Personality for trucking and getting lost?

i remember being told by intructors at cdl school " you will quit two or three times a day for the first month at least" not just one intructor but almost every instructor said the same thing. i have not passed the state skills testing yet but hope to this saturday the 12th. my first choice is not hiring in my area due to loss of freight contract ( mill closed). i am looking at moving 1600 miles after completing state test for better opportunities with the companies i am interested in. hope all goes well saturday.----lockednloaded

 

You'll fit right in probably. You'll get lost. You'll have to turn a big truck around. You'll have a lot of paperwork. You have to tell people where you are going to be, and when you are going to be there.

If you hit something, you can loose more than your job. You will be working a lot of hours. The odds of bad things happening go up dramatically if you try to figure out everything on your own, or forget your training when you need it.

When you love to drive, nothing will bother you, because you know what you have to do. If you make one little mistake, expect all of us to remind you, because our lives depend on it.

 

The best way I can answer your question is to relate my own experiences from Feb 2007 to Aug 2007. Having followed my wife to Iowa for her to take her dream job, I became unemployed after 5 years of working for the government. I too loved to drive, and after sitting in a town of 10,000 with no job for six months I responded to an ad for MCT truck driving school thinking it would be a good way for me to get a job eventually with a local trucking company.

MCT's four trainers taught me how to drive a truck and what the rules were and three weeks later I had my CDL and a contract to drive for a year or pay $2500 for my training. I still think MCT did a good job of training me to drive the truck during school and a good job of teaching me the FMCSA rules. I think they could have been more forthcoming about the realities of driving solo for them but that will be a story for part II or part III of this story.

For now I will relate that I started my 25,000 miles of minimum codriving training a week or so after passing my state CDL test and for nine weeks I drove from Sioux Falls, SD to Fontana, CA delivering a 3M load to the Conway yard in Fontana. The first night out I became really concerned when I realized I was expected to drive through my first night otr with my "trainer" sleeping in the bunk. I communicated my discomfort and my very good trainer stopped for the night at the rest area near Chamberlain, SD. We had only left Sioux Falls about 5 PM. Next morning I started driving and that was the only night ever in my training that I didn't team drive. I drove mostly at night from when my trainer was tired or timed out (usually 9 PM on the first night out) and shifts rotated according to HOS rules the remainder of the trip but with me heavily weighted towards night shift driving.

I enjoyed team driving with my trainer ( he was a very fair guy with me) but I found it hard to understand how making me drive every night while I struggled to stay awake (since sleeping in a moving tuck with conservative talk show hosts yelling out their gospel wasn't easy for me) was the safest way to train me. Running this semi dedicated route allowed me to ease into solo driving responsibilities taking on more responsibilities as the weeks went on, but ultimately gave me unrealistic expectations of trucking since we had three days off each week before we went again. In general, the only time our truck stopped in nine weeks was for fuel and the occasional casino stop outbound in Jean, NV. All loads into Fontana were 1 to 3 AM trailer drops taking less than 1 hr and we picked up our empty either from Conway or 3M a few blocks away. Pickups in LA were generally 7 AM Saturday morning and we were on our way back home by 10 AM.

Backhauls from Los Angeles provided opportunities for learning "real world trucking" and my favorite pickup was at CountrySide Baking where a blindside back in "too close quarters" tested my new skills to their limits.

This memory also reminds me of the perils of GPS because I ran with microsoft streets and trips from day one, and it is the only thing that kept me sane while learning my route into LA while my trainer was generally asleep (He did have me wake him up when we got to the top of the hill going down into LA on 15 the first time). But on this night at 3 AM in LA I had failed to check for toll roads on my S&T mapped out route and came right up on one with no cash in my pocket. That was fun. Go past the exit for toll road, take too small exit across overpass under construction to turn around, nearly drop trailer tires into 15 inch deep hole where concrete used to be, park on on ramp to refigure route, punt!

I later (after weeks of solo driving) graduated to driving with laptop and Garmin NUVI 680 running all the time (and even later added a low clearance map of Chicago provided by my second trucking company) because each one has its strong points and I didn't want to have to call 911 on myself again (Chicago) to get a police escort away from another too low train overpass.

