S1B4 Orientation - The Rubber Meets the Road
Lauren Saige the Travel Gal, Sept 21st, 2020
I received six pre-hire letters and decided to go with Werner Enterprises. They pay tuition reimbursement at $250 per month until your school bill is paid off and they have many more opportunities for different routes with some very good dedicated ones which can put me home on the weekends. Most of the other companies were 2 to 3 weeks out at a time One smaller company that I was quite in love with only paid out $100 per month for tuition reimbursement. I hope I didn’t make a mistake in not going with them.
Prep was packing for 10 days on the road with a trainer. While I trained and tested out on a manual the newer trucks today are automatics and come with air ride seats, electrical systems that automatically turn the truck on and off during the night as needed to keep the batteries charged, Cpaps running and truckers comfortable in all weather conditions. We’ve come a long way from the covered wagon days! The older truckers call us wheel holders.
Aug 3rd, 2020 began my orientation with Werner. It was with a mixture of excitement and worry that I headed to the Springfield terminal. Here we go!
The first couple of days we were in the classroom learning the company rules and regulations among other things. Part of our orientation also included “virtual” driving. Anyone who knows me probably knows what happened on the virtual driving unit - I was immediately nauseous. I get motion sickness and as a result, could not complete the virtual part of orientation - they passed me on nonetheless. We had a road test and a 45-degree backing class, I did well on both. Then it was to the hotel to wait for a trainer assignment. Mine came two weeks later, it was hard to find female trainers so I finally agreed to a non-smoking male trainer. He ended up being the best trainer I could possibly have and an absolute gentleman.
They gave me a rental and sent me to St. Louis to meet up with him. He was “Met Opps”, which for one thing meant he was home every night – which also meant that I stayed in a hotel rather than in the truck. Met Opps is sort of a relay race type deal where one driver will drive a trailer to a drop yard and another will drive that same trailer to another drop yard so and so forth across the entire country. The only time I would sleep in the truck was on the weekends when we would leave out at 2am or drive on Friday night to get a jump on the pick up Saturday. Ray drove through the night while I slept (or what counted as sleep, bouncing somewhere between the bunk and the ceiling all night long), and then I would drive in the morning. Our typical day was back and forth between saint Louis and Indianapolis, The weekends were typically between a Saint-Louis drop yard and Oklahoma city or up to the Joliet terminal in Illinois.
My trainer taught a foolproof 45-degree backing technique that works every time if you do it correctly. It’s kind of an extreme jackknife sort of thing, but it works. And, of course, ”turn towards the problem” became a mantra. It ended up being very helpful, though I eventually ended up using a modified technique I learned in trucking school that’s a little easier on the tandems.
My trainer was the perfect Gentleman. I always felt safe in the truck with him even on the weekends those few times we slept in the same truck. There is a bunk bed in the sleeper birth.
Four weeks later and my training was done. Another rental and back to the Springfield Ohio terminal for a last over-the-road driving test. Werner promoted me to a full company driver and sent me off to pick up my first truck. That in itself was an interesting story (for an hour I felt like I was in something akin to the Burt Reynolds movie “Deliverance”. Subscribe to my blog and continue to receive new updates!
If you see me on the road, give out a “hoot, hoot!” I’ll message back with my country horn rolling down the highway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBN86y30Ufc
Happy travels!