Excerpt

Driving a truck as a profession is unique because it takes your entire time while you are on the job. (A comparable occupation would be a soldier on a war assignment in a battlefield or an oil rig worker out on the rig.) Once you are assigned your truck (as an over the road (OTR) driver), it becomes your personal vehicle where you are expected to live for the period of your tour of duty. For many OTR drivers, a tour of duty could last anywhere between one week and five weeks or longer if you are in training. In some cases, you could be gone for as long as you please beyond the initial duty tour period that your company mandates. Therefore, it is expedient to ensure that you are making the best of the moments out there.

In my experience, I have found that many warehouses are permanently understaffed. The under-staffing means that drivers have to wait virtually indefinitely for the personnel to attend to them. This is the Achilles heel of the truck driver. You could have a load in another location due the next hour but if you have not had a satisfactory stamp or delivery receipt issued to you by the warehouse you are currently in, you could not leave for your next scheduled delivery. If you have been nice to the staff, they could quite easily have told you if there would be any delays in attending to you. There have been countless occasions when all goods delivered have been segregated and stacked ready for inspection only to wait another three to four hours or longer before the desired inspection. On one occasion I arrived and was assigned a dock by 8.45 a. m. I did not get my delivery receipt signed before 3.30 p. m.! On that occasion I had an interchange 195 miles away because the driver was running out of driving time. My truck manager probably overlooked the three hours I had to drive to the location because he questioned me later when I told him I could not make the destination of that load after the interchange because I did not have enough driving time left. If my previous delivery had not taken up so much time, I could have made the next 195-mile drive (leading to the interchange point) part of the last 10 hours drive. After that I could have taken my 8 hours of off-duty to be ready with a fresh 10 hours for the next destination after the interchange. In effect, when your company promises you a lot of driving, you should qualify that with if the almighty warehouses permit

Psychologists have found that religious people live longer than non-religious people. They found that people who have strong beliefs in a supreme being were happier and healthier than those who did not have such beliefs. As part of your strategy to maintain your health on the road, maintaining your spiritual health should also be given serious consideration.

It is pertinent to realize that this syllabus is for instructors and not for students just joining the company. As an instructor course, it has to emphasize what the instructor should do, rather than just train the instructor to be competent on driving the truck. Thus I would expect, for instance, that if the instructor is being given the technical refresher, not only would the instructor be expected to do the maneuvers correctly, but she would also be expected to know how to correctly teach them. The transportation companies could, through training the instructors, get them to be partners in their driver retention effort. By teaching trainers how to gain the confidence of their students, they will indirectly promote retention, but they could even go further. Companies could include courses in what the instructors could do to directly influence company retention efforts. Thus the company could actually get quite a lot more for each training dollar as such training could most certainly lead to greater retention of drivers in the company. A company driver can look up to the time when she becomes a company instructor as a milestone in her life within the company. By creating a milestone in the life of a company driver, the company would be creating a new believer in itself, who would now be an even better ambassador of the company than the people who are paid to do the public relations work for the company. Companies should realize that their trainer drivers are the first line of contact of the company with new drivers. If the initial reaction is one of lack of confidence and distrust, then the new employee may not last in the company and all of the recruitment dollars spent on the new driver would have been a waste. However if the initial contact with the trainer is one of mutual respect and the driver actually gains the confidence of the trainee, then the beginning of a lasting relationship would have been established. The resources the company spent on trainer driver training would have been well worth it.