"I had a newbie ask me this one day.....and my jaw dropped!"

At the time I thought how dumb can you be? But now when I think back about it he was not dumb, just did'nt know what he was pointing at or what it did.

 

So he wasn't dumb, just ignorant.

Umm, recognizing a brake chamber was part of my pretrip test required to get my CDLs. WTF?

 

I had a new guy at work ask me how I knew when to shut off the valves while dropping gas. He had been there a few weeks and I told him "when it's empty?" I seriously had a talk with his trainer after that.

 

I don't think that's much of an excuse. A driver ought to have some sort of knowledge about the vehicle he's driving. If you don't know what something like a brake chamber is or what purpose it serves on the vehicle, how competent are you to inspect it at the beginning and end of your shift to know that it won't cause a breakdown?

I understand that there is a learning curve...and in this industry, there is a LOT to learn...but that really only stresses the problems with the current state of training in the industry.

Where it used to be a career that you WANTED to get into....where you got hired on at a company working the docks or wrenching on trucks and eventually worked your way up to a driving job...or perhaps you knew a truck driver who had his own truck and you rode with them for a while to learn the ins & outs of the job before you struck out in your own truck...more or less an apprenticeship type situation, where you spent a lot of time (possibly years) in and around the trucks before you ever got to drive one...

...now it's a last-ditch effort to find a job...you make a phone call today and by the end of the week, they ship you off to a puppy-mill type CDL school for general training before tossing you into a truck with a 90-day wonder to receive the rest of your training from a guy who is still wet behind the ears himself. You go from never having seen the inside of a truck to driving 1st seat in less than 2 months time. The easier trucks are to drive (i.e. automatic transmissions, etc.), the less time companies will have to spend training.

 

A lack of training/understanding of what he was looking at. Just because he could tell you what it was don't mean he knew what it did. The pretrip test don't require you to know how it works only "Can you name that part"

 

I took my CDL test in Missouri. We had to be prepared to answer the examiner's question of "and what does that do" for every part we identified during the PTI exam.

Perhaps more states should follow this example.

Of course this was almost 7 years ago. More and more states are going bankrupt these days compared to just the short time ago I tested.

 

He was asking what the difference should be maybe? Like if the tandems got to just under 34k after sliding and the drives could still take more weight should he slide them further?

 

Just rip it off.

Then tell the inspector it was there on the pre trip.