Comments By Scott D.

I see your from Indiana. who did you end up driving for?

Drove an Auto for the first time today.... what a slow ass slushbox.. didnt think i was ever gonna get up to 65, and that was with an empty 48' trailer..

Don't keep it floored. Let off the accelerator as if you were shifting. I let off just as it approaches 1500 rpms & it shifts faster.

ill just stick to manuals until im forced to make the switch,, i was also bored as hell on this trip haha

Speaking of prime.... one of their drivers about ran me over today when i was leaving school. locked up front and rear brakes on my motorcycle...

Drove an Auto for the first time today.... what a slow ass slushbox.. didnt think i was ever gonna get up to 65, and that was with an empty 48' trailer..

Congrats!! What CDL school did you go to?

Truck Driver Institute. they have like 15 locations across the states. Mine what the South Indy location

Well i passed my road test this morning. now off to finalize where i wanna drive for at least a year now.

The most important part is don't think for a minute that you can't do it because you can. It just takes experience and time.

what company is this since it shows your in Indy. im about 20 minutes south...

It's possible, best bet to avoid really tough situations would be regional work getting you home weekly. All I got to say is avoid dollar store accounts. If there is a will there is a way.

If you can backup to anything and everything ect.. go for it.. seem most ward away from local stuff because newbies suck at backing up... im in school and got bored... i made myself an old serpentine back test using 8 cones instead of 3... like i said i was bored lol

Backing is easy when it's cones. Wait till you got to blindside back into a business on a busy street with cars on both side of the road. Don't get too overconfident that will lead to accidents.

ill quote the russian bad guy from goldeneye (james bond) "use the bumpers, thats what they are for".

but in all serious yes its cones and every situation will be different. but when i im watching people here on the cone range take over 10 min on the strait back cone course and they still kill half of them after 25 hours of practice... i start to worry

If you can backup to anything and everything ect.. go for it.. seem most ward away from local stuff because newbies suck at backing up

Scott, we're proud to have you in here, and glad to hear you're doing so well going backwards. But... you need to be careful giving out advice like this. People get their whole careers cut short by going local first. We see it often. There's always a few exceptions, and we've got a few of those exceptions in here. Most of them readily admit that they got lucky. There's a lot more issues involved than just backing.

We teach best practices in here. We do that because they produce the best results. There are a lot of reasons why most local jobs require one year of OTR experience. So, we don't just encourage newbies to avoid local jobs because they might not be good at backing the truck. Sure, that is one part of the problem, but there are plenty of other issues involved.

Any job that is safety sensitive like trucking should be a approached with incremental steps into the learning process. Taking a local job first bypasses many of the opportunities for learning how to handle a rig in all sorts of situations. It's not recommended here.

yes i almost fell into the dollar account trap until this page forced me to do more research on it... prob spent 15 hours or so on google and you tube.... told them to shove that one you know where lol.

If you can backup to anything and everything ect.. go for it.. seem most ward away from local stuff because newbies suck at backing up... im in school and got bored... i made myself an old serpentine back test using 8 cones instead of 3... like i said i was bored lol