Comments By Code Red NV

Training Week (Days Seven through Eleven) – Final

In total, I was in the truck for four days. I racked up around 1,980 miles in those days. On Friday, we were supposed to transport a load back to Reno, then I would get a hotel room and get a rental car for the trip back to Phoenix. However, for some unknown reason, Schneider didn’t want to pay the mileage from Reno, only from Salt Lake. And I didn’t want to drive back to SLC on Saturday only to make another drive from SLC to Phoenix in one day, Sunday, my one rest day. My 36 hour reset day. So, after we pulled into the yard Thursday night and did the post trip inspection and TIV*, I said “Goodbye” to Detroit, slept in the truck, packed up my things Friday morning and headed back to base.

Only four days. The Million Dollar Question: Am I ready to go solo? Honest answer. Maybe. I mean, I think four days was a perfect amount of time to be with Detroit, he was truly a fantastic trainer. The problem was his route. I wish I got in more city driving. I was I had more time to practice backing, and not be so rushed at the end of every day because we were struggling to get everything completed before our clocks ran out.

My mother told me if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

Ultimately, I think if I wait until I’m “ready”, then I’ll never get out there. I’m grateful for this experience. I’m grateful for all the wisdom Detroit dropped on me. I know I can do the individual tasks, hopefully I can figure out how to string them all together to make a pick up and delivery.

We’ll see.

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*Trailer Integrity Verification – something the Guber’mint cooked up after 9/11 to make sure those sneaky terrorists weren’t trying to hide their dirty bombs underneath our unsuspecting, freedom loving trailers. I kid you not.

Training Week (Days Seven through Eleven) – Part Three

We’re on our last trip, from Sparks, NV back to SLC. I’m on the last upgrade of the last hill before we get to the low horizontals of the Salt Flats. My downshifting has improved over these past few days. Down to 51 mph, shift from 10th to 9th. Done.

We’re heavy, little over 77,000 lbs. Down to 41 mph, shift from 9th to 8th. Grinding, I suddenly can’t find the gear. Grinding again. We’re slowing faster now because we’re heavy. Try 8th one more time. Grinding. Try 7th. Grinding. Nothing is working.

In my head I’m envisioning the truck beginning to roll backwards down this grade and into oncoming traffic because I can’t get it out of neutral. Try anything. Nothing but grinding. Get in a ****ing gear. I try 6th. I’m in. God bless you 6th, you are a beauty. I love 6th gear.

We proceed up the grade even more slowly now, but at least we’re not rolling backwards.

I have a theory about trucking, it’s hours of boredom followed by moments of sheer terror.

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I’ve lost 10 lbs since I’ve started this adventure. This week especially, we were running so hard that we barely had time to eat. I grabbed Subway a couple of times when we stopped in Winnemucca, NV. I’ve almost given up soda completely, drinking mostly water instead. On the road, I have chosen bananas and apples over truck stop food.

I’m slowly becoming accustomed to not eating, actually. Maybe I’ll turn into one of those Ascetics from ancient times, who would forsake worldly pleasures to pursue a more spiritual lifestyle. I will be like a trucking monk, the highway will be my desert, my truck my place for meditation.

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Detroit said something really interesting, he said he believes there are two types of truckers, those that love to drive, and those that love money. If I can be brutally honest, I think I love driving. If I never make a six digit salary, then I’m ok with that.

I remember one guy in CDL school constantly drone on about how he was going to be a flatbedder because they made a few more pennies per mile. God speed, friend, you do that. Have fun tarping loads in 40 mph winds and rain, standing on top of uneven stacks of lumber or pipes. Knock yourself out, kid, I’ll wave as I drive past in my nice dry, warm truck.

I didn’t change careers to get rich, I changed careers because I was miserable, and a part of me died every morning I sat down at my computer. I’m not saying that I don’t want to work. I’m saying that I don’t want to kill myself chasing big money.

And small money is where I am. Schneider is good, don’t get me wrong, but don’t think I don’t realize I’m getting paid the trucking minimum wage here.

