Roadmaster school, the instructors would tell him different reference points to use to judge when to cut the wheel to make the trailer go the direction he wanted it to go. But the Covenant equipment was different from Roadmaster's and so the reference points he was trying to use didn't work. He kept asking his trainer to give him some clues on what he used to judge when to cut the wheel and the most he could get out of him was, "You just have to sense it." Well, after four hours of frustration, it was apparent that Redcoat's sense of "sense" wasn't working and he needed some hard techniques to use to help him.

So these are a couple situations that I have gotten him to talk about so far and that's about it. I'm sure there will be more as he comes to terms with what happened and he feels more comfortable talking about it.

 

Rocks, thanks for the post. I believe this post now puts me at 50 so I can finally respond to all PMs. I'm going to call the company sometime next week to see if I can contact the people you suggested and talk to them. Much appreciated!