Meandering Musings And Misadventures From The Road

So I’ve been in the TNT portion of training with Prime Inc for almost two weeks now, and it’s been an experience. TNT is team driving, with a trainer. So unlike PSD , where I drove just enough to learn how to pass the exam, I’m driving just as much as my trainer. Backing at truck stops and shippers and receivers (it’s a lot harder when you’re aiming between trucks instead of cones), and driving on city streets in places like LA, Oakland, and Cleveland (two of those were by accident, and one was to go to a truck stop in Oakland that I decided to pass on once I saw it). I’ve gotten lots of good pictures (Utah is the most consistently photogenic state I’ve seen so far), and the list of states I haven’t been to is rapidly dwindling.

My trainer is really cool. We get along great, and he’s pretty laid back about things. However, shortly after I got on his truck he decided that he was going to quit Prime as soon as my training is finished. Like so many people, he got suckered into leasing when he started at Prime. Not a good deal. He’s not doing well. Unlike my PSD instructor, who is a company driver and does VERY well. He warned me not to lease, and I told him I had no intention of leasing. I told him that I’d never heard anyone say anything good about leasing, and told him that Truckingtruth.com was one of the main places I got that from. He said he wished someone would have told him that in the beginning. So while he’s a great guy, and laid back towards me, he’s got a short-timer’s attitude now and he’s pretty much fed up with everything. Yesterday didn’t help that at all. We dropped off a load of bread near Oakland that we had picked up in Michigan, then were told to get to this place near LA as fast as possible to pick up a load of strawberries. No other information, no appointment time or anything. So we start down there, sacrificing things we needed to do like shower and do laundry (I spilled soup all over my last clean pair of pants, so now I’m down to shorts – not going to cut it now that we’re out of California). We figured we’d get loaded that night and be on our way to Ohio. Well, our dispatcher didn’t tell us that the place closes at eight, and didn’t tell us that we weren’t picking up until the next day anyway. She just wanted us to hurry up and get there, just because. Not giving any consideration to the fact that we need all the information in order to plan the trip properly. Especially since California hardly has any truck stops (that state is a big middle finger to truckers). So we slept at the shipper overnight, expecting to get loaded early in the morning. We got checked in third, yet somehow sat there all day waiting to be loaded while we watched truck after truck come in after us, get loaded, and leave. My trainer kept going to the office to see what was up, and it was always “Your load’s not here yet,” or “The load is being cooled. How long? I don’t know. Half hour, an hour, I don’t know.” All day we sat there and watched strawberries brought in on little trucks, pallet after pallet. Apparently we were waiting on special strawberries just for us. I don’t know what the problem was. It made no sense. So we finally got out of there around six in the evening, so I had to drive through LA during rush hour, which is more like rush five hours.

You know, there’s a lot of land in this country. I really wish the people of LA would make use of it and spread out. I drove for almost three hours through endless cities during rush hour in the LA area, and it was NOT FUN. At one point, the GPS told me I was out of route (even though I did what it said), and when I hit “Reroute” it sent me off the freeway and through Hollywood to get back on track. That took a few years off my life. The freeway is bad enough, with rush hour traffic and people who don’t know how to merge and don’t have a healthy fear of trucks or respect for their own or anyone else’s lives. I can handle that, though. Moving straight forward is easy. But driving a truck on congested city streets is like navigating a giant spaceship through an asteroid field, if asteroids had middle fingers. Apparently the GPS wanted me to get some shifting practice. My trainer says that I maneuver the truck well, I’m safe and aware and laid back, but that shifting is the one thing I still need work on. Downshifting is supposed to be the hard part, but I’m pretty smooth with that. But upshifting for me is like arm wrestling with a rusty robot. That doesn’t mix well with California’s bumpy, broken-down roads. The one good thing about the roads is that the lines are painted so badly they look like Stevie Wonder’s musical notation, so they don’t put you to sleep. As soon as I crossed over into Arizona, the perfectly painted lines started to hypnotize me. So I’m done driving for the night. There’s a lot I’d like to do in California, it’s a beautiful place (minus Oakland). But I want to go there in a car.