I'm going with Swift!!!

So as I take all of this in, my first thought is, I can't wait to get my own truck. I need to set up my own truck to be open, organized, and smoke free just to put some meaning back into life. I mean this truck is so cramped, filled with ashed, and initially looked so much older then it is in the interior....I was stunned and felt a bit bad for my mentor (even though he seems perfectly happy, thank you very much).

So it turns out (as I'm taking in the interior of this truck, mouth opened) that the lumpers called us at 2 AM in the morning, but we were both exhausted and didn't hear the phone ring. So we both were up at 10 AM and we parked into a truck to get the truck unloaded. $250 and it took 2 freakin hours for these guys to get the truck unloaded!

So my first experience was about as complicated as you could get. Smelly, nasty, a 14 hour unload, haggling with lumpers.....and.....*start the dramatic music*....one of the most difficult non-hazmat, non-liquid loads you could get.......HUGE ROLLS OF PAPER.

Now my mentor has some cojones on him. We have this extremely top heavy load, and I just told him that I was trained on a 10 speed, I never drove an 8 speed transmission which is what this truck runs on. So what better way for me to learn then out on the open road, huh? So my first load was 6 huge rolls of paper that brought the weight of the truck 250 lbs under limit.

Now how does this guy know I'm not some person who went to a school that rubber stamped me a CDL? The answer is he doesn't! So he's as relaxed as can be in the driver's seat while I begin to drive. So this freakin transmission is BACKWARDS as far as I'm concerned. 1st gear is center and forward instead of all of the way to the right and back. Heck, my shifting was only adequate with a 10 speed, and with 2 weeks out of practice, this was going to be a learning experience. To make things even more interesting, this load was going to STATEN ISLAND.

With all that said, I did pretty well, if i do say so myself. What was unique was there were times when I could't grab a gear because I was learning the gear pattern on the fly, and my mentor would reach out and throw it into the correct gear for me. Considering the driving we were doing, I couldn't blame him. With a full load of paper, me learning a new gear pattern and being new to driving a truck, and with the extremely aggressive driving of the NJ/NY folks, now wasn't a time to mess around.

We made the 64 miles safe and sound, and this was a HUGE psychological victory for me. Unlike with school and with my driving test, I was relaxed, cool and calm, and my shifting steadily improved. In fact, other then learning the new gear pattern, I found this truck very willing to be shifted, even though it had only 50,000 miles on it.

 

So we dropped off a load of paper at Staten Island, and then took a load of some other form of paper (designed to make cardboard) and took it to Metheun, MA. When we got to MA we had to drop off the bill of lading, and get a copy of it signed by somebody. This gave me a chance to go into the shipper and I got to see the truck get unloaded. In the truck was huge rolls of paper with probably 2 inches of clearance from the top of the truck to the roll of paper. But the shipper had these huge fork lift type vehicle with huge arms that wrapped right around the paper and lifted it precisely an inch off the ground. At which point the vehicle backed the paper right out of the truck. Looking around the warehouse, there were huge piles of these rolls of paper which must have been stacked as high as 10 stories. It was awesome to see how this stuff worked. That's why I want to do this. And imagine, I could of been staring out the window confirming that the Empire State Building was still the same size it was 15 minutes ago....

So we got our empty trailer back and went to another shipper somewhere in New Hampshire (only about 60 miles from where we were). We dropped off the empty trailer, and picked up a load of empty cans. Even though the trailer was filled with these cans, the total weight of the load was about 5,500 lbs, an almost comical difference in the type of load from what we drove the last two loads.

This load was a piece of cake. It was enough weight to keep the trailer from bouncing, but it also allowed the 440 horsepower engine in the International to pass just about every truck going up the hill. It was a bit disappointing though when we'd see that same truck pass us going down the hill, or driving over a flat area.... We drove this load all of the way to somewhere in Indiana (I can look at my log book some other time if somebody wants to know the names of these towns).

We got a load from there going back to Massachusetts. I have no idea what we carried. Once we dropped that load off, we went back to Indiana....We did this one other time. For some reason we liked going from MA to IN and back again.

With those loads out of the way it was time for my mentor to drop me off at the terminal for home leave. This was great because it gave me a taste for the extreme schedule I'd be keeping, but also gave me another break to comtemplate it as well.

With my house now on the market, and with hardly any furniture in it, and with my family in Colorado, it was sad to admit that home was no longer home. To me home is wherever my wife and kid are, so that was a bit of a depressing thought.