My 10th week of training ran me to the East Coast for that experience and boy was it different than the mindless West Coast driving I was getting spoiled by. My 11th week found me solo with a trip from Sioux Falls,SD to Dover, DE with a trailer of cardboard boxes for Kraft Foods. Map that one on streets and trips and see how much fun that first test of my nerves was running through Lancaster, PA in a semi with a 53 foot trailer.

I spent the next five weeks solo and out while wondering if I would ever be allowed to go home. I finally got home and one week later I quit after becoming frustrated with continued poor communication from my dispatcher. If there is interest I can relate all of the things that drove me crazy in a later post. I'll also tell the story of trucking company number two if interest exists. Just let me know.

Bottom line, "trucking" is not driving. I love the driving part. I don't love the trucking part. You had control over your destiny when driving the uhaul. That's what entices us all. You will have control over nothing as a company driver. After only 15 weeks of driving, I payed MCT my $2500 to buy out my contract and went home wondering what to do next. Let me know if you want to hear the rest of the story.

Respectfully,

BRI

 

Ok, lets get some more details here about MCT's training and my first (partial) year of driving.

As I have already said, I think MCT's training program was good and not too long. I don't know what these six month long trade school programs give you that takes that long. We started with something like 16 students and over the first few days of class students started disappearing, which of course meant rumors about why they left started surfacing. It isn't like the instructors came right out and told us why each student left. I'll try to sum up the losses in categories.

The women. We started class with two women. One older woman and one younger woman. Both were sent home but for different reasons. At the time I remember being quite disappointed thinking that MCT should have tried harder to keep them and work through their learning problems. After being solo and seeing the kind of responsibility a driver has to master, I'm not so sure it wasn't the best thing for everybody. The young woman apparently could not get shifting down. I thought at the time MCT should have had an automatic available to see how she handled the driving responsibilities absent shifting. Afterall, I spent all of my 5-6 weeks solo with MCT driving an auto Volvo. My 25,000 miles team "training" with MCT was in a 18 speed Peterbilt. The older woman apparently could not handle decision making under stress. She would freeze up. If this was true, she needed to be sent home because she could never handle real world trucking safely.

The guys. All guys who did not graduate left because they started to figure out that we would not be getting home as often as recruiting let us believe. I say "let us believe" because all newbies including myself came to MCT with profoundly inaccurate expectations of otr trucking. In part, I think this is because we either don't know any truckers or the truckers we do know have 20 years seniority and get to cherry pick their hauls. We also naively think driving a truck is about driving. It isn't. We also were led to believe that we would be able to choose our hauls from a choice of three. I never got to choose from three. I never got to choose from two.

SIDE NOTE: I did one time get to pick a load from Iowa to California to see my old stomping ground at Conway in Fontana. This gift was bestowed upon me because I ran a JIT load from Freemont, NE to Wichita, KS through a tornado WARNING when I was supposed to be on a 34 hour restart 30 miles from my house and my wife had already picked me up (I had permission to leave my rig at my consignee) and I had been up all day at about 5 PM when I get a call I didn't know better than to answer. My dispatcher pretty much told me I had to go even though I had been up all day!. I had been solo something like three weeks at that point. I can't remember exactly what kind of games I played with my logbook to appear legal on that trip to Freemont. I remember leaving too early to be legal because I wanted to run to Freemont in daylight and I knew that horrible storm was coming. After 120 mile deadhead to Freemont, waiting several hours to make my logbook really legal again, and leaving around midnight, I got to Wichita about 9 AM the next morning. I'd been awake something in excess of 30 hours except for a couple hour nap in Freemont. MCT never told me to drive illegal. That was a no-no especially since their trouble with Uncle Sam. And I admit that this trip could have been run completely logbook legal but for my choice to run the first section in daylight to help keep me awake when I should have been sleeping. But the reality is driver's are always making decisions that compromise both the law and our safety and that of others because dispatchers only see numbers on a computer screen and every minute that we are on a 10 hour or longer break we are expected to be asleep until one minute before we are dispatched. Real life does not work like this. That is why reliable preplans (that aren't taken away at the last minute) are so desireable. That is also why so many drivers want dedicated routes!

