Starting soon with SNI. Tips/Warnings?

I have seen a lot of posts by you so I am honored that you would reply to mine as well. I am shocked by the level of community here and simultaneously grateful for it. Thank you for taking the time and effort to give me insight on where I should be looking. I truly appreciate you.

 

It is a team home depot route

 

That might pay ok then. Home time may be better than FFE, but not positive about that.
You can made lots more money with FFE teaming on the plasma account. I think @TravR1 made around $90K for his cut of the team pay. If I remember correctly, that was his first job out of cdl school.

 

Hang in there, the fun is just beginning!

 

Well, HD is pretty cool. The only problem I ever had with the was from time to time I had to do a double drop and hook.....drop your inbound load in the yard, hook to the empty in the door, drop that in the yard, pick up your inbound load and put it to the door, then go back and hook to your empty. But, it was mostly pretty casual. You can usually park behind the store at night if you need to.

I've never been a fan of team driving. I got my fill of it one week when I was starting out with Millis. There are very, very few interstates that are smooth enough to sleep on. Furthermore, I never cared to have someone else in the truck with me. People around here know me and they know how much I love my wife. But she rode with me twice and almost got put out twice.
But people are different. There's lots of folks who have never done anything other than team driving. So, I guess it works for them.

I wish you the best. Schneider is a pretty good place to start. I stayed there 12 years.
Hopefully you'll get the miles to justify a team operation. Perhaps you might inquire if a solo spot is open.

Good luck

 

First thing is it won't be 80 hours, as you'll need a restart each weak. I would plan on 60 hours, I also thought the training pay per hour was higher, but I stopped paying attention to it.

The CDL training you'll get with Schneider is top notch, but you will have an automatic restriction on your license. If you can swing it, I would go to an outside school and pass the CDL with a manual transmission. It's not a huge deal anymore, but I find folks that learned how to drive a manual CMV do better over time.

The mileage quote is pretty reliable, especially if its for a dedicated account. The HD account out there is pretty well run and has pretty low turnover, both of the trainers on the account are good dudes as well. The difference between what the recruiter told you and the glassdoor reviews are the individual drivers. I did 2,500 miles last week in 5 days despite twiddling my thumbs for most of Wednesday due to a series of mistakes by Ops. Drivers who plan their trips and communicate their availability have no problem getting the miles. It's the drivers who don't pay attention to appointment times, their HOS, their route selection, etc that struggle getting the miles. A simple thing like stopping short to avoid evening rush hour, then getting up early to get through a major city before rush hour starts can make a huge difference. Or vice versa - pushing one truck stop further might make it possible to drive an addition 150 miles on day two.

Regardless of where you get your license from or who you start with:

• LISTEN. The instructors aren't talking because they like the sound of their voice. They're telling you things that you're going to need to understand
• ASK QUESTIONS. Don't be worried about looking foolish for asking dumb questions. Yeah, your question might be dumb, but if you don't know the answer you'll end up doing something stupid, and I'd rather be thought dumb than stupid.
  
• LEARN WHY. Don't just memorize the answers, learn why the answer is correct and why people think it's important enough to test you on it.
• WATCH. Watch others as they work their skills, see what works well and what doesn't. See how the mistakes get fixed, or better yet how the mistake got made in the first place.
• OWN YOUR LEARNING. Take responsibility for learning your craft, don't wait to be spoon fed.

A last thought, stick around TTR. We're a bunch of sarcastic billy goat gruffs, but once you get past the rough edges we're actually quite cuddly.

 

First time I ever caught @gentleroger .
Dude, you know better. You can work 180 hours a week so long as you're not driving. I imagine a good bit of that 80 hours is getting unloaded. Which begs the question......"who's on duty when they're unloading?"
Nope. Not me. I split nothing with nobody.
Merry Christmas, @gentleroger !

 

Ah, but they are driving during training, so 10 hour breaks and all that jazz. With me, I make sure my guy's 70 is cashed when we're done because I want him making as much as possible.

As for "who's on duty when they're unloading?" - me, as soon as I have enough time on my 70 to get back to the house. We now get paid for all time spent on line 4, so it's in my best interest to a) maximize miles and b) maximize line 4 time. Before, you just logged as conservatively as you could get away with, and if there was unused time on the 70, no big deal. Now, leaving time on your 70 is leaving money on the table. I logged 27 hours of line 4 time this week, under the old pay scale it would have been 6 - 10 hours, max. I also need to try to have no time left to do load and stages at the end of the week, because those now pay out at an overall rate of $18/hr, instead of the $40/hr they used to.

Merry Christmas to you too.

 

F that. So what happened if you didn't make 1200 every day? Drove team my first gig. Never. Again c

 

I always wondered how that worked. Because in my mind, if you're sitting in the passenger seat, "training", and getting paid for that training, then wouldn't you be on duty"?
Not throwing rocks at all, just asking.