Comments By K.R.

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.

Swift's CDL schools are currently NOT able to accommodate or train on an automatic transmission (to the best of my knowledge, just finished orientation today). At least, not in California and not anywhere else as far as I understand.

I was trying to pursue this route (different disability that affects the use of my knees for long periods of time) but was told that because they train on manual transmission trucks and have no automatics available etc etc. I have a doctor's letter and everything documenting this but they remained that they would not be able to test or train me in a vehicle with an automatic transmission.

They will hire someone who gets their license elsewhere and has an automatic/E restriction though.

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.

Kirk is unimpressed:

As sub-par as the training was all 4 of us in that class got our CDL.

98% of trucking schools have one goal: get students ready to pass the CDL test. In your case, 100% of your class did "graduate", so the school did it's job with flying colors.

I also considered that my Swift Academy did not teach us enough "trucking". But most of us made the CDL examiner happy and we got it licenses. That was, and is, the goal of trucking schools: get students past the CDL skills test, and not much else. That's why it's a regular thing to put recent grads on a truck with an experienced trainer.

Yeah. Every time I mention something about school not teaching us enough "trucking" they basically tell me, that's what your time out with your mentor is for.

What we're being taught for parallel and offset backing is that the turns should be until you make a triangle between the nearer drive wheel and the farther leg of the landing gear.

This worked fine for me to figure out offset but I still haven't figured out parallel yet.

How is it going?

It's going pretty damn well.

I'm still having some problems with the clutch and my knee, because that's definitely a lot more than I was necessarily expecting and with my knees it's taking some time to adjust. But it's getting better every day, and I think I'm actually starting to understand how shifting works— whereas yesterday with road time I was just pressing the clutch when the road instructor told me to and having a lot of help with shifting.

My legs are still sore enough that I'm relying a lot on my crutches at the end of the day, but I'm really a lot more confident than I was at the beginning of this week. Not less tired, though. This is the first day in a few days that I've done more than just get back to the motel room, lay down and go to sleep. I'm also really glad that I'm doing my road time in the morning and skills in the afternoon because it's the skills backing that's getting my knee the worst.

I went to the library over in Upland, got myself a library card, and checked myself out two books, because one of the things that is being constantly told to me is that I need to relax, and one of the best ways for me to relax is to read a book or get my mind a little bit off of the training. There's only so much I can study before I start going in circles and feeling like it's counterproductive.

I've pretty much got straight line backing down, and offset backing, but no matter how much I tried today I couldn't quite get the knack of parallel parking. More practise on it tomorrow, driver's side, and then after I get that it'll be on to conventional/blind side parallel.

Anyway, onwards. Time to go read my book.

It's good he was able to retreeve the load for you…

(sorry-not-sorry, couldn't resist.)

Passed my pre-trip mock no problem at all. Definitely looking forward to skills on Monday, although I'll admit that after all of my experience being with vehicles with an automatic transmission I'm nervous about the manual transmission. Anyway, time to get some rest tonight and tomorrow so that I'm well-rested for Monday.

Good luck! I'm sure you'll make it and get this sorted out, and it was great to get to talk to you while you were here.

Pre-trips, pre-trips, pre-trips… what can I say other than that it's the part of driving that we all love to hate?

Swift does a mock pre-trip test that I believe is this weekend, basically to prepare us for the pre-trip section of our license test. Not so bad, right? 70 points minimum on the mock test, and 67 for the actual test, and of course getting more points is better than getting less.

For me at the moment it's just a matter of getting a hang of the verbiage— I've always found the verbosity required by the dmv pretrip section to be kind of a thing that trips me up. Currently I'm working on narrowing it down into a numbered list of steps in order, so that I can get a better handle on the additional parts of the pre-trip from it being a combination vehicle.

And tomorrow it continues.