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Thanks Pack Rat. By the way I have been reading your diary of being OTR. Very enjoyable, picking up some good stuff. As I drive along I comment on the bone head moves I see cars and other truck drivers make. Like wow that truck is backing off a little to let me move over. Nice guy. Then the next truck cuts in front of me and sets my close following alert off. All the while in my head I am hearing keep your signal on until your trailer is completely in the lane. A few of these drivers need to go back for more training I think. Speaking of something to scare a new guy, we take an exit onto another road, trainer says careful it’s sharp, I seen the sign before marked 45. I slowed to just over 30 and was easing through the turn. It had several signs showing arrows to the left. Right in the middle of the turn the dash goes off red, and screams collision alert. The trainer said it is getting ready to nail the brakes when it does that. I am not sure what it picked up but it woke me right up! Guess the good thing is I was doing exactly what I was supposed to. More later

Part 7 We wake up to a beautiful 53 degrees day in Fairfield Ohio for our 1215 drop of 47000 lbs of cheese slices for McD burgers. Hopefully not a long wait. Then we got another load to pickup a few miles away with 2 drops, the last in Detroit, MI. We are having some fun now. Yesterday afternoon coming over I missed my exit on to I 74 east. I think it was a test and I failed badly. I thought the right 3 lanes split off but it turned out only 2 did and I couldn’t move over due to traffic. I admitted I screwed up. He told me which exit to get off and we made a loop through town and came back out on the freeway. All life’s trucking lessons to learn. My trainer logic is you are going to make mistakes, one of my jobs is to show you how to fix them.

Part 6 Trainer came in late last night. Wanting to do pad time, raining and blowing 34 degrees. Waited on the pad , no trailers available. Finally after a while a trailer comes free. Trainer hooked up and shows me straight, offset passenger side, parallel and alley dock. I do straight, do ok. Try offset and wind is blowing rain in the window, I am having trouble seeing landing gear to spot angle. Try offset, no enough angle, can see one side and barely the other side. Decided I could get it in the box, I did and it wasn’t pretty. Trainer says set the brakes, shut off the truck. I did, he walks back and I didn’t know what he was doing. Pretty soon he walks up and shows me the cone I ran over with the front wheel. He calmly says that could have been somebody else’s truck. By then he was soaked and our fleet manager said no driving around town as we had a freezing rain warning. So back to the room. I started thinking about the cone and beat my own self up worse than he did. We had a load coming in we were supposed to grab and take to ElPaso. It didn’t show until around noon the next day. We hooked up and I started driving. It rained all the way until south of Oklahoma City. It was a miserable 5 hours. I was tense, it was poor visibility and a lot of watch your signs, your on the white line, slow down to 50. Wow was I exhausted. We stopped And did our 10 off. Next morning got up and at least it was sunny. Drove to ElPaso about 6 hours, trainer took over last couple hours and parked us at the shipped drop point. Next morning unloaded around 730am. Got confirmation of another load to pick up 5 miles away. Travel to shipper. Found a Mexican place just down the block. They had a special, 2 pancakes, 2 eggs, sausage or bacon for $2.99. It was tasty. Went back checked in and it was live load. A couple hours we pulled out. Load headed back to Springfield. Stopped for the night at Amarillo Big Texan. Had dinner and Parker there for the night. Next morning was on the road at about 730. I drove almost 9 hours and felt pretty good. Stretched our legs north of OKC and did a little backing training. Did a straight back, good. Did offset back, fair. Getting better. We pick up a load at noon tomorrow going to Ohio. Once we get to Ohio we are at about 2500 miles for my first week. Only murdered 1 cone so far. Ye haw

Trade?

My dad always told me when you think you have it tough just look around and somebody else has it worse. Where you headed?

I'm enjoying reading your updates. It has me excited, too. I remember what you are now going through. Hope you are paired with a great trainer for PSD.

So far he is really good. I had told him my fav granddaughter lives in Tulsa, so tomorrow we should be going through there and he said I will have plenty of time for a lunch so that is cool!!

Part 5 The weather gods are not kind today. 39 degrees at 7am with a forecast of 32 degrees and spitting rain. More pretrip in the shop . Hopefully my trainer will call and get me out of here this afternoon!!

