Comments By Joseph B.

Hey everyone...it has been a long time since I posted here but I wanted to check in with everyone. I was posting a couple years ago, but last April I got custody of my two sons that hadn't seen me in 7 years (thanks to their mother). Because of this, last July I hung up the keys so I could be home with them and we could get to know each other again (the last time we saw each other they were only babies). I sure do miss the road though! I think in 2 years of driving I maybe had 2 or 3 days where I really hated my job. I finally found my calling, and I sure can't wait to get back to it. The plan was to be home for a few years, then once the boys are stable and used to being here, get back into it...but it has been less than a year and I miss it every day!

Wanted to open it up for other people to share if they have had experiences like mine. Or maybe I'm just the weirdo of the bunch...either way, I can't wait for the day I can get back out there with all of you. Keep the shiny side up!

Happy Thanksgiving to all! This is my first holiday out on the road since I started training on Saturday...really going to miss all the food (and the family too, of course )

To all at home, I'm thankful you have the opportunity to be there, and to all on the road, I'm thankful for you keeping it rollin'!

Now off to Denny's for my Thanksgiving dinner away from home ;)

Some conversations I have had with other truckers were very favorable toward Stevens Transport. The only reason I didn't choose them were that they do payroll deductions for their CDL school, and although you sign an agreement for one year, you really only pay off the interest in that time. It really takes something like 3 years to fully pay it off. I'm on my phone at the moment do I can't look up the details of that. But all in all they are supposed to be a great company, and as a plus all of their trucks have APUs.

Thanks everyone! Jon, I put in a lot of time studying with The High Road in the 2 months before school, and due to that it was pretty natural.

And just to add on, we went to DPS today and I passed all 5 tests, with a perfect score on 3 of them. Now I can finally start learning how to drive a truck!

I wanted to share something that just made me pat myself on the back today... I am currently attending the FFE Driving Academy (Now KLLM). Today was our final written exam for the school, tomorrow we go take the DPS written tests. Once the class tests were graded, our instructor told me that in the more than two years the school had been open and with all the hundreds of students that had gone through the program, I was the third person EVER to get a perfect score on all 5 written exams.

WOW!

Darn right I'm proud of myself, but I didn't do it alone. I can't express enough how helpful The High Road training program is, and can't thank Brett and TruckingTruth enough for putting it together.

Anyway, like I said, just wanted to pat myself on the back a bit :-) I'm so glad to know that I shouldn't have anything to worry about tomorrow at DPS.

Brett and Tim, I am one of those people thankful for your experience! I have been following this post for awhile now, and I just started FFE Driver Academy today myself. Of course, we were told that today was the first day that FFE no longer exists, it is now KLLM officially, but it pretty much will remain the same from what we were told. Pay during training will be lower, but starting solo will be higher pay rate than we were originally told. We are staying in a hotel the while time now, no more on site housing. First day was fun, and thanks to the High Road CDL training program I was way ahead of a lot of my class! We take our "final exam" tomorrow, CDL exams at DPS on Wednesday, and get into the trucks on Thursday. I'm so excited I'm drooling a bit...

I wanted to share a funny story of what happened about a week ago. Backstory: my dad has been driving for Werner for a little over a year now, and I am scheduled for school starting November 4. I went out on the road with my dad last Saturday to check it out and help him a little bit...it won't be the same experience as mine, since he is on a dedicated account and has to unload at all the stores he stops at while I will be driving OTR, but it's better than nothing!

Anyway, we were driving through San Antonio on the way to store #3 for the day. He got started pulling out of the parking lot and I was plugging the next address into his GPS (a nice Garmin model for truckers...not the cheapo 4-wheeler kind). It took a little bit...the address was, according to the paperwork, on "Old Hwy 90". I tried that in many different formats and couldn't find it, so he told me to just try using Hwy 90. For safety's sake, he plugged the address into his Qualcomm too, and it came up with Old Hwy 90 sure enough. They both pointed in the same direction so we felt OK, but he was following the Qualcomm just because it had the right address as far as we knew.

We got about 10 minutes down the road following the Qualcomm, and I took a look just to see if maybe the address was formatted weird, and I did notice something weird...the ZIP code shown on the Qualcomm was not the same ZIP code that was on the Garmin. I grabbed the paperwork and took a look, and sure enough we were headed for an address in a totally different ZIP code. Uh-oh! I told Dad about it, but we were already committed so we crossed our fingers and kept going. A few minutes later it said we were nearing our destination and we started getting nervous because there was no store in sight...we took the final turn and came around a curve and were suddenly slap-bang in the middle of a housing subdivision. Phooey.

OK, no biggie, time for "take 2" as they say in Hollywood. Luckily, the road we were on took us straight back out to a main road, and we started following the address on the Garmin, which was the correct ZIP code but was just regular Hwy 90, not "Old Hwy 90". It looked a little more promising, but as we approached the destination we saw a giant empty field with a little bitty junkyard in the middle of it. Sigh...to move from Hollywood to baseball...strike 2.

He pulled over on the side of the road and was just about to call the store and ask where they were, but I had a hunch...we had passed a road sign for "Old Hwy 90" a couple of miles back, and I knew it had to be in the GPS somehow. So he grabbed it and played with it for a few minutes, and finally found an entry for "Old US-90 Hwy". Gee, why didn't we think of typing it like that. Good grief.

Well, to make a long story longer, that address worked. We got to the store only a couple of hours late, and still made it to the last store of the day and home before his 11 hours ran out. It's great to have 2 GPS units to confirm each other, but sometimes everything goes nuts and you just want to punch the people who programmed them.

I personally am counting down the days till I can bid the cubicle-and-phone world goodbye and head off to school. Until then, safe journeys!

So it's official...I gave notice to my current job yesterday and I leave for school with FFE on November 4. I don't have any delusions that it will be a cakewalk, but I have gone through the High Road Training Program and it made a HUGE difference so I definitely want to thank all of you who put it together. I know I will have a leg up on most of the folks who are in class with me! Also, my dad is a driver for Werner so he has taken me through the pre-trip on his truck a few times and I know that will help as well. I also have to say a HUGE thanks to Tim L for his wonderful description of the FFE academy, it was a great way to know what to expect!

I am so excited to get this new career going I can't see straight, and to Brett, Starcar, Old School, Tim L, Daniel B, and everyone else (please forgive me if I don't remember to mention you!), a thousand thanks for all the help you have provided thus far and all the wisdom you have given. I look forward to more wisdom as my new career takes off!

Thanks Old School! I hadn't even touched on the diaries yet...there is such a massive amount of information on this site, I have been on it every day for the last couple of weeks and feel like I haven't even scratched the surface!

One of the companies I am considering driving for is FFE. I was talking to a driver the other day who told me that FFE was sold off to another company, so I checked and sure enough FFE has been bought out by Duff Brothers (press release here).

I spoke to a recruiter who confirmed it, but she stated that FFE would be keeping their school. Any FFE drivers who can give me advice or info on how this may affect new driver candidates?