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Male, 36 years young
Introduction
I am a 36 yr old wanna be driver. After a year and a half recovering from an injury I have started truck driving school.
McFatter Technical Center, Davie, Florida
I started this program on May 12, 2003. I am presently in my 5th week with 4 weeks to go. I must say the school is excellent. We start out in old 1975 Kenworth K100's. They are old trucks, but very well maintained. The downfall is no A/C in the South Florida summer heat. The K100's are all 10 speeds with doghouses, being as they are cabovers. Not great. but not bad.
We started out driving bobtail on the range to get familiar with the shifting. I am in a class of nine, and we are all gear grinding fools. After the fourth day of school we are coupling and un-coupling, as well as pulling the trailers around the yard. It is surprising how differently the trucks handle with the trailers.
We are now into weeks two and three and we are trying to back up. Our class shrunk from 9 to 7 students last week. I feel bad for the two classmates who left. My backing is coming along well, and my instructor pretty much leaves me alone. I am hoping/guessing that is a good thing. Toward the end of week three and into week four I take my pre-trip inspection test and pass. Not as well as I wanted, and the things I missed I should have gotten, but I passed! We are told that some of us will be taking skills qualification tests this week. This school doesn't play around. There are times when we will talk about OTR, since my instructor has been doing it a long time before he decided to teach. However, when it is time to learn, you better be paying attention.
Week four came and went without a hitch. Passed my skills test, again not as well as I had hoped, but still a good grade. We took one of the road trucks out on the course we will be on for the actual CDL road test. Wouldn't you know, two days later another student and I were out there taking our road tests. Show me once and let me loose. I passed the road test with flying colors. I guess all the repetitiveness of the range really paid off. The next morning my classmate and I went to the DMV and are now the proud owners of a CDL, with hazmat and tanker endorsements.
Now is when the real fun begins. Now that a few of us have our licenses we are out in the traffic of South Florida. This school doesn't end once you get your license. Each student is guaranteed a minimum of 1000 logged miles driving all over Florida. Not sitting there watching someone else drive. A lot of other schools do what they call "accumulative" driving. You watch I drive, then I watch you drive, and you both log it. Not exactly sure how they work it, but I do think that for $4,000 I should be doing ALL the driving. BTW this school is costing me 1200.00 bucks. The closest one was 3600.00 bucks, but 1/3 the time, 1/4 the driving time and three times as much! Tomorrow we take our first long distance trip up to Vero Beach from Fort Lauderdale.
Road Driving
Well the road driving is going very well. We took our first long trip last week from Fort Lauderdale to Vero Beach. All in all it was relatively uneventful. I drove up and my partner drove back. He made a couple little mistakes and one big one, but no damage or injuries. Today we are heading out on a long night trip. We will be heading down into west Miami then out to the west coast of Florida up to Ft. Myers. We have another 12 days of school, so we need to get some miles run. I have a few lines on jobs already. I want to be ready to rock and roll once I graduate from school. There are a few other classmates who are like me, while some others are just lolly-gaging along. More to come........
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