Profile For Davy A.

Bro...take some personal responsibility or your fail at WE too.

1. It's not "according to him" it's you backed up on a street. Never do that. You could have killed the guy behind you. Good way to recieve a lead diet supplement in many areas of the country.

2. Drop the excuses. We've all been stressed, out of hours, not much experience. Many of us made appropriate choices and didn't have any accidents or incidents.

3. Many other drivers aren't driving your rig. You are. Many other drivers lie like a rug, exaggerate and drive like idiots. You took the turn too fast. I have a hunch that your school specifically told you to take offramp 10 under the posted recommendations, which are for cars.

4. Own your crap, learn how to improve from your mistakes. If you crap in your underwear, don't blame your underwear.

A bunch of us gave you advice on how to get it done

That advice is: Get your experience in OTR first for a year then proceed to go local.

But....then you revealed that due to your parole you can't do OTR. Would have been more helpful to have known that in the beginning.

So basically, you're a convicted felon who can't leave the state or area? No one here is judging you for that, but if you failed to tell us important things like that, it begs the question are you telling your employer?

My best guess is to see if there are any dock to driver programs locally, or agricultural work, and or construction. With so many illegals self deporting, it may free up some spots. Although with your restrictions, it's going to be even tougher in an already tough market.

Yes, I use my atlas for backroads, alternate routes, anytime I have questions on routes.

I'm sorry to hear of your circumstances. My advice off the top of my head would be to apply everywhere you can at companies that offer training. Be prepared that some may want you to start from the ground up. It doesn't sound like you actually hit anything, so if you have no accidents or incidents, you may be able to find something.

It's a tough market out there for even experienced pros with clean records.

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I've been really busy and haven't had time to reply. I really appreciated OS's reply. I may come off as though I'm bashing Knight at times. Rest assured, I'm not.

When I was there, I built relationships that I still have today, and if it were to fit my circumstances, I would return there if I felt like it matched up to my needs and wants. In fact, recently, I had discussed returning as o/o leased on to them with my old TM there. I chose to purchase a house instead, but that's a whole other story.

I enjoyed a solid niche, and like OS, their business structure of having the terminals have so much autonomy benefitted me greatly. Very true that their flatbed division is a potentially much higher earning division as well. I also maintained great relationships with people in corporate as well.

My grievances with their policies are just that, it's policies and systems. There are very little human input on a daily basis that can change them. I really identify with just wanting to make things work. It's a large part of the reason that I stayed as long as I did.

I look at cameras and subjects like this more towards the demographic of drivers as a whole. In general, if we allow it by our actions, individually, it allows the carriers to continue to engage, and allows the insurance companies to dictate it to the carriers. Where as if the drivers continually vacate carriers that use cameras, the carriers will eventually be forced to use insurance companies who don't require them. It takes a long time to accomplish, but eventually it does, it's the beauty of capitalism.

As we always say, there is no perfect company. I think of it as always a give and take. The company I'm now with, fits my operating style and needs and wants very well. I can't stress enough though, that based on my experience with Knight, I would definitely recommend them for an individual coming into this industry. Should they find success, they could make a reasoned decision later if it still worked for them or if they needed to move on.

Yes, I have a subscription to it. I find it invaluable for locating off the wall truck stops and parking. I use it as a secondary gps. My primary is a garmin dezl otr500. New places final and initial mile as well as location satellite and streetview I use google maps for.

Best practices are just that, best practices, they are not necessarily the only way to go, just the ones that have much higher success rates. That's important in this industry where the failure rate for first year drivers is well of 75 percent.

It's great that you found success in a different method, but for most, they need every advantage they can get just to simply stay in this industry.

I'm assuming you're out of reno terminal. Talk with your terminal manager, when I worked for Knight, they had a lot of freight that goes over donner to eastbay n central valley, also a lot of runs down to Vegas and socal. They may have something dedicated there, both Lowes and Sam's club used to have a lot there. If you're reliable, safe and easy to work with they will find something for you.

Im guessing along the lines of what Kearsey said as well. Unless the company is pushing you to somehow run illegally, which is very doubtful, its almost impossible to run without sleeping enough, its the very purpose of our hours of service regulations. But what does often happen is that most people are totally unprepared for the lifestyle of trucking.

