Swift Fontana 4/11

Good to hear. The clutch does take some getting used to.

Good luck as you finish up.

Orientation tomorrow. Better get my sleep so I can put on my people person mask, or something like that…

I'm feeling pretty confident about this whole thing. Still not great at alley dock, and not much I can do about that from here, but I was able to successfully get it in the box once (with some help so I could find my reference points, which I have now memorised as to what it should look like at each stage). Also, because you are allowed 11 points for the skills section and I feel very good about the rest of the skills I'm not worried about needing to take extra get out and look or extra pulling up for the alley dock if I do in fact get it on the skills test.

Feeling pretty good about the rest of things, too. I did really good during my road time on both Friday and Saturday and didn't stall, didn't need help with the shifting pattern or being told when to shift or the shifting itself, drove on the freeway, and was getting a real hang for the feel of things, and that confidence and comfortableness goes a long way to contributing to overall feeling good about this process.

Got my clothes set out for tomorrow, going to chill out and play games on my phone for the rest of the night.

Orientation was… well, orientation.

And then today I did my CDL test— or part of it, at least.

Checked out of the motel in the morning, hung around the yard until it was my turn to test (nearer the end of the tests). Passed my pre-trip with absolutely no problem. In fact, the instructor doing my test several times told me 'next' because I was being a little bit too verbose.

Got through the first two of the skills with no problem, but then I went to do the parallel (sight-side) and four days without having touched a truck caught up with me, and I just screwed it up beyond my own ability to fix it. All twelve points on the parallel pretty much and lacking the ability to fix it, so I'll be repeating skills and hopefully moving on to road on Sunday.

I'm not letting it get me down, though. Watching a lot of videos about how to do the skills that I've been having trouble with. Both parallels and alley dock. Tomorrow I'll be spending time in the skills yard hopefully getting to get some more practise in, so that come Saturday I'll have it down and be able to just knock it out of the park.

Not an ending, just a pause and such.

Today after backing— or rather less successfully not being able to deal with the clutch during backing— I decided that there's no way I'm going to be able to get my class A without an automatic restriction. My knee just won't hold up to it and my health in the long term is important as well, so I'm stepping back and reevaluating. I'm looking into Roadmaster (also in Fontana) & through that Werner and being able to get my CDL that way.

In the mean time I'm going to see about picking up some local work of one variety or another so that I don't burn through the rest of my savings.

Did you talk to them about testing in an auto? Swift has them in their fleet.

Another option, since you've gone through school, is to rent a truck and do the test on your own. It would be cheaper than fronting the cost up front for another school.

Best of luck going forward.

Did you talk to them about testing in an auto? Swift has them in their fleet.

Another option, since you've gone through school, is to rent a truck and do the test on your own. It would be cheaper than fronting the cost up front for another school.

Best of luck going forward.

Thanks. Yeah-- I'm looking at all of the options, but.

When I talked to Carlos about doing the testing in an automatic, they're not able to do that right now, not even as a reasonable accommodation, because of the way that they are set up with the employer test program through which they do the license testing.

As far as renting a truck and testing on my own, while I would potentially be qualified for Swift after I did that, most of the rest of the companies that I have inquired with have said that they require having the certificate from a school or something like that. Which of course, I don't have, because I didn't complete and test out through TDA. And I want to go into this with a job lined up on the other end if at all possible. Going through the school allows me to do that in a more manageable way.

That is understandable. I'm sure they have guidelines to follow, especially in California.

You may want to check into Knight if you haven't already. Sounds like you have it under control though.

In case you're still reading these. CR England is only training and testing in automatics now.

I passed DMV test on stick and now in automatic 2017 Freightliner Cascadia. I guess I will be requesting automatic after my 200 hours.

In case you're still reading these. CR England is only training and testing in automatics now.

I passed DMV test on stick and now in automatic 2017 Freightliner Cascadia. I guess I will be requesting automatic after my 200 hours.

In case you're still reading these. CR England is only training and testing in automatics now.

You probably won't need to make a request like that...most of the fleet at this point is auto-shift.