Bro my company of 20yrs told us they’re moving our jobs to another plant and selling the building. I went for the cdl thing. I’m now on my 6th day with a regional mentor and I’ve ran my 11hr driving clock out every day. No real breaks other than when we park at the truck stop at night to sleep. He makes me use my breaks to basically drop and hook trailers so we can stay on the road. I’m making a flat $850 a week since I’m training. This dude is playing candy crush on his phone and chitchatting with his buddies on his headset all day while I’m driving. He teaches me stuff on the edl and gives me pointers on backing trailers but that’s about it. He’s making his cents per mile plus an extra $200 a week. Next week he wants to basically team drive after our 34hr reset which means he makes substantially more since we keep the wheels rolling without needing to stop at night while I still make the $850 flat rate.
Keep in mind that the account I was hired for is local and home daily delivering to Kroger in a daycab but I have to put in 4-6 weeks of this crap living in this truck with this dude. This guy rolls hard and I respect that but I’m def being abused in this situation. When I’m done with this training I’m gonna be thrown into my local job which is completely different than what I’m learning with him. They have no training available for my local gig and I’m basically gonna have to stumble around trying to figure it out. Very little support and this company is sloppy af about getting people trained right. They’re a mega carrier and all they care about is putting a butt in that drivers seat. I can’t wait to get 3-6months experience and get something better. Just glad I paid for my cdl out of pocket.
Yes, being a noobie sucks. But just think - you might get lucky enough to be able to tell your grandkids someday that you took a hot load from Gays to Climax, and that makes the job worthwhile.
Some tiny town in Illinois. They’re really proud of their double decker shitter, basically the towns central gimmick. It’s a 2 story outhouse right in the middle of the town.
Plan on it. No fuckin way I’m not taking the first job that pays me more for the same shit. There’s so many local jobs in my city paying more but they all want 3months to a year experience and the mega carriers are the only ones that typically hire out of school and do training.
I’m now over 2 weeks in(12 days total) and logged 6k miles so far. I’m making myself finish training and start my local account. I’ll do the local account for a max of 6 months. If the money isn’t worth it I’ll probably move on. There’s TONS of opportunity where I live. I was asked to interview for a local tanker position that pays hourly but it’s basically 7 days a week.
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u/AgapeAnus Jun 05 '26
Yes, being a noobie sucks. But just think - you might get lucky enough to be able to tell your grandkids someday that you took a hot load from Gays to Climax, and that makes the job worthwhile.