Me being a highly responsible adult, I decided to live it up for the last time in awhile. So I stayed at a place called The Inn At Turkey Hill in Bloomsburg, PA. I highly recommend this place to anybody. Their prices are extremely reasonable, and their dinner is out of this world. I had some pork that literally fell off the bone, some creamed spinach, and some outstanding mashed potatoes. I topped that off with some sort of chocolate mousse cake, and proceeded to go to my room and lay on my bed moaning and holding my gut for 2 hours. I suppose that's the punishment for gluttony.

So ending my dual life as a truck driver student/playboy and it was back to the current stint of THREE WEEKS straight on the road. Let me tell you, it's been a ride.

We went from the Jonestown terminal to Florida, and from Florida to Arizona. From Arizona we went to Memphis, TN. As I said before, in the 11 or so days I've been out so far, I have driven over 6,000 miles.

 

So far the surprises are how difficult it is for me to back up the truck. I've been able to mange it, but it's easily the most challenging part of training for me. The other part that surprises me is I'm worried about learning the administrative end of things. There's a whole bunch of Qualcomm scripts I need to memorize, along with their associated number. I'm learning, but it's easily going to take me the whole training period to get it.

 

So, in a manner of speaking, that has us caught up to the present. I know I kind of sped through the last of it, but that is how quickly that last 11 days has gone for me as well. It's been a blur, and many miles. It's amazing how much birds really really like to take a dump on our truck, by the way...but that's a bit off topic.

The most interesting part of my experience with Swift has been what I've learned over the last few days. You see Swift is basically self-insured. They are big enough to pull this off, but that isn't *why* they are self-insured. They *have* to be because they are taking on trainees fresh out of school. You see, the accident rate with students right out of CDL school is extremely high, I've found out.

Let me give you an idea of how frequent these accidents are. I was surprised to learn that 4.5 years ago my mentor got into an accident on day 42 (the last day of training for him). He turned too tight and his trailer went right through the front of a car waiting at a light. That cost Swift $18k.

My mentor has been had 18 students since he started his mentorship. Two of those students have had accidents, including the one before me which involed the new truck.

If you still don't get the concept of how frequent accidents are, my mentor was talking to another Swift mentor. After the conversation (I was asleep in the bunk at the time), the other mentor drove off with his load first, with his student driving the load. When my mentor started driving, he passed the other mentor. His student had missed the turn into the terminal and tried to turn around in a McDonald's parking lot. The student proceeded to get the trailer stuck in a ditch and a tow truck was required to get it out.

You may think poorly of Swift now that you know this, but I can honestly tell you I don't believe this is their fault in the least. I'm telling you right now, learning how to drive a tractor trailer is *hard*, especially if you don't have a good context to compare it to.

As an example, I have driven my car in New Jersey and New York all of my life. I have put in hundreds of thousand miles in the area. So when I was driving a truck, I saw the body language of a lady in the fast lane, and knew she was going to cut me off. I already hit on the breaks before she even moved her hand to move the car over. Yet when I was driving through Dallas a few days ago, I couldn't make heads or tails of what those people were doing or thinking. A young lady in a SUV who was going slower then I was suddenly veered into my lane. I immediately hit the brakes and the truck started to burn rubber. She saw *now* saw that a 40 ton truck was behind her hitting the brakes to avoid her, so she veered back into the fast lane and proceeded to cut off yet another truck who actually would of hit her had she not veered back in front of my truck and then off to the exit. I came within 3 feet of taking her out. I doubt she would have lived. Thank God I have good reflexes, but I have absolutely no idea what she was thinking, nor an indication she was going to do what she did.

You might also be thinking that Swift hires crappy students. I would beg to differ. First of all, I'm definitely not the *best* student. For instance, Chris will easily be a more natural truck diver then I am. He picks it up much faster then I. But my driving ability on highways is actually impeccable, if I do say so myself (and I do). Out on the highway I can honestly say four wheelers are safe with me on the road. I mention this only to say I'm a pretty good student, and yet going through a traffic circle in NH I was so focused on the traffic that I completely forgot about the trailer, and proceeded to run the crap over the island on the right of the circle. I'm telling you, that first 6 months of driving a truck is an incredibly vulnerable time for us truck drivers. For those of you who are students, or who are planning to become students, I would highly suggest you take in all of the fundamentals you are taught during class and with your mentor because you will most assuredly need it.