Its often said that trucking runs 24/7. Like many sayings in the industry, its both true and not true. The truckers are expected to deliver and pick up virtually any time, any day, anywhere. But the great majority of shippers, especially smaller ones dont operate that way, they are only open certain hours, and you can only pick up at certain times, coupled with totally erratic waiting times. Add in times and pauses due to weather and mechanical issues, it makes for a maddening soup of inefficiency and disfunctionality that we have to wade through on the daily.

The tools for dealing with this mess are learning how to bend your circadium rythm and sleep schedule, become efficient and effective with your truck and clocks, and becoming a master of trip planning. These all take time to develop. A company is not going to bend to your sleep schedule, its your job to thread the needle through and learn how to improvise, adapt and overcome. This process takes time, but given the nature of our job, you dont have much of that luxury.

In regards to hitting things in your yard. Youre a rookie. Its probably in all reality that you just dont have very good spatial reasoning skills and inherent abilities to judge distances. Not everyone does. In fact, most people lack the basic hand eye coordination to drive vehicles this large, let alone back them up. Over time, they build skills based on the abilities they do have. Keep in mind, abilities are innate, while skills are learned behaviors. Again, it takes time to develop skills, even more so if your abilities are lacking. One must use tools to combat the deficiency in ability.

Self honesty in assessing your abilities and skills goes a long way. It doesnt mean that you are not capable of driving successfully, just that you have to work a bit harder and use tools to help yourself in areas that are tough for you. If it sounds like im ripping on you, Im not. Ive earned every mile ive driven and square inch of a race track ive ran on. I was the slowest racer in my class when I started and I was the worst driver in my class when it came to backing, I over analyzed every little movement and really tripped myself up all the time. Where everyone else could simply back it in to a hole, I would spend a month of Sundays trying to calculate the exact angles and eventually frustrate myself to the point screaming. But I used every tool I could, including our beloved GOAL to avoid hitting anything...ever. Failure is not an option. I practiced and practiced until it was fluid and repeated results. Make no mistake, this career is about high performance driving.

There indeed is some crazy interpretation going on here. No one has compared any of the mega corporations to nazis. But for those who obviously need to brush up on their reading comprehension skills, unless they were just being argumentative and misquoting, there are some folks who will attempt to overlook the obviously bad behavior of an entity and instead only herald their good items.

For new readers that aren't aware, I worked for Knight for over 3 years, so I have direct working knowledge of their pay structure, safety devices and policies and how they use said devices to limit driver pay where possible. It's a policy issue, not a person issue. Knight, notwithstanding, in my opinion is a great place to start a career at, but go in knowing what they do and why they do it.

The thing is, we have a responsibility to acknowledge what the mega carriers in conjunction with gigantic corporations are intentionally doing to drivers. There's a reason why there is so much negatively regarding them. While we Excell in combating misinformation about them, we fail in acknowledging their faults and this does a disservice to drivers. The battle for better working conditions, better pay and honorable practices by employers in this industry needs to be fought at every angle and each person can make a difference. When we accept and tolerate bad behavior and policies, we continue to get bad treatment and bad policies.

In the context of this thread, Knight, and many other carriers unequivocally use the cameras to lower compensation to drivers. It's factual. It's a primary design function of the systems. A significant portion of a drivers wages are attached to interpretation of events triggered that a driver has no control over whatsoever. There are completely subjective standards for scoring the events, and they will not produce the parameters and standards that they do use. This pattern is also applied to their fuel bonus, with the exception that they did provide some standards for that.

All of these items won't make much difference to a driver starting out, odds are, they won't be efficient and effective enough to produce enough. Where they do make a difference is after a year or so of experience where a driver starts being able to produce consistent results.

So a fleet can say they're "maintaining the safety of the fleet" all they want, but it's simply a nice way of saying, "were going to reduce driver pay even more if we can"

Thee carriers can because there's a massive driver surplus industry wide. Due in no small part to having entire generations of drivers who lack the self control and judgement to drive without devices making the decisions for them and behavior engineering by proxy through audible and visual alarms, and pay based behavior. These drivers would have been fired out of the ecosystem if the systems weren't in place. Instead they remain in place, recieve lower pay and lower the aggregate skill level and pay of the group. We need natural selection back in the industry.