Which is totally fine. For now. It’s called paying your dues. People used to have to do that.

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Friendly advice to car drivers from a newbie trucker: GET OFF YOUR ****ING CELL PHONES!

It’s an epidemic out there. I can’t count how many people are driving around looking at their phones when they should be looking at the road.

Oh, and here’s some friendly advice to other truck drivers from a newbie trucker: GET OFF YOUR ****ING CELL PHONES!

Unbelievable.

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61 miles per hour. That’s how fast we were going for most of our trip. Speed limit on I-80 is mostly 75-80 mph. Over the week, I think I passed three vehicles. Big rigs passed me quicker than politicians on their way to a Wall Street fundraiser. Am I ok with being limited to 61 mph on the highway? You bet. I think right now if I was allowed to go any faster I would just kill myself.

61 is fine.

Training Week (Days Seven through Eleven) – Part Two

Monday morning was a rocky start. First, Detroit said he had a doctor’s appointment, so that set back our start time some. His truck was also in the shop that morning, so he needed to transfer his stuff from his truck to the truck we’d be using for the day. Soon after we started the swap, his truck was ready, so we waited for his truck to get out of the shop and onto the yard. In the middle of all this, we had started pre-trip procedures on the loner truck, which we chose to complete.

All of these effected our start time for the day, and through a domino effect had ramifications for the rest of the loads all week. They say time is money, I doubt there’s an industry where that holds more true than trucking.

Detroit runs an almost dedicated route, from Salt Lake City, Utah to Sparks, Nevada. Goes up one day. Comes back the next. Sweet gig, actually.

Eventually we got on the road to our first pick-up, an RC Willey trailer that should have been in Reno the day before. Starting late, Detroit knew we would be finishing late. He hoped to just be able to arrive in Reno, open our trailer doors, back into the dock and go to sleep, hoping that they would just let us do our 10 hour reset on the dock. The problem was that there was a lock on the back of our trailer that nobody seemed to have a key for. Therefore, we couldn’t just back in, we had to wait for the receivers to open (or break) the lock and then we could open the doors and back in.

Everything was going from rocky to downright craggy.

We hit the road. I was driving. Now, consider this for a moment. I first began to drive big trucks, what, less than two months ago? In my CDL school, I drove about an hour or so a day for two weeks. Rounded off, that’s about ten hours of driving time. Total. Here at my Schneider training, I got another 5 hours or so. Maybe. 15 hours total drive time.

Suddenly, I’m driving one leg of a journey that’s almost as long as my cumulative total of driving experience.

Again, Detroit was great. I had missed a few gears in town, he quickly identified what I was doing wrong and gave me some pointers. I also wasn’t looking in my mirrors nearly enough. And not paying attention to signs nearly enough. And my lane control was atrocious. We had a lot to work on for all those upcoming hours.

Interstate 80 Westbound. Flat through the Salt Flats, up and down through the mountains (well, sort of mountains). My training ground of North Las Vegas was complicated with traffic and insane pedestrians, but one thing it didn’t have was steep hills. Phoenix, too, is pretty flat. I can’t imagine approaching the kind of grades I drove on I-80 without any kind of coaching. Again, Detroit was right there with tips on when to apply my engine brakes, when to stab break, and pointing out what other drivers were doing wrong; “See that guy, he’s riding his brakes all the way downhill. Don’t do that.”

The miles, the hours, rolled past. As it got later and later, I could feel fatigue setting in. Not only was I used to driving in one hour intervals, I was also used to going to bed at 9:30 every night to be up and ready by 5:30 in the morning. 11:00 hit and I could feel that drowsy feeling, that forcing your eyelids open feeling. I wanted to push through, make a good impression for my trainer, but I also felt like crashing the truck because I fell asleep would make a bad impression. I confessed that I couldn’t continue driving and he needed to take over. He have me a look that said I probably should have confessed that 30 minutes earlier.

Know your limits. No load is worth your life. Or the lives of others.

