Stories from the Road: Trucking School

Tobin S.

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Sep-04-10 01:14 AM
Original message

Stories from the Road: Trucking School

Edited on Sat Sep-04-10 01:15 AM by Tobin S.

First of all, let me thank all of you who read my stories. I also appreciate the replies. Watching the view and post counts go up on those stories really floats my boat :). It's encouraging, and without DU I don't know if there would be very many of my little essays. As it is, there are over 50 of them totaling over 30,000 words and I've also written some trucking related fiction that I've not posted here, but that would not have been created if it weren't for you all.

It struck me tonight that I've never written about my experiences in trucking school. Some of the old hands make fun us trucking school grads. They were either taught by their fathers or some other trucker relatives and perceive the old school way of learning to drive as superior...and maybe it is. But for we "new breed" folks, who don't have the benefit of a trucking relative, the only way to get into trucking is by going to a CDL school. And my choice to become a trucker and going to one of those schools was an experience that I'll always remember. It was a life changing event and it couldn't have come at a better time.

It was in the fall of 1996 and my life was a mess. I was 24 years old and couldn't hold down a job. I'd been living in a 1969 model mobile home that I'd paid $2000 for that was located in one of the worst sections of town, a crime infested trailer park. I had a fifteen year old Mazda mini pick-up that was rusted out and running on three cylinders. I was crazy as hell and my life made no sense.

After losing yet another job, I was looking through the classified ads in the local paper one day and I noticed the trucking ads. One of them said that they would train me for free and give me a job if I qualified. I called them up, told them my deal, and they said something like, "Welcome aboard. The next class starts in December. We'll have a bus ticket reserved for you." Well, that's not exactly what they said, but that's it in a nutshell.

I had about $500 to my name and a credit card with a $500 limit. There was an old guy that lived in the park who I was friendly with who fixed up trailers as his source of income. He was just about as poor as me. I went into his trailer one time in the winter and he was heating the place with one of his cooking stove burners. It ran on propane and he just left one burner on 24/7. It surprised me when I learned that because it really wasn't all that cold in there. Anyway, I gave the old guy my trailer and pick-up before I left for school. Just signed the titles right over to him free and clear. I changed my mailing address to my folks' place, who were kind enough to let me stay there in my time off the road, and I caught the bus to New Buffalo, Michigan on December 1st.

There was a motel located next door to the trucking school where the company that was sponsoring me put me up. On December 3rd classes began. It didn't take long for me to see that things were not as they seemed. After calling role and making sure everyone was there, they escorted us all down to a clinic to do drug tests. The ol' pee in a cup routine. After we got back from that we started learning about trucking laws. There were nineteen of us there, if I remember right.

The next morning, after we'd all checked in, a guy came into the room and started calling people out one by one. They didn't come back, either. I later learned that some of them had tested positive for drugs and others were disqualified due to too many speeding tickets, a DUI, or other moving violations on their BMV report. I was angry for those guys. It didn't seem fair to get someone's hopes up like that, cart them hundreds of miles away from their homes, and then check up on them. It seemed to me that those things could have been taken care of before they'd even left home. I was glad I wasn't one of those guys, relieved, in fact, but it didn't seem fair to me at all.

After four days of classroom study and tests, it was time to hit the driving range. It was just a big dirt field with an obstacle course set up on it, basically. They had several trucks set up there, old beaters for the most part. They were in the front of lanes about 50 yards long that we had to back up into. They put two people to a truck. Before we hit the rest of the course we had to prove that we could back up straight by backing the entire length of those lanes without going outside the boundaries, and we had to do it twice in a row. The lanes were about 12 feet wide. A truck is 8.5 feet wide. Sounds easy, right? Wrong, to the uninitiated anyway. Trucks pivot at the connection with the tractor and the trailer. You have to be able to think in reverse from the way you back a car. Couple that with the long length of the vehicle and you have a real challenge to someone who's never backed a truck before, unless you're a trucking prodigy. I could not get that truck to the back of the lane at all the first day, and I was really stressed out about it.

I had to sit and stew about that over the weekend. In the meantime, I had to deal with a crude room-mate at the motel. I think just the act of breathing gave this guy gas, let alone eating something. I asked the guy to go to the bathroom or go outside or something and he just kept farting. I'm lactose intolerant and when I drank milk it had the same effect on me that existing did to the other guy. So I went down to the store and bought a quart of milk, came back to the room, and drank it.

Two hours later, that guy had to leave the room. I didn't have a problem with him after that.

On Monday we hit the range again. I was back to trying to back up straight, while other students were doing the rest of the course. Finally, after about half the day, it just clicked and I was backing up straight as an arrow. I called an instructor over to show him that I could do it and I was off to the rest of the course. Unfortunately, there was one student who was still stuck and couldn't even get half way down the lane after two days. The instructors were working with her, but she gave up and went home. Her husband was a trucker and she was trying to get her CDL so she could drive with him. Maybe the teachers just weren't good enough to show her, and I hope she was able to get the training she needed elsewhere.

The rest of the course consisted of maneuverability, 45 degree backing, and 90 degree backing. Strangely, I was able to hit the 45 and 90 degree backing quicker than I learned how to back up straight. After a week of tooling around the obstacle course we hit the road.

