So you wanna be a truck driver?

When Manuel and I first started thinking about going into truck driving, I had no idea where to begin. It took a lot of research to figure out how to even be a truck driver. Hopefully this will help someone who is interested in it like I was.

When I started my research, I already had my class B license, and we owned a dump truck. He and I had been driving it for a few years, first in Panama and then in Florida. But a tractor/trailer is a whole other beast completely. I had driven tractor/trailers in the Air Force, but that was 10 years ago and I had forgotten a lot. So I had to figure out how to get us from this point to being over the road truck drivers.

I started with picking up some recruiting/job advertising magazines from the local Peterbilt dealership. Then I started calling all the companies listed in these books, and asking them if they would hire me with my class A license but with no schooling and no experience. You are probably thinking, why did I ask such a stupid question. But you have to remember, I knew nothing of the business at all. I was going in totally blind to what we had to do. Consequently, all of them said no. If we didn't have any experience then we at least had to be recently graduated from an accredited truck driving school with a minimum amount of hours.

At this point I started an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the companies I called. I would note down not only would they hire us as students, but would they hire us from our area (Southwest Florida), what was their minimum schooling requirements (ie 320 hours) and how long their training program was. After a few days of calling I only had 2 companies that said they would hire us, as students, from our area. I thought, 2 was better than none! So on to the next step...

I remembered that my community college back in Nebraska had a commercial driving course, so I pulled up a list of all the community colleges in the state of Florida and started calling. I started another Excel spreadsheet, and noted down the name and address of the school, the phone number, how much they charged for the course, and when their next class(es) started. I did not find any in our immediate area, but I did find 3 that were within a few hours drive. The average price was around $2k to $3k, and the average amount of time was 6 to 9 weeks, graduating with 320 hours.

I had also found a truck driving school called Road Masters. I don't know how, but I had heard to watch out for them. I called them anyway to see what they said. First thing that I noticed about them was that I was talking to a recruiter, not a teacher or school admin person. As you and I both know, recruiters make their money from recruiting people. This was the first warning sign. Another was that the length of the course was only 2 weeks, but they wanted 3 times more money ($6,000). Oh but you should have heard the recruiter, he went on and on about how good their school was.

In the end it was a no-brainer, cost wise. We went with pTEC in St. Petersburg, FL. They offer a 9 week course for $2,230 which includes the text book. Class was 4 days a week and we lived 2.5 hours away. We opted to drive in every day because when we did the calculations, the gas was a lot cheaper then a hotel room. And you can't get anywhere in life by being lazy. We got our lazy butts up early every morning!

At this point I would like to pause and share some photos from the school, because blog posts without pictures are boring!

The classroom

The bridge across the creek to the range

Some of the trucks

Next time I'll talk more about our adventures in the school, and how we got our start with Schneider, later ya'll!

Mexico gets a few auto parts...

Today is Wednesday May 9th. On Monday we arrived at a customer a little after 10 am. The reason we didn't arrive right at 10 was due to the fact that we had passed the small dirt road leading to the business, and took a while to get turned around to get back to them. The qualcomm (that computer thingy in the truck that we use to communicate with our dispatcher) told us we could arrive any time between 10 am and 1 pm.

As we pulled up (I was driving) the first thing I noticed was that it was a junk yard with no dock and no other Schneider trailers. We had been told that we were going to be picking up a loaded trailer, but we soon discovered that we were actually going to be live loaded. The second thing I noticed was a group of about 5 hispanic guys staring at us. I thought they were looking at me, as if a girl truck driver was a circus side show to gawk at. I started to get a little annoyed at that but after a few minutes I decided to not be so judgemental and go and figure out where I was supposed to put my trailer. If they want to gawk, let them gawk!

However what I soon found out was that they were the ones that would be loading the trailer, and they had been waiting for us to arrive. I went inside the office and one of the parts counter employees told me that they were moving some junk cars out of the way so that I could park the truck inside the junk car yard. Once I got it parked (just to the side not really in any spot at all) they started to go to work loading our trailer. I thought they would be done in a few hours, but in reality the whole process was not to be completed until 9 pm the next day!

