Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Road Training #1: On the road again

So I finally met up with my training engineer yesterday. It went rather well, I think. We started at 7AM by meeting in the OC and spent a bit of time talking about how this is going to work. Then we went out to the truck, got everything situated in there, grabbed a training trailer, and took a short trip around the city so I could show how well (or badly) I drive. He seemed to be rather happy that I could drive, though I needed help backing the unit up when we were getting ready to park the trailer. While we were out, just in that short trip, we received a work assignment that will take us about 350 miles, which isn't a bad first trip, though it's likely our next trip will be longer.

After that, we took lunch, then got out on the road, since we had to make our pick-up by 4PM and it was a nearly 100 mile trip just to get the trailer loaded. Well, I should say that it was more like 60 miles to pick up an empty trailer, and then 40 to get to the customer whose freight we were hauling. While waiting on the trailer to get loaded, we spent time talking with some other drivers, then just sitting around and talking to each other, trying to pass the time. It was roughly an hour and a half before the trailer was full and we were on our way again. From that customer, we started driving and made another two hours or so before stopping for the night.

Yesterday, my trainer did all the driving, once we actually had our work assignment. Today, though, I'll likely be doing most of the driving, quite possibly including backing into someone's dock, though I think that we might just be dropping this trailer in a lot. I don't know what we'll be doing next; in this line of work, there's almost no time at which we'll actually know what we're doing more than a couple hours before finishing the previous assignment. I'm quite eager to see where we're going next.

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