Comments By Kenneth L.

Yeah, I'm that person that's pulling it off. I was in IT doing computer programming and systems admin for about 25 years. Been programming longer than that for my personal use but you get the gist.

Been trucking now for about 15 months. It's definitely a lifestyle change. There is no day and night study on a continual basis. No long thinking processes of how you plan on getting that MRP system integrated with the organization and keep it all running without a shutdown. I'm single and have no kids or family at home. So I am at home, no matter where I am. I try to make where I am, home. Just bring all your entertainment with you as compact as possible. Put your movies and music on an external hard drive. You can get an android pretty cheap that can play the music through the truck stereo (fairly decent, but not true 'high fidelity'). Put your favorite listening tunes on it. Watch the movies from the hard drive with a good laptop. For gaming I brought my home PC desktop. I mounted the flat screen monitor above the bunk headboard and the pc on the floor strapped in. Works pretty nice.

Other forms of entertainment you may have to just buy, or bring her along if you can.

If you're into programming / development. You can still do that while on the road. You just won't have as much time for it as you're used to. Most times I don't even care to get into it anymore. For my creative juices, I just play some creative games that needs extra thought to accomplish it for burning off the need to create. KSP, Factorio, Fallout 4, those kind of games.

You can still keep in touch with your friends and cohorts through skype or other means. You still get enough time off to get face time anyway, and you'll have plenty of stories to tell them when you get in anyway. It's also nice to have at least one trucker friend to share trucker stories with as other "normal" people just look at you funny when you tell them all the great tales and adventures you have endured.

Make new friends and KEEP them. You can never have too many friends.

Oh yeah, don't try to fix the world. You gotta get that out of your mind. Being in IT, you're used to having to put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right spots to make the world operate. You gotta get out of that mindset. That is kind of tough to do when you've been into IT for such a long time. You gotta learn to let fools be fools. You will find SO MANY retards out on the highways that it makes you wonder how they even get by in life. You will need to have good driving skills and learn to read other drivers minds. You will acquire a skill to know what another driver is about to do before they do it. You will have to adapt to the trucking lifestyle or will fall to the wayside. You logical thinking process will help and hinder you. It will help you solve problems, but it also frustrate you that so many others do things so wrong.

Make sure the doors are sealed and locked. Either pad locked or bolt sealed.

And don't be telling ppl in a public forum what you are carrying. There are some bad ppl out there.

Well there is a bit of a difference in company sponsored school or one that you pay yourself.

I myself paid for my own school. Do I regret it? Hell no. Why? Because I was able to start out with Ozark and make 39 CPM on first day of solo. Training days made 25 CPM but that was as a team with the trainer. When trainer drove, I still made 25 CPM. Those first few weeks made some serious money, which was a much needed boost to my finances.

Do how long did I have to drive to make up the money lost? Just a rough estimate, about 14 weeks in, and I'm ahead of the game.

OK, I got my password sorted again. So I decided to log back in and reply once again. Been lurking for about a year now.

I just had to reply into this thread and say that not all trainers are bad. I think I had one of the very best trainers this world has to offer.

Chris was a very aggressive driver when he drove but was the best trainer for teaching I had ever met or imagined. I've been solo for about 14 months now and upon reflection, I cannot think of one thing he told me that I would consider wrong. He was very understanding of what a student was going through and what the student was currently thinking. It's almost like he could read my mind. For instance, when I was first going down this one mountain pass on a two lane road at night, I said "I know it's 55 MPH speed limit, but I'm gonna take it a bit slower because I've never been down this road before and with so many blind curves, I don't know what around the next bend." He said, "You get an extra 10 points for that, I was waiting for you to say something like that. Being safe is the first priority."

He would also explain EVERYTHING 'just in case' I didn't know it already. It almost got annoying at times. Like explaining the short dotted lines on the road that means that lane is about to run out or is going to be an exit only lane, or how to know if you are on the interstate or a business route about to go through town. Stuff I already knew. I had only been driving cars for almost 40 years. I knew how to read a map and how to get around. But he went over everything just to make sure I knew it. And I never said a word to stop him either. I thought at the time it was him just following some criteria and was required of him to go over it.

A couple of times he made me plan the entire route using the road atlas and turned off the GPS and I drove those without any help from him or the GPS. That was a bit scary the first time. Yet I remember making trips in the car across country before there was GPS. But doing it in a truck, is a bit more scary because you are so afraid you will go down a road you should not be on or meet an overpass you cannot get under.