It's funny how appearances can be so deceiving. I thought the hispanic guys worked for the junk yard/auto parts store, but come to find out, those guys were the actual customers! What they do is, the drive up to Wisconsin together, in a Chevy Silverado pickup truck. The parts store sells them as many parts as they can fit into a 53 foot trailer for one lump sum. So they load it up and ship it back down to Mexico.

They later told my husband that the reason why the come so far north to buy car parts is because it ends up being so much cheaper then parts stores further south. They then meet up with the trailer somewhere in Mexico, and sell their wares in some auto parts store that they have down there.

One of the men was the owner of said establishment in Mexico, and another was his son. The other 3 were the hired help.

There we sat waiting patiently all day to be loaded. A little after 5 pm one of the Mexican dudes knocks on the door. I roll down the window. 'Listo?' I ask. Meaning, is it ready? 'No' he says. My copilot then took over the conversation. They told him that they had not finished loading the trailer, but that the company was closing so could we come back tomorrow? They would start loading again around 6 am and should be done around noon or 1 pm. So we dropped the trailer and bobtailed out of there.

I should mention the method that they used in loading the trailer. The junk yard had 3 huge fork lifts that were constantly moving junk cars around, organizing them, placing them up on these pedestal thingies so that the mechanics could cut parts out of them, etc. The first things to be loaded onto the trailer were whole car engines. The engine would be lifted by one of the forklifts with a chain, and then placed inside the trailer. I am assuming that the Mexican worker bees would then take the engine block and pull them all the way to the back of the trailer. I'm not sure how many engine blocks they loaded but there were at least 5 or 6. After that, the fork lift would take an old truck bed full of parts, lift it up into the trailer, and the worker bees would unload, by hand, all of the parts that were inside the old truck bed.

I thought about this process while it was happening but again, I just assumed that they knew how to load a trailer...

My view of the junk yard

The next day we came back to pick up the trailer, they had finished loading it. They knew we had to go to the scale to weigh it. Luckily there was a Pilot with a Cat scale just 2 miles down the road. They followed us to the scale.
The gross limit for a truck is 80,000 pounds. And that weight needs to be evenly distributed. 12,000 pounds on the steer axle (the front tires), 34,000 pounds on the steer axle (that's the middle axle) and 34,000 on the trailer axle (that's the tires on the trailer).

The first time we weighed the load the gross weight was 84,880 pounds, almost 5,000 pounds over the legal limit! The steer axle was at 12,260 pounds, the drive axle was 37,000 pounds, and the trailer axle was 35,620 pounds.

And so the day began. As I said earlier, these guys were paying a flat fee for as many parts as they could fit into the trailer. But this was not our problem, we were NOT going to haul an illegal load all the way from Wisconsin to Laredo, Texas!

After the first weigh we took the truck back to the auto parts store so that they could take stuff off. Once they did this we re-weighed. We were still overweight by almost a thousand pounds so they had to take more stuff off. At this point they just did the work right there at the Pilot. After we got the load under 80,000 pounds, the weight was not evenly distributed. They had too much weight on the drive axle. I was thinking about those engine blocks they loaded first. We slid the tandems all the way forward which helped a little but not enough, they needed to move stuff off that middle axle.

Every time I weighed we would show them the scale ticket. Discussions were made in Spanish between them and my copilot. Sometimes it can be very convenient to have a copilit fluent in Spanish! After discussions I would park the truck and they would hop in the trailer to do some more moving around. As it got darker they used flashlights.

I had to re-weigh the truck no few than 12 times. Finally, a little after 9 pm, we got the load under legal limits. Phew!

During this process they told my copilot about how this happened to them the last time. The last time??? You would think they would have learned their lesson and known how to load a trailer, ugh!

But it's all good and despite it taking 2 days we are finally on our way to Laredo. On a side note, they also told my husband that whenever they cross the border back into Mexico, back into their home country, they are scared. On the contrary, whenever they cross into the United States they feel a sense of relief, a sense of safeness. I think this is so very sad, and it's a testament to the upheaval going on in Mexico. No wonder these people want to come to live and work in our country.

But that's all I'm going to say about that, I'm not writing a political blog here! Catch ya next time!