Post your bad trainer experiences here

I work part time as a switcher at a cardboard mill and we have Schneider driver/trainers come in every day. I have yet to see one that did not get out of the truck and watch the trainee back in and provide hand signals for him/her. I always talk to them first and then give the trainees the biggest hole to back in and tell the trainer to go ahead and back in and out of the tighter ones if they want to get some practice.

 

My trainer at Swift was John Dingle. He had driven a flatbed for years and was pretty easy to get along with although my having served in the military then graduating from college might have have something to do with my not taking any grief. The first week he got perturbed about something, I forget what, and said something like "maybe you aren't cut out to be a driver" and I told him maybe he wasn't cut out to be a trainer. Pretty much ended that. The first thing he said to me when I met him was two part and I have never forgotten it:
1) Give me enough rope and I can tie down a load of water. Always use one more strap, chain or rope than you think you need.
2) No load is worth you life. If you don't feel safe, stop. If you don't like the way the customer is putting it on the trailer stop them. Your the Captain of your ship, not some guy behind a computer 1,000 miles away so screw them. Do what you feel is safe and never let anyone force you into an unsafe situation, you can always get another job (sic)
we drove from Phoenix to Fontana and back. Every week. When I got a little tired of this and told him I wasn't learning anything other than how to strap down t-bar he called our boss and we still went to SoCal and back because he needed to be home to look after his daughter on the weekends but we changed up and picked up concrete, steel rolls, sheetrock etc...
I had a good experience with him with one exception. He told me that when all of his trainee's got off the truck he bought them a steak dinner to celebrate and over 20yrs later I'm still waiting

 

I dont know how werner still in business.☻

 

OK I'll tell mine but it has been something like 18 months ago.

This guy is a lease operator for Swift but has huge disrespect for the Swift company drivers. He'd hold his hands like Handi-Man on In Living Colour then make 'dooyy doy' noise and gestures every time he saw a Swift truck. Yeah that's professional. Then he'd ask me if I thought he made enough money to buy a house. I told him of course, he's an owner operator! Turns out his income was the same as those company drivers he denigrated and therefore could not qualify to buy a house in spite of working for Swift for over 7 years straight at that time. So he would buy lottery scratchers every time we pulled over. I'd pull the oil dipstick and show him that it was dog dry, "That's OK", he said because he was getting an oil change next week and he didn't want to spend $50 bucks on oil but lottery tickets instead. I brought my gambling books from home and showed him that scratchers have the same odds as slot machines which are heavily favored to the house. Crickets. When he came back to the truck later I happily informed him that the truck passed the air brake test, he said "don't do that you might break something, and this is a brand new truck, you don't need to do pretrips or air brake tests".

He'd leave the stereo very loud, the CB squelch all the way down also very loud static, then like to talk on his phone using the speaker feature. He'd yell above the din to assure me that it was legal because it was on 'speaker!'

He got a bloody nose one day so I grabbed the only thing available which was a roll of paper towels. He'd wipe his nose then toss the towels out the window. Finally shoved a paper towel up his nostril then called his ole lady to inform her.

I only slept on the bottom bunk once after I found a couple of soda bottles with questionable content rolling around the bed.

He got his first bill for his new fancy smartphone then called customer service while driving to dispute the bill. He never let them finish their explanation before yelling that he wanted their supervisor. Got through about 3 people the final guy told him he had subscribed to some porno sites as to why his bill was so high lol.

I was driving one day in Seattle, we are at a stop light, he says go up that hill. I say, 'sign says "no trucks over 10,000 empty"', he says, "we're empty, good to go". Duh. Slight rain, of course slipped out halfway up the 21% grade hill. Had to back down to a live intersection and get out of there.

He has me call guardshack once on CB, I get on and say "Breaker 1-9 for Guardshack", he goes ballistic-- "Nobody says that, give me that mic!" lol or the time he told me to call the terminal for a trailer location, I asked, "permission to return to base?" he announced he's an owner operator and asks no one for any permission for anything.

A couple hundred hours into my training they send a message for new policy stating students can be turned out at 240 hours, he was upset because that shortens the teaming time with students therefore lowers his income. He kept me on the truck the full 300 hours.

No sense of humor. I bought ice cream sometimes, he'd ask why, I said I hate it but my doctor prescribes it.

Some months later he asked me to team with him due to his last 5 students quitting on him the first week out. Of course he burned me on the pay. I had also said I wanted to shower more often than when we were in training. No go. One trip that I remember, we got to the consignee over 12 hours early and they would not take the load til appointment time.I asked why he didn't stop at the truck stop back there or go back there now, he had talked himself into believing they would take it early without confirming it lol. So here we are with no food, no showers because he was too cheap the run the truck back to the truck stop.

During training he told me never split break because it benefits the company only never the driver so never do it. So teaming up, he was trying to get his 34 finished, I drove 10.25 hours to the place, of course 7 something hours early. So we got unloaded I told him just a little while longer sitting I will have 8 hours off for the split then we can to the truck stop. He says log 30 minutes pretrip, I say the truck stop is 30 minutes away and I only have 45 minutes left. He insisted I had 3 hours left-- "You can drive 13.25 hours a day" he said. I just drove to the truck stop and logged it legal.