I did have a leg up on backing though and my trainer didn't have to give much advice on backing. As I had worked for a boat manufacturer and backed many a big boats in the water and into tight spaces in various places. Backing a simi trailer was not much a challenge other than 'can only see one side at a time' unless you're straight backing.

But now I've been out here on the road for since April of last year and 2 days ago Ozark put me into a brand new truck. Had all of 90 miles on the odometer when I got it. Plastic on the seats and floorboard. The smell of new car (or truck). The new ones are automatics though. I still miss my standard transmission though. I still try to press the clutch when coming to a stop. I still reach for the stick when starting out for the day. The standard gave finer control and finesse of the vehicle. I'm still learning the new machine though and maybe in a few weeks I'll have it down pat and know what the truck wants to do so that I can apply that for greater finesse. I have yet to pass over a single mountain with it. So if you auto drivers can give me any insight, I'm looking.

I'm at the flying J close there. You couldn't get a word in edge wise on the cb it was jammed. The weather at the time of the crash wasn't all that bad at least east of there where I was. There are more and more trucks on the road that don't have or use a cb. Very tragic.

Good weather / bad weather where you are doesn't really apply.

Last night coming out of Cincinnati on 71 I saw ahead of me a strong gust blow a 4 wheeler into a skid and slid off the road into the medium. Yet that gust of wind only occurred in about 1000 feet of road. By the the time I got into it, the wind had already died back down some.

I have the same dash cam. I put 32G card in mine and with 30 frames per second at 1920 x 1080 resolution, It will only record about 4.5 hours of video and sound before it loops back over. Also, I turned off the shock setting to that it would stop protecting files. Trucks ride rough, and it thinks it's in a crash all the time.

These things are on my required equipment list for driving. They can really save you from problems of proof.

Now my question is how do you set the squelch and rf gain?

The proper way to set the RF gain and the Squelch is to turn down the squelch so that you hear all static. Then turn down the RF gain until the static is at a lower level (but not all the way down). You can also see the drop on the meter until it is almost at the bottom of the scale. Then turn the Squelch back up slowly until the noise is squelched out. Turning just a bit further for RF blasts of various sorts.

You do this when no one in range is keyed (talking, singing, etc.). If you need voices louder, that is what volume know is for.

You also do not just set it and forget it with CB. It is one of the noisiest frequencies given to the public for public use. It will require re-adjusting as the day goes along and even as you travel to different places.

Now you can set it so that only those trucks you can see can overcome the squelch and forget it. But then you will probably miss out on some important traffic info that's a bit further down the road.

Now my question is how do you set the squelch and rf gain?

The proper way to set the RF gain and the Squelch is to turn down the squelch so that you hear all static. Then turn down the RF gain until the static is at a lower level (but not all the way down). You can also see the drop on the meter until it is almost at the bottom of the scale. Then turn the Squelch back up slowly until the noise is squelched out. Turning just a bit further for RF blasts of various sorts.

You do this when no one in range is keyed (talking, singing, etc.). If you need voices louder, that is what volume know is for.

You also do not just set it and forget it with CB. It is one of the noisiest frequencies given to the public for public use. It will require re-adjusting as the day goes along and even as you travel to different places.

Now you can set it so that only those trucks you can see can overcome the squelch and forget it. But then you will probably miss out on some important traffic info that's a bit further down the road.

That's last year's YTD gross 2015. I started driving at the end of April.

Well, if it makes any statistical point, I'd share that I've been driving now since April last year. I am sitting in my forth assigned truck due to break downs. First truck quit 3 times over the same injector problems (severe loss of power). Second truck I broke a U-Joint climbing a grade to a Flying J (exit 146 off I-79) with a full load (total weight was 79840 lbs). Third truck quit on me with some ECC and ECU error codes (computer kept shutting engine off). Now in my fourth assigned truck and doing OK so far (had it all of about 4 days now).

Point is, THERE IS NO WAY, I'd buy one of these pieces of junk, with as much problems as I've seen from them so far.

The cost of sending out 3 wreckers to rescue me has to be quite expensive.

Oh yea, and just for something for you all to ponder over, ------ YTD INFORMATION ------ GROSS 36446.07

as company driver.