UPSF in Central PA?

Got the official word on Thursday that everything came back clean, so I'm hired. The next road driver class starts on the 10th and it sounds like that runs all week, then I'll be with a trainer/mentor for a week at my terminal.

So I was told that I will need either black or brown boots that are able to be polished -- I would rather wear black. What do most guys tend to wear, if there is a common style, and do they need to be safety toe? I just want something comfortable and not too heavy, at least for the warmer months.

 

Thanks, DOT. First day of orientation at Harrisburg went great. There are only 4 of us in there and the trainer is a really laid back and friendly guy. I'm the only road driver in the group for the York terminal, the other three will be working out of Harrisburg. Apparently York only has about 6 or 7 road drivers, so it is no doubt a very small terminal with only a handful of runs. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

 

About done with all the orientation stuff and found out I'll be starting with a trainer on Monday night. I also found out that every run out of my terminal is a mini-hub run. We're an end of line terminal, very small, and for some reason we just don't get any long out and back or meet and turn runs. It also looks like the city guys share tractors with the road drivers. Some things that don't look so great about working at this type of terminal. On the upside, there's no chance of having to do a sleeper team run and there won't be 200+ guys on the board ahead of me. Not sure exactly what to expect yet.

 

Going to be running YOR to HRS and back to YOR all night on Monday. Looks like it will probably be about 3 total round trips at least, so I should get plenty of practice hooking and unhooking a set. Since it's less than 50 miles it will be all hourly so it'd be nice if I get to stick around for more than 8 hours and get some OT.

I don't think this will be a bad gig as long as I can get the hours, don't have any accidents, and can get into the habit of all the protocol and policies. I'm most nervous about missing something on the t-con(?) sheet, like overlooking a trailer number, seal, or hazmat. Also, just remembering to go alternate routes for table 1 hazmats (we have tunnels between here and PTG). A little nervous about working the dock at a mini-hub, too -- I have no forklift experience and judging by the look of the one I was on for about 10 minutes on Friday, it looks like they often play bumper cars. It just seems like there's a lot of opportunity to really screw up since there's such an overwhelming amount of info in such a short period of time. I plan to go through all this slowly at first until I get it all down.

They really stress going slow at first and to ask whenever you're unsure of something. I plan to take full advantage of that, especially in the first 45 days.