That sounds resonable to me.I wonder if they have a regional board?

Day 3:

Orientation is over!

I am officially hired and (more importantly) pay-rolled

I have a stack of papers 2 inches thick and will meet my trainer in 2 hours. I will be driving a kenworth :( for my training on a dedicated coors run. I also met my fleet manager who is pretty cool. It was really cool to see a driver call in with something and watch as my dispatcher went to the right people and found out what was going on and got the issue resolved right away.

One of the other drivers husband got injured on the job and they will not let him ride along as a passenger, the wife got into an argument over this with the person she was dealing with and that person yelled at and talked down to the driver. The driver went and talked to someone else and the first person got disciplined for inappropriate behavior.

All the people we talked to really emphasized safety and gave us direct extensions to talk to them if we had issues with something. This is really different from the last place I worked that claimed to be open door but didn't want to deal with you. There is a huge feeling here that if I need to talk to someone about something I really can go right to them. Many of the different departments have a macro on the qualcom where you can send a message right to them and it does not have to be relayed through the dispatcher. All of the people I have worked with have been awesome so far.

--
Cockroach

Congratulations!! I have been following your posts about Central Ref. They are on my list as a company I am looking into. So far sounds like a good situation. I hope you are able to continue some post as you go out with your trainer.

BOL to you

Best of luck to ya Cockroach.Stay safe.

I am out on the road now. My trainer is an owner op. We are running pretty hard, there is a load of coors down to florida the dispatcher could not get any one to take so we are doing it for him as a favor. We are running hard to try to make it on time and to beat the hurricane. His dispatcher will do almost anything for him but he has to do stuff like this for him every once in a while. If all you do is bitch about crappy loads to your dispatcher thats all your gunna get basically, they are going to give the good stuff to the drivers who take care of them. Since we are doing 10/10 team right now to get this load down to florida we don't have time for much one on one training. My trainer says after this load is done we will have more time for that.

I am trying to get used to the 8 speed since I am training in the kenworth w9 w/ 8spd and we had straight 10 freightliners in school.

An interesting note about central is they pay their lease operators less money per mile when they have a student while the company drivers get paid extra to take a student. hmmm. My trainer says he takes students because it gets lonely driving alone, and that he doesn't get that many more miles out of it to make up for the pay decrease.

:shock: I hope you guys can beat the storm.And working with your dispatcher as a team will most times work out in your favor.

(vent)Today I started out in kingdom MO at noon, and hit St. Louse around 2 (log time, MDT) while there the traffic got thick. I had cars on both sides of me and a car decided to pull about 30 feet in front of me from the right to cut over to the left, but there is a car to his left and he can't make a second lane change so he slams on his brakes. mean while to the right its branching off into an exit and a minivan pulls up into that painted off area between the lanes. As I am doing every thing I can to bring my 78633 pound truck to a stop the minivan starts to pull in to the RAPIDLY closing spot between me and this idiot car. now this stupid car has NO cars infront of him, he is just trying to get over into the left lane because its faster. My truck is slowing down but not fast enough so I pull on my horn and the minivan darts back over into the painted offf area and comes to a complete stop. Good riddance to him now I have a little more room. anyways this guy going 25 on the freeway never did get the idea that if a truck just a few feet behind him is going 50 he should move out of the way, but I got my truck down to about 20 two feet from his bumper before he moved over to the left lane and took off. Now I am doing 20 mph going up hill in packed freeway traffic thats going 70 around me! Grrrr (/vent) and yeah I had lots of room in front of me before this guy pulled out in front of me. Also later on between cities another car came and got infront of me then slowed way down before taking off and this time I was going up an even steeper hill, He got me down to 40 (in a 70) but I couldn't find the gear right away so I dropped down to 15 fast, got a few comments over the cb, but its hard to get a fully loaded truck moving again. It took me a good 2 1/2 miles to get back up to speed.

hehe other than that my day went great. got to deal with lots of traffic in town in rush hour in 3 major cities, talk about trial by fire. I think I am getting the hang of the 8 spd transmission. I still don't know where the points are like I did for the 10 but I figured out how to find a gear/rpm by listening to the sound the transmission and the engine are making. That is working for me pretty well.

Also my trainer was sleeping and I went to wake him up because it was his turn to drive so I pulled off into a truck stop.. only it wasn't a truck stop it was a small car/garbage truck type diesel station and fast-food joints with signs that looked like a truck stop that was on a dead end street and had no room at all in the parking lot for a 53 foot trailer. So I had to do a U turn pushing my trailer way up into an empty lot because the street wasn't big enough to turn around. This was in georgia and I couldn't see the station from the road because of all the trees.

Yeah!
Fall for that line of thinking right away!!
I'm sure they are "needing" that Coors in FLA!
Training is training!
Running to get the miles is dollar signs!
Believe what you want from your owner/op trainer!
He's there for the $$$$!!!! :wink:

In time we will see... I will keep yall updated.

Coors. The official beer of the NFL and hurricane parties :D