Part 4 Thursday was told, keep your phones close, turn them up loud, no matter if you are in class or not if it rings, answer it. It could be your trainer and there number could be from anywhere. I was told it showed a trainer was assigned to me. So I patiently waited realizing he could be anywhere in the country maybe driving nights, etc. Had my phone by my side all afternoon. Kept working on pretrip. Most of my group of 25 had trainers and left with them. Back to the Plaza on Friday for more pretrip, however the weather changed. It was near 40 degrees and spiting rain. I am a Montana boy but have not liver there in recent years, and just a week ago I left Mobile area at 90 degrees! They did pull a couple tractors and a trailer into the shop area as outside had about a 20 mph wind. That helped a lot but there is still a steady stream of trucks coming through night and day for inspections, tires etc. They even have a in floor scale in one bay, and all bays are set up to fuel as they come through. So it was still pretty chilly. In the afternoon 1/2 of the Wednesday class of 46 filtered in to start pretrip training. So there is only about 6 of us left from the Monday group that are waiting for trainers, so they assign us to help the new group with pretrip. I really enjoyed that. I felt like an instructor. You find out the ones interested and eager to learn, then the ones that think they have it figured out and the final ones hiding off with their phones. Still had fun. Around 4 pm I mean 1600, we were summoned to the classroom downstairs. We were told if we were not called by a trainer to report. Saturday at 1300 for sim training. Cool. Wake up Saturday, no call yet, even put my phone within reach of the shower just in case. Not worried just don’t want to miss the call. Went and washed laundry wanting to be ready. Campus inn cafeteria doesn’t open until 8 am on the weekend so I jump on the shuttle, head to the millinium building for breakfast. Big difference here is the cafeteria is open 24/7. So they have 2 dinner options buffet style, then lunch and breakfast made to order options, heck you can order up Ribeye steak and sides for $14.00. Matter of fact I order up a breakfast burrito and when my name is called I go to pick it up and a guy was picking up his ribeye with hash browns and eggs. I thought man that looks good, bet he isn’t in student driver training. Ha ha. Went to the movie theater upstairs and watched men in black. Head back to the campus for sim training. Get to class , there are 10 or 11 sim units and we have 36 students. Not to pick but wouldn’t you think somebody in planning would have split us up into at least 2 groups? Anyway the trainer had 16 of us stay and had to rest come back at 1500. So we break out into groups of two and practice straight alley backing. I paired with a nice lady, so I was polite and said ladies first. Plus I wanted to see what this truck was going to do to us. She had here hands full. She was turning the wrong direction to start and then over turning and it would get away from her. After several attempts she said ok you have to do better than that. I was really nervous but I have over the years pulled a lot of 16 and 20 foot trailers behind 1 tons and feel pretty confident in backing them. At this moment I was hoping that would help. I give it a go, first two attempts the trailer started moving to line up and got away from me. I pulled back out and got straight. Third try backed up very little correction and backed right in. Did 4 more in a row. Quadfecta, sorry got caught up in the moment. My partner said you make that look so easy. So I was working with her and got here to start steering the correct way and she backed a couple clear in but was still struggling. Then we just started to practice offset alley back and ran out of time. Went to Millinium for dinner and watched another movie, back to the room and crashed. Sunday morning and our day off. Shower and off to Millinium for breakfast. Meat lovers and veggie omelet for breakfast, was awesome. Sat down at one end of a long table so I could watch Fox News while I eat breakfast. A guy that goes by DJ starts up a conversation. Turns out he is a 15 year veteran of prime. Pretty soon a couple other drivers he knew stopped by and we had a couple hour visit. I really enjoyed it. They shared their love for prime and some great advice for setting a goal of what I want to accomplish at prime to keep focused. The lady driver D, maybe loves Prime more than Kersey! I went up stairs and started watching John Wick 3. About half way through I got my call. My trainer James. We start chatting and I start asking him questions about some of the concerns I have seen posted here. I liked all his answers. I told him I was glad that he had called and he says, what day is it? I laughed, he said he had been driving nights. He was in Texas headed for Springfield. Supposed to get in tonight around 9. His load is headed for Wisconsin so he has to figure out what to do with it. He wants to spend 4 or 5 hours driving around and some pad time before we leave on the road. I told him I will plan on going to class in the morning and he can call me when he gets a plan. I asked if I should go get some groceries? He said no just wait, I will show you how much room is available and then we can both go shopping. What a great plan. I am excited to get going. Stay tuned!!!!!