Back to training...
I remember sitting in class with my laptop (ya, they all made fun of me for that but it sure was useful) running spreadsheets to calculate how much money I could make running 70 hours per week. We would all talk about these fantasy dollar signs in hearing distance of the instructors and not once did any instructor ever wise us up that we would be spending untold hours waiting on loading, unloading, and dispatch orders. And this is the nexus where driving becomes trucking so dreamers pay attention (when I get to this topic).

We trained half of each day in the classroom and half in a truck. When the class was full at first we would have four students and one instructor in each truck. Later as the students left, we would have more time in the driver's seat. I made friends in school and enjoyed the atmosphere even though it is stressful to memorize the pretrip responsibilities. Because I was an out of state student I had to go back to Iowa to get my CDL otherwise the head instructor was a designated examiner for SD and could have tested me at the end of class. That would have been eaiser because I would not have had to arrange access to someone elses semi tractor for my test.

Pre CDL test training at MCT culminates in a 500 mile drive from Sioux Falls, SD out to a little past Chamberlain, SD and back. It is a good drive and builds confidence. I think we had 6 or 7 0f 16 students graduate. One apparently immediately wrote his $2500 check and went home because his wife was not happy with him being gone even for the three weeks of class.

Post CDl training puts you in a semi with a training driver from your truck owner's fleet of drivers. MCT works differently in that MCT owns the trailers, leases the trucks from owners, many of whom have multiple trucks and hire drivers to drive them. Because the profit is split three ways between MCT, the truck owner, and the driver, MCT does not pay as much as many other companies. I earned 26 cpm solo. The company that owned my truck said 28 cpm was the max they payed their MCT drivers no matter how many years of service. I earned something like 11 cpm for every mile the truck was dispatched on while training for my 25,000 miles (promiles). This is so little money that I often wondered how people who came to MCT to make a living could even feed themselves. I confess my wife pays the bills at my house. I earned $4,795 total gross pay for the entire time (10 weeks training and 5 or so weeks solo) at MCT. That was from February 4, 2007 when class started until to June 20, 2007 when I finally gave up and turned in my truck. While I wasn't otr everyday for this period, I was ready and able to work every day during this period except 1 week. Will this pay your bills? That is only $320 per week of driving!!! This number would be even less if I counted school time. And remember, I wrote a $2500 check to get out of my contract. Can you afford this type of financial risk???

Any questions? Part III to come...

BRI

 

I'm quite interested in this topic. Trucking is a very stressful job, no doubt. I would like to get some more examples of "handling decision making under stress." Thx.

 

Stress level or not, I love this job. I wouldn't trade it for anything. . . except maybe a better company. Or a job as a computer hacker.

We don't avoid getting lost. You WILL get lost. Finding your way back is like solving a puzzle. In big cities like New York or Detroit or Chicago, when the you know what hits the fan, it's probably best to call the police for an escort. In most other places, identify areas you can turn around in, or imagine the spot you blew past, draw a box in your head around that point, and identify the major streets. Look for roads that look like they lead back to the interstate. Sometimes you screw up.

 

While following the mostly bad directions your given and you miss that narrow street you where told to turn on and there is no place you can turn around for miles (legal or not). You finely arrive on time and you end up in a line of 10 to 20 trucks in front of you. Now you have to sit and wait to get to the dock. Of course it's break time for the warehouse staff now you still have to wait. Your dispatcher is asking if your done or why your not rolling? You finely are rolling but your hours are up so now you have to fine someplace to park for the next 10 hours. You are not allowed to park at the facility there are no parking signs posted all over. You fine a truck stop and it is full. So you drive a little further down the road looking for a place to park and wondering if you'll fine some place and still be legal?

 

On to Company number two.

After quitting MCT and writing that $2500 check I took some time (about a month) to sit and wonder what to do next. I applied for a job at JB Hunt and was scheduled for orientation but they wanted me to take a 27 hour bus ride to Lowell, AR and I just couldn't see doing this. The inconvenience was immediate and the risk that things would not work out for me (given my personality and given all the bad press JB Hunt has) was too great. Thus I declined their invitation at the last moment and stayed home.

