Looking for fleet to take on new driver in Sacramento area, West Sacramento esp.

I will. I haven't got a car yet and so OTR still looks pretty good to me. I have thought about looking to pick up some operating skills beyond just trucking, mixers and refrigeration, for example.

 

I've decided to go with CRST. I know many people have warned against this, but for my situation, these arguments simply don't apply. I would rather get started with a company who clearly knows what to do with inexperienced drivers than try to go for more money or something somewhere else. CRST looks a little scruffy compared to others, but it looks more solid, like it knows what it's doing. We'll see. I'll probably have more questions elsewhere and keep posting as time permits.

 

It was a complete and miserable bust. I bused down to Fontana in September and was fired in late January for having too many parking lot accidents.

Mostly I was relieved to be no longer working for them, but I was left with not enough experience to get a new position along with the reason for being fired. In between that and my initiation into trucking has been a lot of unbelievable crap. It's hard to say if it is the company's fault or if its just trucking. Maybe a little of both.

I love the job. I love hauling freight. I love living on the road. I love the driving. Really, it was the best job I ever had. The worse part was co-drivers. My co-drivers were without a doubt, the most rotten human beings I have ever met anywhere under any circumstances. CRST hired me and its pretty clear they will hire anybody. This is great if you deserve a job, but not so great if you don't deserve the company of other human beings ever. One of the things I learned to worry about in picking a co-driver was not to drive with anyone who was homeless. There are a lot of people like that who don't have any place to go for home time. CRST seems to rely heavily on drivers who don't have anything else to hope for. Their terminals seem to reflect this, a popular report about these terminals is that they are worse than homeless shelters. The west coast might have gotten better with a move, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The other problem was that I wasn't making any money. I had been living on section 8 housing and food stamps and I was convinced that very quickly I would become ineligible for both. But that never happened. I was still on the edge of poverty throughout my time there. Part of the problem was being idle for lack of a co-driver. Part of the problem was down time for maintenance. If you are not rolling those wheels, you aren't making any money.

Since I don't have any experience with any other company, I am in no position to say that CRST is any worse than the rest who will train you to drive for them. I can say that it's pretty bad. Fleet managers are your most common point of contact with the company. I went through four fleet managers once in a month. I don't know why they quit, but they just did all of a sudden and with no warning. I had another fleet manager try to rob me of my kit during a truck change. The other common point of contact is the safety office at the terminals. These seemed pretty competent, but they are up against the law all the time and there has to be something that looks like it is working right.

It was the safety office who terminated me for the parking lot accidents. And the parking lot accidents where the real rot of the whole mess really shows up. My first accident was the direct consequence of being bullied by somebody in a drop yard who would not let me park the truck myself. He and the drop lot manager would not leave me alone. Every time I tried to park in their lots they would be yelling and screaming at me to do this or do that, I had never seen anything like it anywhere. Finally I just surrendered to what the guy was saying only to find that he had deliberately guided me into colliding with a trailer on my blind side, leaving a huge dent in the sleeper cab. The second accident occurred when I had just pulled over for a driver change. I was pulling up and my co-driver slipped into the jump seat and started talking to me as I pulled to halt. Somewhere as he chatted away, I neglected to set the parking brake and the rig silently backed into another trailer. To this day I am convinced that he deliberately distracted me from setting the brake. It was a game I saw played again and again by the rotten driving instructors at the driving school where they trained us. I complained to the insurance company, suggesting to them that they should look for a connection between my co-driver and the driver of the other truck, but nothing came of it. The third parking lot accident was a simple fraud. I tried to back into a spot that was too narrow. I quit and moved to another spot and a security guard came up to me and told me he had two witnesses who saw me hit the mirror on my blind side truck in that narrow slot. But the mirror had obviously been previously damaged. I went through the reporting procedure anyway including my suspicions. When I checked with the insurance company about the claim, I found they never collected. I think they were illegal immigrants or something.

In all cases, I reported my suspicions along with the accident reports.

I could still do it given the opportunity. There is a lot that is miserable in trucking. You see a lot of the country and a lot of cities, but its all the back door. I have seen a lot of beautiful country, but I've also seen a lot of miserable urban rot too. Some of the freight handlers I've done business with were god-awful places to be working for. They made me feel lucky to be living in the back of a semi.

 

Sorry, I'm not posting just to excite anyone's imagination.