Part 3 Ok at the Campus Inn. Nice place not flashy but neat and clean. Food is buffet style but edible and part of training. Schedule I received at check in shows classroom C 4 , Monday 7 am. (Don’t be late, or on time. Early is on time) Yes they notice and make you aware this is a job interview. We had about 25 in my class. I don’t believe we lost any through the week. We talked about what would be happening. Since everyone had completed physical and drug screen we didn’t need to worry with that. Due to COVID we are one to a room and masks all the time. Just part of the deal lately. At check in we received a blank application that had to be filled out by hand. I had saved a copy of my online app just to make the dates easy. At 830 we were all taken to orientation office to lake copies of driver’s license and birth certificate, then were taken in one at a time to sit one on one with staff, they looked through the app glanced at the computer and that was about it. This is where you start wondering , did I forget anything? The young man I had was very nice, he said he had worked for prime for 7 years and his dad has been driving for prime for 26 years. He like all the rest of the staff is super helpful, very nice and will do what ever is needed to get you through the steps. This took about an hour then we had to log into the FMCSA clearing house web site and register our cdl, that took a little bit.Me and another guy had to jump on the shuttle, go to the Millinium building and take our cpap machines so they could verify we had been using them since the last report date. Returned back to the campus. Then we logged in and started working on our CBT ( computer based training). Like 36 different items and most had videos and quizzes. Worked on this until 12, had lunch and then my half of the group had sim training at 1300 to 1600. I had a lot Of fun with it. Worked on CBT for another hour and was down to about 7 items. Had dinner and called it a night. One down! Tuesday roll call 7 am, we then had to log in and take a personalis test. Never seen anything quite like it. Hope I have a match out there. After that had time to knock out the rest of my computer classes. No mention of pretrip training yet? Went to lunch then free time until sim training at 2000 to 2315. Part of the test I think. We had one older gentleman, no not me! He spoke French and a little English, he had trouble seeing, constantly loosing his phone and glasses and didn’t listen very well. In sim training we were told, speed limit is 55 , get to it and put on the cruise. So we are driving along he is driving 65 or 70 the instructor got on him pretty good and at the end of that class kept him after. I was surprised he was still in class the next day. Wednesday did not have to report in until 1300. We were told if we had everything completed we would be badged, which allows us to the milliunium building and the plaza building to work on pretrip. Arrived at 1300 and about an hour later was badged, yee haw one small step for mankind. Thursday we reported to the Plaza building to start on pretrip. Went outside and the weather was beautiful. The training pad is hard to believe until you can see it in person. It is huge. So started the walk around, properly mounted and secured, no cracked bent or broken. Will remember that for the rest of my life, we also had a tire class for an hour, picked up a lot of important info about the super singles. I am guessing most of the mega carriers are running them. More to come

Great job. Best of luck to you

Part 2 The other frustrating part of no internet is having a nice printer scanner sitting in your living room and you still have to go to the UPS store. Prime uses the Driver pulse app. So I was able to upload some of the forms to it which helped. So I have my paper cdl permit. Not sure about other states but in AL the paper one expires in 30 days, so Stacey said that would not leave enough time for Orientation and Prime student Driver training, testing out and then returning home to change over my license. DMV had said I would have my hard card in a couple weeks. They were right 14 days later it finally shows up. The hard card version expires in 6 months, so I can see that makes sense. Physical wise, I had applied for a truck loading job with ups a few months before. I am type 2 diabetic but no insulin, also use a cpap. I was given a 90 day health card pending cpap info. My cpap is older and has a as card in it. I asked my regular doctor about and he referred me to a respatory specialist. Went there the gal tried 2 or 3 times and said she could not read it and I probably needed a new unit. So I called a medical oxygen place the guy said bring it in. This was right in the middle of the hurricane mess. He hooked up the as card and it took about 20 minutes and he was able to print a 90 day report that showed I was 100 percent compliant. The machine is about 7 years old and never was read before. Then the guy didn’t even charge me anything. Whoopie!! So then took that report back to the doc that did my dot health card and he made it a 1 year health card. I told Stacey this was my plan or I would take a new physical which ever she wanted. She said that was fine, but she did schedule a new drug test as it was a couple months since my last one. Got that done, no worries. When I got the dot physical it was an impromptu thing. The doctor and I only discussed the main meds for my diabetes and blood pressure. When I supplied the paperwork to Stacy I took a sheet of paper and listed every prescription I was on at the time of the physical just so there were no surprises. Nothing more was said. Prime is only allowing driving your own car or renting a car to travel to orientation. No bus or plane allowed due to COVID. I rented a car. Due to the fact it was 11 plus hours of driving, plus any stops, I drove part way and got a cheap room for a night. Stacey told me to email her copies of the rental and fuel and also the room. I explained I felt the prudent thing to do was get a room and said if it was covered, great, if not that was fine too. Arrived Sunday Oct 18th, for Orientation starting Monday the 19th. Arrived at about 10 am. My paperwork had said rooms were available at 6 am on Sunday. Not the case, rooms still being cleaned, was asked to complete some paperwork. About 11 I told the gal at the front desk I needed to return my rental to the airport. She said no problem I will let you know when your room is ready and you can leave your bags here they will be safe. On the way to the airport she called and let me know my room was ready. Very sweet gal. I turn the car in and it is pouring rain. I get done with that. My paperwork showed a prime shuttle phone number to call to get picked up at the airport. First I called and was told, no you need to call a different number on the weekend. Ok got that number, call and was told they only come out to the airport every 2 hours. Here I was soaking wet and really just wanted a warm dry place to lay down. So I grabbed a cab, $30 ouch. Anyway the driver asks how long I have worked for Prime. I said just starting training. He says they are a good outfit, just don’t let them talk you into being an owner operator it just isn’t worth it.! Hmmm heard that before some where. Stay tuned