After finishing our 10 hour “rest” at the shipper, which wasn’t restful at all, but nevermind, we were back on the road, picked up another trailer and headed back towards Salt Lake.

And that’s how most of the rest of the week went.

I’ll detail some specific instances and impressions in my next post.

Training Week (Days Seven through Eleven) – Part One

The guy from RC Willey pounded on our window at 6:00 AM sharp to let us know it was ok for us to back into the dock. It woke both of us up, but my trainer told me, “Go back to sleep.” I heard him climb into the driver’s seat and back the few feet needed to affix our trailer to their building. After the gentle thud of contact, he turned off the engine and went back to his bunk. I was still in my clothes I had worn the previous day. We had only been asleep for four hours.

This was my introduction to the real world of trucking.

Before I go any further, I need to make something crystal clear, my trainer* was amazing, and any critique I will be sharing will be more focused on the loads we were given during my training week, and maybe even some general critiques of trucking in general. We’ll see.

As I’m writing this, my recollections will also be a little less linear than my previous blog posts. If you want a more traditional, linear telling of the events of this past week, we started on Monday in Salt Lake City, Utah, ended up in Sparks, Nevada early Tuesday morning, drove back to SLC on Tuesday, drove back to Sparks on Wednesday, and drove back to SLC on Thursday. There, how’s that for linear storytelling.

This was a weird week, man, no getting around it. Hopefully writing down some of what happened will help me make sense of it.

First, let me introduce my trainer. He’s a huge fan of the Detroit Tigers, even though he’s originally from the South, so I’m just going to call him Detroit. Detroit decided to become a trainer because he kept meeting newbie Schneider truckers who hadn’t been taught the basics. Or, hadn’t been taught the basics well enough. His story is that after spending a lot of time complaining to other people about the state of training within Schneider, someone confronted him about it and asked, “Well, what are you doing about it?”

Like a sinner during a Sunday sermon, he was convicted.

For the correct procedures on how to do a pre-trip inspection, brake test, and for coupling and uncoupling of the trailer, Schneider has very informative, step-by-step handouts. We’ve been working on these daily for my first week in Phoenix. I was fully expecting to get out to the field and have my trainer say something like, “Let me explain how it’s done in the REAL world.” Instead, Monday morning, pretty much the first thing out of Detroit’s mouth was, “Get your pre-trip instructions, and we’re going to go over everything step-by-step.” I was overjoyed. All week he never once cut corners, never once had me do anything out of bounds, and for the hundreds and hundreds of questions I asked, he had good, clear answers.

I’ve been thinking about this, actually, how blessed I’ve been. On most trucking boards you can hear some horror stories about CDL schools and training programs, where students are given bad information, berated and belittled, or just left to fend for themselves. In my limited contact with those in the transportation industry, I’ve come across people who are knowledgeable and helpful, yes, but more importantly they seem genuinely interested in seeing me succeed. And that is an amazing foundation for any student to build on.

I think that will set the stage nicely for now. I expected this week to be written over multiple posts, and that looks like what is going to happen. It’s late, and I’m tired.

Again.

To be continued.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ *Schneider prefers to call their trainers “Training Engineers”, or TE’s for short. I think that is ridiculous corporate-speak and refuse to acknowledge such silly, unnecessary language.

1,836 miles over four days. Not bad for someone whose only been behind the wheel an average of 1 hour a day since he started driving.

I've blocked out some time Saturday night and Sunday for writing, hopefully I'll have a couple of blog posts coming up soon.

As always, everyone, thank you for your support!

Quick note from the road:

I've driven almost 900 miles in just two days, and I'll probably break 2,000 miles by end of Friday. Not too shabby for a rookie trucker.

I've also slept in my clothes, barely eaten anything, and I'm constantly covered in dirt and grime. Oh, and my laptop fell from the top of the storage in the truck, right onto the truck floor, but as you can see, it totally survived. This Acer is the best $80.00 I've spent.

G-Town is right, I probably won't get a blog post up until I finish this placement, so hopefully over the weekend. Take care, everyone!

