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

Get out!, the trailer has brakes ? What will they think of next ?

 

I actually had the same driver ask me several questions while talking a few weeks ago.
He was bobtail and waiting at this small fuel stop for a service truck to come and fix a bad brake chamber (he did not know what was wrong, just that he was loosing air)

Anyway. He is hanging out behind the truck with me and I notice that the wings on the back of the cab are all bent up. So I ask him if he did that.
He said did what? So I pointed it out, and he said no and that it must have been that way when he got the truck. Then he asked me how that would happen....
So I explained that it was from jack knifing.

The next question was once the service guy was there.
The service man chocked the wheels and asked him to unset the brakes.
The guy asked if he needed to do both, because for some reason the the red one leaked allot of air........
Ok, for new guy. The red air button is for your trailer brakes and the guy was bobtail.

He also was going to side scrape a high curb pulling out, till we warned him that with the angle he had on the curb he had a good chance of bending his rim and needing another repair.

 

Don't know if they come from newbies, but folks asking for directions to major cities on the CB. One night going across Alabama on I-20, one guy kept asking how to get to Columbia, SC. The answer was "take the south loop around Atlanta, then pick up I-20 again". Pause...then he asked what road took him into Atlanta. It seems like many new drivers do not have an Atlas, or do not know how to read them.
I did have a driver ask me where the nearest Kenworth dealer was. He told me that the bulb in his speedometer light was out and without knowing his speed, he did not know when to shift at night.

 

Ya think that was not the only light out?

 

I lost all of the lights in the speedometer on the truck my first year. It was most annoying in order to know the speed to avoid tickets.

I have never practiced looking at the speed in order to shift.

 

While my mentor and I were stopped at a Swift terminal I struck up a conversation with another driver. I don't think he realized I was a student because he started asking a lot of questions. This guy had just become an owner/op and didn't know what the slack adjusters were or that you could slide the fifth wheel.

 

Not surprising, since most students are taught to shift by the speedometer or tachometer, instead of listening to their engine like they should.

 

http://www.thetrucker.com/News/Stories/2010/5/5/Truckinghasappealformanytransitioningworkers.aspx

I think that pretty much sums up 90% of the problems with this industry...