Guy had ADD really bad. They would send us 750 mile loads and he'd turn them down every time. "I don't want less than 1000 miles." Always obsessed with 34's take 2 a week if he could lol but wonder why we could only get no more than 5000 miles. We'd get a nice long load, and he'd already be thinking about Tcalling it someplace so we might maybe get some other long load. I explained that 750 miles a day, we'd never need a reset and get as many miles as we do now. Crickets.

He had BOL's stacked up ash deep on the dash and sometimes lost them.
Instead of scanning them as we emptied out, 'we don't have time for that', he'd wait til we had to scan our logs once a week and take this huge stack of papers in to get scanned then we'd get the 'look' from the other truckers.

We'd score team FedEx loads out of Fresno CA to Seattle or Spokane but it was hard to get routed back to Fresno from up there. He was so deadset to get on this account, why I don't know because it was so spotty trying to get back down. So this one load we are about to take has a pallet of hazmat stacked precariously, he gets someone involved, they have to rework the load, anyway, so now we'll be late. They reschedule and say no rush just get it there. So I drive the first shift all night, 55 miles an hour for 10 hours we are about 8.0 mpg, he takes over and when I wake up it's down to 6.4, I ask what happened? He says he had to make up for my lost time by speeding through Oregon. I asked, what lost time? He said he wanted to get a feather in his cap for making the original time schedule lol. I just rolled my eyes, does this guy really think they care that he spent $200 extra dollars of his own fuel to get it there any quicker when they already said no rush?

We were running legitimately late on another load coming down to Cali, he stopped at the scale in Dunsmuir, I woke up and asked him what's up, he said 'shhh' and called his DM to declare we were being Level III'd, that we would be late on the load. Then he had me got fetch some hot water for his ramen noodles as if I'm his little boybi0tch lol, I filled it in the men's bathroom and brought it back to him. Beings, I hadn't had a shower in 4 days, I grabbed my bag and clothes and locked myself in the women's bathroom and got a spongebath and shave on.

He was driving when when we emptied out over in Chesapeake VA someplace, I routed him back out via I64-I664 but he missed the exit due to talking on the phone, so the atlas showed it was OK to keep going around I64 through Norfolk to Hampton and beyond so he kept going. Just before the bridge, they have this height indicator with bells and whistles. We were empty so set it off as too high. He was mad at me for routing him that way lol. He saw two other trucks allowed to go across the bridge and turned around and went back of course bells went off again and the bridge guy was very upset that we had disobeyed his order to turn around. I had to play go-between and got us out of there without a ticket. He was mad for hours about the 60 miles out of route on that one that was his own fault.

We picked up a nail in one of the drive tires, he couldn't afford to fix it or get a new tire, so he got a loan from Swift to purchase all new tires, but spent the money to take his ole lady and her son to DisneyWorld.

One day his GPS died, so I was driving southbound in Salt Lake City, directions said to turn west at such and such street. So I line up in the right lane he asks me what the H am I doing, west is that way, pointing to the far left lanes, "right?" I shook my head indicating 'no', he got irate and ordered me into the left turn lane. Before it turned green he told me to cross the solid white line and continue south to the next light and make a right. Of course we were lost now, I suggested working our way back out to the main drag and turning then left on the proper street, he used his powerful natural homing instincts to guide us deeper into this residential neighborhood. Then we come upon a big Napa sign , he declares, 'we're here!' But it was the wrong place of course and he had me go in the exit and of course there was no place to turn around in here save for a blind side back near some dumpsters, to line us up to leave out the proper exit. But no, he told me to leave out the entry. Of course the trailer tandems went across the grass which is why they don't want big trucks going out that way.

Forgot to mention he got a parking ticket for blocking a No Parking sign. He argued with the cop that he was spending money in the local establishment, therefore paying the cops salary. He got the ticket and was PO'd about it. When he didn't have a student on his truck they would disable his qualcomm while driving but he took that personally like they were against him or something. He thought it should be on all the time, afterall he's a professional mentor and all. Generally he didn't think the rules of life applied to him.

He wanted me to take over his lease truck payments, so he could go lease another truck. Trouble I had with it was his check engine light would sometimes turn to stop engine light. His solution? Turn the truck on and off 10 times usually clears that dash light off. I open the hood during one of these times, he yells "Close the hood, bro!" I'm like 'excuse me, you want to to buy this truck and I can't check it out?' Then he springs his plan, I give him $0.10 cents per mile and he takes care of my maintenance. I ask why, he says I need his help to get a lease truck, can't do it on my own so I gotta kick back. When we got back for hometime I took my stuff off his truck and got my own lease truck on my own merit. I saw the guy a couple times in the terminals looking unshowered and disheveled as ever.

 

The only thing i remember about training is how bad the seat smelled after my trainer sat in it for 11 hours streight....that's right 11 hours streight. Then he would turn on the lights and music and yell "Time to switch" He would get up and BAM !!!! a big 'ol stench coming from the seat, that smelled like pure hot moist crap!!!