Great post Red. sounds like it has been smooth sailing so far. don't forget about us guys wanting to hear about the road training coming up. Best of luck to you and be safe.

Thank you for that, I will try to post as much as I can from the road!

Day Five and Day Six:

Day Five (Saturday), was mostly spent in the classroom. Even more administration paperwork, some testing, and we were shown a video on how to operate the Qualcomm. Oops, I mean the MCP200. It was the single most boring training video ever made. I've spent most of my life doing office work for different corporations, I am a connoisseur of boring corporate videos. Trust me when I say that it was the more boring training video ever made. I don't say that lightly.

We were outside for demonstrations on how to move the tandems and the 5th wheel. Then we went over to play video games. I mean, work on the simulator.

At the very end we were handed even more packets of paperwork, Benefits packets, our fuel card, a booklet about tires and tire repair centers, and the packets for our upcoming week with our trainer, oops, Training Engineer. I actually have had to get a backpack to carry all the paperwork Schneider has unloaded on us these past few days. As I mentioned, my TE had already called me. We chatted for a bit, he wanted to know if I'm a smoker (not any more), what kind of music I like, and let me know we already have our first load lined up. I'll be meeting him Monday morning at the Schneider yard in Salt Lake City.

Saturday dragged on so long, all I wanted to go was to get on the road. Schneider had a hotel in SLC booked for me already, and had rented a car for the drive up. 10+ hours from Phoenix. But, because I'm from Vegas, I planned to just drive home Saturday night, spend the night in my own bed, then head up early Sunday morning.

Only a handful of us are heading out. Three guys are going to California, one all the way up to Stockton. That's a drag. Everyone else is meeting up in and around the Phoenix area.

After being released (finally!) and driven back to the hotel, I rushed to pack everything, caught a cab to the rental place (don't get me started on my adventures of calling a cab), breezed through check-in (thank you National!) and got to my car.

You know those National Rent-A-Car commercials where Patrick Warburton says, "Go ahead, choose any car on the lot"?

Oh yeah.

As I'm driving north on Interstate 17, with the sun setting on my left, watching the bright melding of a thousand desert colors dance over those ancient Arizona mesas, I thought, "What if I just took the safe route and stayed at my old job. Because it was safe. Because it was easy. Because it did provide me and my family with the basics, though not much more."

Looking back, I know the best things in my life have come when I've stepped out and took chances. That may sound like just another self-help cliché, and it might be. Doesn't mean it's not true.

I got home after 10pm. After 5+ hours of driving. I was exhausted. That was when I got another taste of the trucking lifestyle; home time.

Which, for me, meant a quick chat with my wife, made sure everything was still OK at the house, and with her, and then I collapsed into bed.

I woke up early, got a chance to reorganize my stuff, then did some light, quiet work while everyone was sleeping. Soon, everyone was up, I said "Good morning", then "Goodbye." I was back on the road. Home time.

Today was all about Interstate 15 northbound. And me not trying to get a ticket. Maybe I shouldn't confess this, but I have a bit of a lead foot. I only have two tickets on my record, both for exceeding the speed limit. Me driving that Mustang is like an alcoholic owning a liquor store.

It was by the very hand of God that I didn't incur any infraction on this drive. And not for lack of trying either, I counted at least a half dozen vehicles pulled over by Utah troopers.

Just a couple of quick thoughts from the drive. Utah is beautiful. I mean, I knew that, but I was constantly reminded on this day just how beautiful it is.

Second, I forgot how many steep hills and inclines Interstate 15 has. Fun in a car, it's probably a drag in a big rig. We'll see.

Lastly, my trip planning sucks. I thought I was doing great on time, until I remembered that SLC is on Mountain Time, and one hour ahead of Las Vegas. Better that mistake now, I guess.

Very cool, it looks like we are almost on the exact same track with Schneider, but I'm doing my orientation in Phoenix.

Keep up the great blog, and the great work

Congrats, and well done!

I can't wait to get my own truck, it'll come soon