I am, but I'm not, I do work directly for the company I get a pay check from them, but I'm not actually at driver status, I'm a CDL route helper, so I really really really started at the bottom. It's kind of like when your in orientation for OTR truck driving.
I've been learning and improving my truck driving skills as well as learning the beer distribution business. Today I was out with a supervisor on a bulk route which is just bumping docks at grocery stores. We only had maybe 6 stops. Personally I thought I did okay a few hiccups, but I recovered from all of them, I couldn't back worth a crap today (That's not totally true) but that's how it kind of felt. He didn't say a whole lot to me, about really anything so I don't know. Got off a little earlier today though 7 hours today yesterday was like 12 hours.
I mean if I had to go OTR right now, it wouldn't be so bad for my trainer, a little bit of backing practice and some shifting, but shifting is becoming less and less of an issue. I can shift up and down better now I wasn't to acceptable at it before, but it's a lot better now, I would say at this point and maybe I'm rating my self a tad to high, but I would say my shifting is now passable. Besides the little bit of grinding everyone gets when going from gear to gear in low range and it wasn't even that much you know how sometimes you get a click click and it goes into gear, but there wasn't a ton of gear grinding really very minimal, I didn't really miss any gears, I don't really think or what I define as miss a gear. One time pulling into a store parking lot I was in the wrong gear and couldn't lug the engine so I just stopped the truck and shifted into first and got my self going again (to me that was the worst thing that happened today.) and that was pretty much it. I didn't get much feedback one way or another.
Once they decide they want me to be a driver, I'll be on the extra board and where I work it's kind of strange because some guys are on the extra board for a long time and others cover someones route for 2 weeks and then that person quits and they slide right into that route. I think what they do is look and see and, some guys are good extra board guys and they leave them on the extra board longer and other guys might be okay drivers, but there not good on the extra board so they get routes right away. It's kind of strange, because we don't really have bids per say, but stuff comes up and some guys switch routes for a change of scenery and there are holes in the system and then they fill those in with other people.
Really being a route driver with a side loader or 28-38 foot trailer isn't bad. The only problem with it is like yesterday we were in a 38 foot trailer and our second stop was loaded in the middle of the trailer and we spent an hour unloading and dragging the pallets out one by one and the store wheeled them in with there pallet jack. That kind of blew, of course I don't know if that same order was taking up 5 bays of a side loader, we would have to wheel everything in with two wheelers or use the stores U-Boats and that probably would have taken the same amount of time, it's 6 of one half a dozen of the other.
Some beer distributors and I have not seen this in my area, but some beer distributors have bigger side loader trailers that have those tiny 3 wheeled fork lifts attached to them and they get to a place open up the bays and hop on the fork lift and drive the pallets right into where they need to go, pretty cool.
The one thing nice about side loaders is every customer can have there own cubby hole on the truck so to speak and side loader trailers have walls and are angled backwards so really the load has no where to really shift to I mean it can shift up against the doors of the trailer and sometimes it happens, but a lot of the time the load just stays where it is at it's pretty stable. I must say I have a new found respect for the side loader trailer.
