The Training Bro

I am still in training. I am also exhausted from long hours and irregular sleep.

Training seems like it will never end. I started nearly three weeks ago and I still have about a week left to go before the company considers me to be sufficiently trained. I figure that, at this point, I am about 93% ready to be pushed out of the nest.

"Best coffee on the Interstate"

I am slowly getting the hang of it. I have finally learned to downshift, I no longer stall the fully-loaded truck while going up steep grades, I have finally learned how to slide my tandems forward and backwards without injuring myself, I have a better idea of adjusting loads (so the truck won’t be overweight at highway scales) and I am getting used to the idea of infrequent opportunities with which to bathe. And even though I am often stinky, I have my very own "truckers" coffee mug.

However, I am still wrestling with the Qualcomm unit.

Inside each truck lives a device that looks sort of like an institutional, ruggedly-built, beige plastic laptop computer. This what we call "the Qualcomm"; it monitors everything. The machine makes a sound like a hawk in distress whenever a new message comes in. Through it, we keep in constant contact with the Driver Manager and receive daily "helpful" missives from the Safety Department (messages that usually border on the bloody-obvious).

This balky device is our main tool for conveying information back and forth to and from the company. They use it to tell us where we are to go, precisely which routes to take, where to get an emergency repair done and where we should go to fill up with fuel. In return, we use it to let them know when we have arrived at a shipper, when we have departed a shipper with a fully loaded truck or when we have broken down on the side of the road and the entire truck is now on fire. The possibilities are endless.

The Qualcomm device is also used to maintain the all-important D.O.T. log.

The days of paper logs, the system where a driver uses a ballpoint pen to write in a book (and, just maybe, keep a second copy showing fewer driving hours) are just about over. Most companies already use electronic "logbooks" and the company that I work for is on-board and up to date. By 2014 or so, electronic logs will be mandatory in all big trucks nationwide anyway. This forthcoming mandate has seriously impacted any thoughts that I ever might have had about popping a handful of little, white pills and running a illicit load of Coors through the south.

Which brings me to Hours of Service.

For a moron like myself, one who never did really well at basic arithmetic during elementary school, correctly understanding my own H.O.S. is mind-numbingly confusing and difficult. The gist of it is that I have 14 hours (total) a day to work with, and, out of those 14, I can legally drive 11 hours.

But, if I am inefficient with my time, I can also fritter away hours from my 14 which subtracts valuable driving time from my 11 and that makes me very sad. I can allegedly work up to 70 hours in a week, but I must be in the sleeper berth for a goodly portion of that time though I must be off duty for another period (but not during the same period), though that doesn’t stop me from simultaneously working on other vital stuff, but not driving, whereupon I must take a 34-hour “reset”, which makes perfect sense, unless I am working on an 8-2 split or if I am doing a required recap, (AKA rolling your hours) at which point I curl up into the fetal position and sob quietly on the floor right next to the steering wheel.

Thankfully, the Qualcomm keeps track of available hours for me.

My life now largely consists of getting up before dawn, climbing down out of the upper bunk, putting on my shoes, climbing down backwards out of the truck and scampering to the restroom before I wet myself. After that, I return to the truck, change my H.O.S. status on the Qualcomm thingie from "sleeper" to "off duty", then go about finding some substandard coffee for my new coffee mug. One I am sufficiently caffeinated, I change my status to "on duty", do the morning pretrip inspection, climb back in, change the Qualcomm to "driving" and then try to drive somewhere without running into anything along the way.

Meanwhile, my trainer prompts me to remember all the things that I have neglected to remember. Some day, I actually will get it. I am not all that worried though, because if these guys can learn it, then so will I.

And at the very least, I have a new coffee mug.

We swap trailers just about every day, and occasionally we get one that has had an awkward repair.

All trucks are grey in the dark

At 4:00 am it was still pretty dark outside.

I parked my car, grabbed my duffel bag and went looking for my trainer's truck. All trucks are grey in the dark. I was in the right place, but I couldn't find my trainer and I couldn't find his truck. 

The right place was a dirt lot that filled with identical trucks. I finally located my trainer, climbed aboard his truck and stowed my duffel. This would be my home for the next three weeks. I would sleep in the cramped, top bunk. Bathing, decent coffee and speaking with anybody who shared my liberal politics would become a thing of the past.

It is now the end of that first week.

Once I had climbed up and into that Freightliner tractor, I would begin the real part of my education. Up until then, this whole truck driving thing had all been sort of theoretical. Now, that shit was real.

My company-supplied trainer has trained many before me; he is knowledgeable, patient and is quite the chatterbox. For the first two days, I rode in the passenger seat, listened and soaked up gobs of information, (most of it too boringly truck-specific to bother you with) but I would not be allowed to drive the truck.

When it was still quite dark out, we drove out of that dirt lot in Woodland down I-5, over to I-80 and eventually made it to Milpitas with a load; somebody else's load that was embarrassingly late. The load was so late that the consignee refused us, so we dropped off the entire trailer, still sealed, at one of our company's yards nearby in Lathrop and swapped it for an empty. Then, we drove somewhere else and picked up a load of ketchup and took that replacement trailer all the way up to Everett,WA.

After that, we went here, there and everywhere, picking up and dropping off all sorts of things; new pallets, giant paper rolls, hardware and garden supplies, boxes of paper towels. Nothing really all that special. Just stuff. Anything and everything. Drop off a trailer with stuff, swap it for an empty one. The destinations soon ran together. There were no wasted minutes, there was no time to relax. Sometimes we had to wait for people with forklifts to unload us, but mostly we just swapped full trailers for empty ones and were on our way. I didn't just sit, I helped to do stuff: raising and lowering landing gear, doing pre-trip and post-trip inspections, thumping on tires with a mallet, hooking up and detaching the air supplies and its "pigtail" electrical hookup. But no actual driving.

After a couple of days, my head was about filled with stuff.  (I keep learning gobs of stuff and the memorization never seems to end. I am naturally curious and I like to learn stuff, but come on! Enough already!)

On the third day, my trainer suddenly announced that I would be driving from then on. He would sit over in the passenger seat. I would drive.

Although I had driven a similar, newish Freightliner truck for a few short minutes during my orientation, I had never really driven one, never taken one beyond eighth gear. This new truck sported a 13-speed transmission, and now I needed to learn how to use its "half-gears", whatever the hell those were.

Also, I had never driven a loaded truck; in school I had only pulled empty trailers. That was about to change.

For that matter, I had never driven a loaded truck up and down a real hill of any importance. That changed too.

Lessons on everything continued, plenty of mistakes were made. I made slight improvements. Very, very slight improvements. I also made plenty of mistakes: I missed gears, I grinded gears, I took forever to back up to loading docks, I asked lotsa really dumb questions. But I continued to improve. After awhile, I made fewer stupid errors, though I still have a long way to go. And I will invent new mistakes to make.

As I write this, I am sitting in Gilroy, California, having driven down from Kalama, Washington, around Oregon and Washington for awhile and down I-5, past Ashland, up steep grades over the Siskiyous and down the other side, down through the Sacramento Valley to the Bay Area, down past San Jose to Gilroy, where I finally had a chance to write some of this stuff down, and where I finally got a chance to pee.