Profile For SonOfD

I did it!!! Oh thank God! But I ended up having to rent a truck to take the test in. The truck was an 8 speed manual and I was trained in a 10 speed. But that wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought it would be. Bigger issue was my reference points on the trailer for offset and parallel parking. But I managed to get it in the box, just barely with the parallel but it was in there. Lol! Thanks to all who left messages of encouragement. I’m scheduled to start orientation with KLLM on Monday. So stoked! Thanks Larry

Well, it didn’t go well. Failed for the third time. Really took the wind out of my sales. Pretrip, air brake, straight back, offset and parallel parking all went great. No problem. But when I was pulling out onto the road for the last part of the test, my trailer hit the gate/fence and put a scratch on the side of the trailer. No damage to fence though. I just didn’t go wide enough. So, instant fail. I‘lol be speaking with the school director on Monday to see if they will let me test one more time if I cover the fee. But it’s my understanding they have a policy of termination if you hit anything. But I have to try. I’ve put so much time and energy into this endeavor to just give up. And the instructor I had says I do really well. I just get so nervous during the exam. The testers are kind of gruff. Anyway, if the school says no, I understand I can rent a truck at the dmv to take the test in. Thanks Larry

Good luck tomorrow.

Hi, All the trucks we’ve trained on are 10 speed manual. There is a guy training that is in an automatic but he’s FFE. Which apparently was bought by KLLM. But I feel like I got the shifting down pretty well. I do have an ocassional mishap with the splitter, but I’m getting there. I am embarrassed to report that I’ve failed the CDL test twice though. KLLM gives you three chances so I’m pretty nervous about my retest on Friday. I keep failing on the parallel parking. I get in there a bit crooked and then it all goes down hill from there. My wife passed on her first try! Very proud of her. Please let the trucking Gods smile on me Friday!

From what I understand most of the larger carriers are converting to automatics.

We’re training in manual transmissions so we won’t get a restricted CDL. y

I started on Monday. Today though, we started out on the range practicing straight backing but all the trucks were automatics. Do they have manual trucks for road time or did they recently move to automatics?

Hi there. My wife and I decided to take the plunge and go OTR with KLLM. I was in IT and got so sick of cubicle life that I couldn’t stand it anymore. My wife was a restaurant manager and she was done with it as well. So here we are. We went and got our permits before applying to try and get a leg up. So we started trucking school a week ago. We practiced straight backing for a couple of days, and then we moved on to offset parking. Three days ago, they took us out around town. We’re training in manual transmissions so we won’t get a restricted CDL. But they said we’ll be getting an automatic once training is over. I gotta say, the double clutch is really throwing me for a loop. The Mrs. is struggling with it too. Me being 50 and my wife is 43, we thought we knew how to drive. Not! Wow, there’s so much to keep track of. Kind of hard not to be overwhelmed. But we’ll keep plugging and trying our best. Just wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. All the best Larry