New Member

Hello everybody,
My name is Joel and I'm pretty new to the trucking industry. A few years back, my wife and I opened an electronics recycling company in Albuquerque, NM. As the business grew, so did our need to increase the volume of material that was coming in. Being in a fairly rural and spread out State, we decided that the best way to increase public access to "e-waste" disposal was to park 28 foot pup trailers at landfills across the State so that the landfill operators could divert the electronics to the trailers as opposed to landfilling them. The biggest setback to the plan was the fact that we did not have a CDL driver. I stopped at the local MVD and picked up the pre-CDL test handbook, read through it once and went back and took the written tests. Then, I purchased a little daycab truck and rented a 53 foot trailer. I spent the night practicing driving it around our parking lot and backing it up to our docks. The next day, I took the skills test, barely passed and I now have my CDL. In retrospect, I wish that I would have gotten some formal training before I began driving the truck. I am finding that I was horribly under-prepared for many things. These things ranged from simple stuff like flipping the button on the shifter down to get to low gears (I was driving a 10 speed, using gears 6-10 only at first) to really scary stuff, like hitting a Port of Entry without the correct paperwork. At first, I had my truck setup for weight-distance, but I got dinged for that at a Port, so I had to figure out how to convert it to IRP. Somehow in the process of getting my DOT number, the lady that took my paperwork didnt enter any authority. Dinged again at a Port of Entry. Once I had gotten that fixed, I ran my first long-haul (sort of) from Albuquerque to Phoenix. Double whammy this time, my truck was a few pounds overweight according to their scale and I didnt have a log book (10 hour out of service in a day-cab). I didnt realize that I needed a log book as a private hauler, but I guess these are the things that I would have learned if I would have gone to school. I have been very fortunate that most of the time, the guys at the Ports have been very cool and generally let me go with a written warning so that I can correct the issue. So, I now have an accurate log book and I just purchased a truck with dual rear axles that I cannot possibly overweight (at least not with the type of material that I haul). I guess to put it simply, I joined this forum to learn from other drivers. I want to make sure that I am doing things correctly and that I am following all of the rules. Of all of the forums on the internet, this one seems to have a pretty good group of people posting on it and I feel that I can learn a lot here. Please excuse me if I ask questions that are completely amateur or seem like ridiculously simple things.. I am just trying to make myself a better and safer driver. Thanks for reading my little story guys!
-Sierra Mike