How do I close trailer door?

After the first couple of years of school you are not learning stuff so much as you are learning how to learn. Which air valve activates the tire inflation system is something that should be shown. But not noticing that the left door is hitting the right door???

Mikeeee

 

What kind of a lousy trainer is that? I'm a class B CDL holder and have not gotten into trucking YET but if my trainer said that to me I'd probably tell them if I could figure those things out on my own I wouldn't need a driver trainer. I'm convinced some of these people are sadistic pea brained losers who see being a dt as simply some twisted sort of power trip. Shameful.

 

I understand what you're saying here but it's really not their place to intervene when there's a trainer involved. This was a trainer 'fail' all the way around. Sounds like the so called 'trainer' needs to go back to DT training!

 

This was not a "Trainer Fail" in any way. It is not rocket science, IT IS CLOSING A DOOR! What is next? Buckle the seat belt for the new driver?

Mikeeee

 

We call that "shut up" juice here in Dixie.

 

This is going to be another one of those posts where I sound like a ball busting, kick em while they're down A Hole. And I don't mean to be. There are doors on minivan and extended cab pickups that have to be closed in a certain order. Even children can figure it out. There's only two options for closing trailer doors, right? It's either left door then right OR right door then left.

Suddenly a crowd gathers, and the brain wants to shut down and OP is wanting to go into fetal position. WHAT????? Is this the trainer's fault?

"Six, the trainer told her to figure it out. He should have helped."

I think he did. IMO, it's the best way to get a rookie to began to think outside the box. It is a beginning. YouTube is full of videos of drivers who never learned to think on their feet. If an adult wants to be spoon fed, do you spoon feed them? Or do you place the spoon in front of them and tell them to figure it out?

"But Six, what about the crowd?"

What about them?

When you're trying to get into a dock on a busy street and there are hundreds watching you, how do you deal? Shut down mentally and curl into fetal position? If you can't ignore the crowd, you're going to have a bunch of really bad days. I think the trainer was successful. Odds are that OP will never have a problem with doors again. Mission accomplished.

 

I don't believe in handholding. IMO, it's a setup for failure. The GPS, for example. People enter an address in a GPS and follow the directions blindly. It's handholding. So you have thousands on the road now who can't read road signs. Thousands on the road who can no longer think while going down the road. Thousands who stop at the weigh station when the sign says MAINTAIN 40 mph.

Before you should be able to use a GPS in a vehicle, you should be able to read road signs.

So, OP sat there and worked the doors, shoved the doors, swung the latches open and closed,....

......

...and finally got the correct door and the correct latch in the correct sequence and used the latches to pull the door tightly closed. Brain synapses that hadn't fired in decades were forced to fire, in order for out of the box thinking to occur. Now we have a mental grasp of the mechanics of the door mechanism. It's not rocket science, but there IS a science to it.

 

You beat me to it, and so much nicer than what I was thinking. I could not believe the number of window lickers blaming the trainer. A driver needs to learn to solve problems. If I were the trainer it would have sounded something like... "What do you mean you can't figure out how to shut a ####ing door?"

The trainer was there and saw the issue and was probably rightfully disgusted.

 

Well, to be honest, I was thinking the same thing. The part that got me was the curling up in fetal position comment. "Has this person ever done anything challenging in life?"

I was at a gas station once. A little white haired old lady walks up and asks for my help. Her husband had always pumped gas for her. She had never pumped gas in her entire life and her husband passed. What do I do? She's sticking to what she knows and is depending on someone else to pump her gas for her. Well, I attempt to show her how, but her mind has already been programmed to just let me do it and go. In one ear, out the other. Oh well...

You most certainly can't have that mentality as a driver. I guess some people would like to learn, but you hardwire your brain to think in a certain pattern, and the unused synapses shut down. It's quite a struggle to get a hard wired brain to fire off synapses that haven't been fired up since the preteen years.

 

I've taught the gas thing to a bunch of people who were clueless.

BUT I've got to say this, these are not trainers, they are mentors at best and just people wanting to make a little extra cash normally. I've seen a "go figure it out" trainer too many times, the last one left the poor driver to fend for her self at a customers location to drop off auto parts to be processed. I watched as she struggled to get the truck aligned (it is a pain because to get to that dock, you have to make a swing passed the others and you don't have the room to manoeuvre)and could see the 'trainer' falling his wings like a fool. I was there at the other dock across the way being unloaded, watching the forklift clowns take the products off the deck, I looked back and saw the trailer being jammed onto the guard rail with one set of wheels on the drive and the other dangling in the dock. The dock manager told me later the idiot trainer came into the place and took a dump leaving her to deal with it. He wasn't happy at all that this happened, the logistics supervisor told the company not to come back. She put the truck into such a position that it destroy the trailer and some of the product when they moved it. Never mind that she was instantly fired from that job, all because of the poor attitude of the "trainer".