Profile For Silver Fox

I was so excited yesterday. I drove the truck about 15 miles back to the yard. I thought I did great and it pumped up my confidence about 100%. Now I KNOW I can do this. No question. Thanks to my instructor Nate for the boost. SLB is so simple now, pretty much have offsets down and I have parallel parked (with much instruction) one time. Will be working on that this week as well as double-clutching. Thanks for the encouragement! Patti

Hello everyone! Thank you Brett for putting this website and forum together as it is very helpful to me. My name is Patti and to give a little background, I have worked selling life insurance pretty much all of my career. I did fine while in Dallas Texas but when I moved back to my hometown, San Antonio, TX, 5 years ago, I just couldn't quite make it here. I had a second job for 4 years and it was wearing me down. I am almost 62 years old and in great health but don't EVER want to fully retire. I heard an ad for driving a truck for Wal-Mart and that they made $86k first year and I thought, "Wow, I would love to do that" and started looking into it.

After some research, and to the chagrin of my siblings, I just quit my job and ran off to Ft. Worth for what they said was 3 week CDL training for PAM. The recruiter said 3 weeks but is not honest. The average at this school is 5-6 weeks. I passed the written test with flying colors and passed the pre-inspection (with the school) with flying colors, but when it came to backing the truck on the gravel, pot-riddled road, I couldn't do it. I was in backing for 7 days and didn't move on to learn offsets and parallel parking and OTR. The school dropped me after my 4th week.

I know other people moved on to offsets and parallel, and I was hard on myself for not being able to SLB into the box. I take responsibility for most of that but the school should have moved me to another instructor before dropping me, at the very least. So, I packed up my things and drove back to San Antonio... not defeated or deterred.

The school in Ft. Worth called to say I owe them $1,400 for my time there, and I told them I would pay them when I was working again.

When I got back home, I did more research and I signed up for school with Southern Careers Institute. I will be there until my test date of 9/12. I am passing backing and offsets with no problems and believe that parallel and OTR will be just fine too. I am excited about my new career and am looking forward to seeing not just the Texas Hill Country but all of the other beautiful States as well.

I have ph letters with Paschall and Covenant and applied online with a few more today. I am hoping to team drive as well but am seeing a few comments on here that maybe I might want to re-think that too. We'll see.

Again, thanks for all the comments as I am learning a lot here...Let me know your thoughts