On a whim I went and talked to a local trucking company with about 300 trucks and asked if they would be interested in me. I had talked to them before while I was in team training at MCT and I just wasn't prepared to write that $2500 check yet so I stayed with MCT. I also did not believe them when they said they ran full 48 as I had been driving the West for 6 weeks at that point and had never seen any of their trucks. I also was afraid of giving up the known quantity of my MCT trainer for the unknown of building a new relationship with a new trainer from the new company.

Now, I was surprised to find out that I could start orientation the next day. Wow! I must really be worth something afterall.

Training went fine and after a week out and back to the East Coast my first trainer told the bosses he couldn't teach me anything I didn't already know. I plan all my trips on Microsoft Streets and Trips and I run with my NUVI 680 because it does auto recalculates if I deviate from its proposed routes. I check all non interstate routes against the low clearance charts in one of my three atlases I carry. I use three because sometimes I want details and sometimes I want big picture info so I chose accordingly.

Next came a week of local with a new trainer who also realized very quickly I knew all about city deliveries and dealing with tight spaces. I had been very well trained by this point.

So off I went solo. I soon discovered that the reefer business is a horrible business to be in for someone like myself who has issues with working for free and needs his HOS rules mandated 10 consecutive hours of off time to be a safe and happy trucker. I discovered that getting paid for detention time was not going to happen. I discovered that this company requires me to contact brokers directly, that all backhauls were brokered, that preplans from brokers can be taken away without cause, that I would spend anywhere from 3 to 10 hours waiting for loading or unloading, and that my brokered loads were so tightly schedlued that I could never deliver them on time unless I logged every hour at the shipper as part of my 10 hours consecutive off duty hours. That wouldn't be so bad if you could actually be in your truck and sleeping but that isn't the case most of the time. It is especially not the case when you have lumpers telling you that you will be unloaded in an hour and two hours later they havn't even started your trailer. Argh!

I remember asking the head of safety and his underling during each of my three interviews whether I would have to drive illegal with their company. They never directly answered my question. Instead they each told me a well rehearsed story. It went like this. "Well, if you are only 15 minutes from your consignee when you are timed out we would like to see you finish your load since it is only fair that if you were 15 minutes from our home base here we wouldn't violate you for coming home instead of parking your rig at the truckstop one town over and waiting 10 hours to be logbook legal." Heck, that sounded pretty reasonable. Reality was never thereafter that simple.

Now for the behind the scenes real story about driving illegal. If you haul a reefer, you will have to do one of these things to get to your consignee on time: Drive illegal (or at least tired because you logged time you spent unloading as part of your 10 hours off) after being held so long at the shipper that you are hours behind the computer schedule the broker has scheduled you by; call your dispatch and tell them you can't make it and need to reschedule your delivery.

The company I was working for does not tolerate late deliveries! Period! At least that was the mesage they communicated to me crystal clear when on my first day I heard the owner of the company yelling at his office employees that two drivers had just cost the company an account because they were late. Owner stated he wanted a Qualcom message sent to all drivers that late deliveries would result in loss of the driver's quarterly safety bonus. The employee being yelled at asked if that meant all cases of late deliveries or just late deliveries that were the drivers fault. The Qualcom message came out that week saying late deliveries caused by drivers fault would cost the safety bonus. My safety director told me I didn't have to drive illegal but told me I should expect to really piss off my dispatcher if I called in and said I could not make it all the time. I can't remember a backhaul that could have been driven legally and still meet the schedule. I drove for this company for about 6 weeks before I gave up and turned in my truck after a realy horrible night at the Supervalu wearhouse in the twin Cities of MN.

On that night I had not been warned I would need lumper money. I showed up for my 11 PM delivery at 9:30 PM. I struggled in the dark to figure out were I was to go. Signage was non existant and GPS addresses on very large corporate complexes can deliver you and your 75 foot rig right down a deadend residential street on the opposite side of where semis are supposed to be.

Once I found the first guard shack I drove up only to be told I needed to go to the other guard shack a 1/4 mile away. I turned around in very tight quarters at the east yard and went to the west yard. After sitting in line for 45 minutes, this guard told me I needed to go back to the East yard but not until I was called on the radio. Ok? I can't sleep because I have to listen for the radio but my company expects me to log this time as the start of my 10 hours off duty. Boy trucking sure is fun....