I did not have any experience in teaching people anything, but I knew that the proper way to teach someone something was NOT yelling at them. Shifting and backing are the two most difficult things to learn when you are in a truck for the first time. Manual truck transmissions, the transmissions that are in the vast majority of trucks, are a lot different than manual car transmissions. The "proper" way to shift them is to double clutch. A very common truck transmission is the ten speed manual. It's the transmission that's in the truck that I currently drive and it was the same one that was in the trucks at the truck driving school. Here's how it works. Under most loads and in most driving conditions you can start out in 2nd or 3rd gear. The first five gears are similar to a five speed in a car as far as the pattern goes. Once you wind the truck out in 5th gear, you flip up a lever on the gear shifter that puts you in high range. You then shift to the place in the pattern where 1st gear was and that's now 6th gear. Then the pattern is just like a 5 speed again through 10th gear. When you shift from gear to gear you have to push in the clutch, take the truck out of gear, push in the clutch again and shift to the next gear. That's double clutching. But that's shifting up, and going through the pattern while you are speeding up is much easier to learn than down-shifting. And we were taught that the proper way to slow down a truck is through the combination of braking and down-shifting.

Are you still there? I know that last part was boring, but hang in there. I'm about to get to the good stuff and the yelling and all that. But, first, a few more boring things. It will be worth it. I promise.

To down-shift a truck you have to push in the clutch then take the transmission out of gear and rev the truck up while it's out of gear to match the engine rpm with the road speed that you will be going when you are in the next lowest gear. Then you push in the clutch while the engine is revved and shift into the next lowest gear. So, say if you are coming off the highway on an exit ramp and you are in tenth gear. You slow down the truck using the brake until the engine RPM hits the low range of that gear, say 1100 RPM. You push in the clutch, take the truck out of tenth, rev the motor up to 1500 rpm, push in the clutch, and shift into 9th. Repeat until you reach the low end of 7th gear and then just use the brake to complete the stop.

Clear as mud, right? I thought so too when I first got into a truck. Ask me about shifting without the clutch sometime. It's much easier in practice once you learn how to do it without trashing your transmission.

Yelling. Yes, the yelling. My first road instructor was a wiry, little ex-steel hauler dude who clearly should have kept to steel hauling, because his idea of learnin' ya was to scream at you. When I got into the truck for the first time, I found that I could go through the gears on the way up without too much difficulty. I could not down-shift to save my life.

So, there I was driving down this skinny little two lane road with this cocky bastard in the jump seat. I came up on a down grade that had a stop sign at the bottom. I started to down-shift and could not catch a gear, so I was rolling out of gear and had to use only the brakes to get stopped. Once I did get stopped this fucker exploded on me, "When I tell you to down shift I mean get this fucker in gear! I wouldn't put you behind the wheel of a truck if you were the last driver on Earth if it was up to me! If I have any say in it you will not be a truck driver!" Or something to that effect. I don't remember the exact words, but I do remember the message, loud and clear.

Did I mention that I was crazy? Yes, I think I did.

I grew up in a household where there was a lot of yelling, and, as a young adult, had very little tolerance for it. So, I was behind the wheel of a 65 foot rig with no driving experience and some asshole just did something to me that I absolutely loathed. I was unable to express my anger and fight back with words, due to reasons that would later come out in therapy, so I decided to get scary with the tools at hand...and I hammered down.

I didn't do anything illegal. We were on a rural highway that was full of hills and the lane was not much wider than the truck, trees on each side of the highway. I had been going well under the speed limit before the guy yelled at me, but I got her up to 50 which was the speed limit. I could feel the butterflies in my belly as I crested the hills. Wind was whipping through the truck. I looked over at the guy and he had put on his seat belt, which he didn't have on before, and had grabbed a hold of the arm rest. Him? Fear. Me? Happiness. I'll make no apologies. I got up to the next stop sign and didn't even try to down-shift, just using the brake. He told me to get out of the seat and then drove us back to the school without saying a word.

I went into the school and told the head dude that one of his instructors had just yelled at me and cussed me. He said that he had never had any trouble with the guy. I think that was bullshit, but he said I wouldn't have to drive with the guy again and I completed the rest of my training without seeing him again. And nobody else yelled at me.

I did learn to down-shift with the help of a more patient instructor. I was really slow about it to make sure I got it right and it earned me the handle Slow Motion which I used for many years. Now days, you can call me Toby or Madman. ;)

The rest of my training was uneventful, aside from the graduation. I took the Michigan state CDL exam with an examiner who was notoriously tough and got a 100% passing grade. I did stall the truck during the exam at a traffic light which I had heard was an automatic fail. I went the rest of the test thinking I had failed, which I think might have actually helped me get my high marks because it relaxed me in a strange way. I asked the examiner about it after she had surprisingly told me that I had passed, and she said that since I had gotten the truck going quickly and hadn't held up traffic that it was ok. She said that truckers stall trucks all the time in the real world.

Ladies and gentlemen, the graduating class of December 1996 from the Professional Driver's Institute in New Buffalo, Michigan:

Note that there are ten of us there out of an original class of nineteen. The big guy in the pink shirt and red hat was one of our instructors. I'm the dude on the lower right with the blue and black flannel with the white t-shirt poking out of the top.