Questions about TMC Training

Sounds good cplmac2 I got home from Iowa yesterday I got the honor roll award. I met my trainer today he only lives 10 mins. away so I got really lucky with that one. We head out tommorow morning for New Jersey at 0400 we have a load of shingles to deliver. He seems pretty cool though so I think we will get along.

 

After we dropped off that load of hay in AL we picked up a load of shingles from TAMCO, which was of course over weight. Took that up to Louisville dropped them off and picked up a load of stainless steel, took that up to norhern WI which is where I am sitting right now. We are gonna crash at the customers lot for the night and offload at 6am hopefully. I'm curious to see what we pick up tomorrow. So far training is going well, I have about 2300 miles in and I'm enjoying the job which is easier than I thought it would be.

 

Okay we got the load of stainless steel in northern Wisconsin, then got a message to go repower a load down in Madison headed back up to Minneapolis. My trainer is paid by the mile so all the bouncing is no big deal. We picked up that trailer and swapped all of our gear out and retarped and resecured the load (major pain in the ###) then headed on up to Minneapolis. I got us there about 830pm and we offloaded this morning. We were given a load from the southwest Minneapolis suburbs of shingles (no tarp holy crap) bound for Lincoln, NE. We are currently sitting in the shingle yard about 6 hours early waiting to be loaded. Should be an easy ride to Lincoln from here. They wanted us to route through Des Moines to fuel but that is about 60 miles OOR and we have decided to just fuel in Worthington MN. Everything is going smoothly, the job is better than I expected. Not sold in the least that TMC is the company I want to work for but the job itself is excellent, I really like it. Going to finish training and see how things look, at the moment I plan on staying. I'll keep this thread updated as I roll on. My trainer is on mileage and from the looks of it right now mileage might be the way to go, you get paid all bounce miles on mileage which is a probably worth $100-$200 a week in and of itself. I'm also seeing that a lot of percentage drivers are not getting the high dollar loads. Could very well be coincidence but you know what they say, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

 

Glad to see things working out for ya cplmac2! Things are starting to look up for me here

as well thank god. Hang in there buddy and maybe I'll see ya out there. I will

back out on the road in the next couple of weeks. Be careful out there.

 

Glad to hear it Peanut.

I'm sitting in a rest area just west of Omaha, should be a short 45 minute ride to the customer from here. We grabbed a shower and fuel at the Council Bluffs Pilot and we are going to head in to the customer in the morning. I'm hoping we can get a load of Griffin pipe tomorrow headed out west. Not sure how that's going to pan out but we'll see tomorrow. I'm real happy with the Verizon air card, I was able to watch a couple episodes of 24 and an episode of Heroes while we waited to get loaded with the shingles. If I have time I'll update this tomorrow, got my fingers crossed we get a west coast load tomorrow. It will keep us out over the weekend but it'd be worth it to take a nice ride to the pacific northwest. See you all tomorrow.

9 days into training (including the past weekend at home) and I've got a little over 3000 miles of wheel time which definitely makes me happy.

 

Good to hear it! I guess I will be purchasing an air card myself. Are you using any

mapping software yet? If so what kind?

 

Well things didn't pan out as I had hoped. We were lucky enough to have the customer unload us before 9am despite us having a delivery time of by 4pm. Unfortunately when we got unloaded dispatch informed us there were no loads in the area. So they routed us back to Des Moines for fuel and a load. Well when the yard crew did their walk around at the fuel pump they apparently saw two tires they felt needed replacing and they decided to fix the power steering leak that has been ongoing for a month and a half. I'm glad they decided to fix the truck though as last night I had my scale cherry popped in northwest IA where they were checking log books only. Our weight would have been fine but a DOT would have probably put this truck out of service for the power steering leak. It's best to get it fixed as soon as possible. Looks like we will be layed over at Club TMC tonight though. I'll update when our status changes.

 

The truck finally came out of the shop today, unfortunately there weren't really any loads. They moved us towards IL and called us en-route to tell us they had a load coming by the trainers place that we were going to swap out with. Steel plate headed to KC, we'll be back on the road Sunday.

 

Good hearing from you cplmac2, sounds like you are getting a good feel of what the road is all about . Good luck and welcome to the Black & Crome!! Keeps us posted and we will see you on the road.

 

cplmac2 congrats on ur success. The 5 weeks will go by quick, it did for me at least. We had similar stuff happen, busy then slow and sitting for hours waiting for work. I'll update my thing on here now I think.