Just Started Working For Werner

So I recently graduated from Luzerne County Community College Professional Truck Driving Program and decided that, since I am only 21 years old and every "good" trucking company that will hire out of school has a minimum age requirement of 22 or older, I was going to get my first year of experience at Werner Enterprises. Here is my story so far.

August 26th, my step dad drove me and my belongings to the motel near the terminal in Allentown, PA (to hell with Greyhound). I live about an hour away. I go to the front desk at the motel and they give me my room key. They also inform me that I will be getting a roomate. I had been expecting that, so it was no big deal. I get myself settled in, watch some television, and my roomate shows up a couple hours later. Although the guy couldn't speak english to save his life, he seemed like a nice guy and we had no problem getting along for the two days that we shared the room.

Anyway, two days of orientation go by. They shuttle us to and from the terminal and the motel. We spend most of the day at the terminal filling out paperwork, watching powerpoint presentations, and taking boring tests on the touch screen computers. All in all, it wasn't that bad. There was only 6 people in my "class", all of whom were fairly nice people as well as the instructor.

After the second day of orientation, I'm told to call my SDM (Student Driver Manager) and then go back to the motel and wait for a trainer. I was told I may not get one until possibly Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week due to the Labor Day weekend. It was Thursday afternoon. I figured what the hell, I'm getting paid for it anyway. So I get back to the motel room and not an hour later I get a phone call. I've got a trainer and he'll be there about an hour or two.

His name is Jim. Sounded like a nice guy over the phone and after spending the past two weeks with him on the road, my opinion hasn't changed a bit. He's an owner operator. Has a Freightliner Classic with about 430k miles. It's pretty banged up due to the higher milleage, age of the truck, and the fact that a few of his previous students were.. well.. not of the highest caliber...

Anyways, in the past two weeks, I've banged out close to 100 hours of driving time and have been in about 35 different states. I haven't had any serious problems yet and hopefully it will stay that way. I had to drive in LA rush hour traffic as well as a few other large cities (Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, NYC). That hasn't been too much of a problem. Just stay calm and take your time. Only significant problem has been that the clutch has been starting to act up the past few days. It's not really noticable when your moving, especially if your floating the gears, but accelerating from a complete stop can give a bit of a jerk.

The real killer is when you try to back. You can't just let the clutch all the way out and back with this truck like you can with some others (like the Century for example). You have to hold the clutch it or else it moves far too fast. This is a problem. With the clutch slipping like crazy, you can't back up without feeling as if your riding a #### rodeo horse. That has been really ticking me off. But this won't be a problem for long. We are on break right now and he's looking into either getting a new truck or getting the clutch fixed.

I'm typing this from a pretty decent motel in Spearfish, South Dakota (about 10 miles from his hometown) on my laptop with the motels craptastic wireless internet connection. Hey, at least I have some kind of an internet connection. I'm looking forward to sitting around on the computer, watching tv, and just relaxing for the next few days while I wait to get back out on the road. I should mention that I'm still being paid while I'm here. $325 per week of which I have already received two paychecks via direct deposit into my account. No complaints there.

I did want to mention that I really like the paperless log system, but that's probably because im a 21 year old computer junkee *laughs*. However, I spilled his coffee mug on top of it about 4 or 5 days ago and it became unusable for about 48 hours. Had to take it apart, flush it out with water, let it dry, and put it back together. Luckily it still worked after that. Had to use paper logs during that time. That was a pain in the butt, but we had no problem getting the logs department to help us out as far as getting the info we needed for our 70. Faxed in the logs once the Qualcomm started working again and they got it updated within 24 hours.

All in all, so far it's been good. I've been doing lots of driving all over the country, listening to music and audio books with the in dash cd player, and having a pretty good time with my trainer, plenty of laughs.

It really helps that I'm only 21 years old and have don't have too many bills to pay (mostly college loans and the truck driving loan - I went to Penn State for a couple years), so low pay isn't a huge deal. It's still more than I've made anywhere else, even during this training period

Anyways, I'll try to update this post once in a while. Thanks for reading and feel free to ask any questions/post any comments. I'd love to read/answer them.

Edit: Holy hell I didn't realize how long that was until I went back and looked at it, haha. Sorry for the wall-of-text and a HUGE thanks to anyone that actually reads it all lol

 

Will do. Thanks

 

Maybe, but I think it'll be a good start.