At 1 AM I am called on the CB and told to go to the East yard again. I get there and have an extra 2MM in which to back my trailer into my dock. It is very dark. I am very tired. I do an excellent job. Elated, I go inside and find Hell awaiting me. I need lumper money. I have no lumper money. I was not told I would need lumper money. I only have access to an on-call dispatcher who apparently "works" from home while he is asleep. I refuse to call him because last time I woke him up he was a complete ### to me and told me he would have to go to the office to get me a comcheck number because he couldn't do it from home and I should have been better prepared.

SideNote: (I need to say here that trucking company #2 would not let me carry roll-over truck money. I either used it on a per trip basis or it got charged to my paycheck. This was unacceptable to me so I thereafter never asked for truck money I couldn't use immediately. I funded small stuff from my own pocket like scales and blind bills of lading until I got yelled at for doing so. Then I just stopped doing things that required money until I got a comcheck. This meant I might spend an hour getting scaled when adding up comcheck time to scaling especially if multiple reweighs were needed. Yep, I never got paid a penny for my time scaling or out-of-route miles for scales.)

back to my story...
It takes me about 1 hour to negotiate with the lumpers for payment in the morning but unloading now. I definately did not want to have to back into that dock again. The lumpers take a few pallets off my truck in a couple of hours, tell me I can't have my paperwork until I deliver their check in the morning, and tell me they aren't sure where the rest of my load is supposed to go but they don't want it there.

I go back to the West guard shack parking area and thank goodness at 3 AM or so there is still one spot open. I send my dispatcher a qualcom relating my personal Hell and ask for money. In the morning I get my comcheck info, get sent a mile away to another SuperValu wearhouse where they think it is funny to tell me I can't be unloaded because I don't have an appointment. I just walk away. They say "Hey, we're just kidding." I back into my spot. There are like 5 docks and no other trucks. I am greatful. I am unloaded an hour or so later.

I am now sent to pick up a load 40 miles away. I can't find the place because they have no sign. My GPSs are both telling me to load in a field. I try calling for the thirds time and finally get directions to an entrance on a street 90 degrees offset and by a different name than the GPS address I had been given. I can't get the guy in the caged in office to talk to me. I go back to my truck. I call for the fourth time and tell the lady the guy in the shipping office won't talk to me. She asks if he saw me. I say "unless he is blind." I am told to go back inside and Mr silent is now talking to his boss. His boss asks him why he didn't help me. He says "I don no." I get no apology. I am told my trailer should be dropped and my new trailer is number XXXX. I am handed a broom and told to sweep my old trailer before dropping it or to go to a washout. I figure it is easier to sweep. Roughly one hour later I am ready to drive again. Driving is the only thing I ever get paid for.

I have been paid about 40 miles times 29 cpm (and yes this company paid practical miles) since 9:30 last night. I have had maybe 4 hours of sleep. My logbook says I have had 10. I will be barely able to make it to my destination on time which thankfully is a local company near our yard. I send a Qualcom message to my dispatcher asking if my company can offer me a dedicated route. He says no. I send him a message telling him I am turning in my truck. I get met at the yard by head of safety. He walks around my truck looking for the damage that must be making me want to quit. He says my dispatcher doesn't understand why I am unhappy. He tells me I should have aTV in my truck. He doesn't try really hard to keep me. I go home wondering why the trucking industry has to be this way. I am educated enough to know greed and incompetence are the only answers that make any sense.

I am unemployed again. I admit I am the problem. I can afford to not work. Trucking companies don't like that because I won't take their crap. Trucking companies can't by definition be the problem because they publish the dictionary.

Anyone still think being a driver is all great scenery and fun? I got a logbook full of more stories like this one.

I will not name this company because I have no desire to make waves with them in particular. They did a lot of things right like pay practical miles and get me home every week even if it was during the week and my wife was at work. They also offer medical insurance which MCT didn't. If you can stand the cold storage wearhouse business, you would probably do well with them. I don't think I ever would have left if they could have assigned me to vans or if the brokered load business didn't create market realities they couldn't control. I also should never have asked to get home every week because it meant I spent a lot of time doing tiny little trips to get back home. And just because you are only driving 100 miles doesn't mean it will take less than 6 hours to load your trailer. You still only get 29 dollars before taxes for a day of work.

BRI