I went to C-1 (Driver Solutions) back in the summer of 2007. Got approved to go to C-1 and had the money to drive down to St. Louis myself. I was coming from Chicago. I was pretty excited to try my hand at truck driving. I already had my CDL permit so the first week of school I was literally doing nothing. As the first week of class everyone had to study to get their permits. The hotel was horrible. My room was actually one of the better rooms except for the mushrooms growing in the bathtub. Other rooms smelled like mold. It rained very hard on the 4th of July and a classmate's room had leaked really badly, almost ruining his clothes. Plus when we had to take our tests at the state, we had to be awake at 3 am which is not a huge deal for me, but there were neo Nazi meth heads partying in the parking lot and harassing us. St. Louis P.D. did nothing about that.
The school itself was a joke. Looked like an abandoned UPS lot with empty run-down docks. The trucks at that time were fully functional and not hard to operate. I guess I was lucky to be there while their trucks were working. But they were run down, but at least the A/C worked.
Training wasn't really training. They never really explained how to properly back up the truck. Just things like "Well when your drive tires get to this set of cones cut the wheel to the right and when you're 90 degrees away turn all the way to the left until your truck is completely straight. Then do this blah blah blah." It was all based on extremities and maneuvers that don't really work in the real world. On the road training wasn't bad. Everyone got the hang of that really quickly even though our instructor (an old guy named Jim) was a yeller and every little mistake you made you got your a** chewed out by that old little redneck. He didn't like city boys and treated the more country boys much better. He was a douche but he did help me with my mistakes, albeit through constant yelling. Supposedly, everyone gets pre-hired at one of their trucking companies in their network. I got pre-hired through PAM and didn't have any trouble getting into their training. It was when I became a first seat driver that I had problems.
I was maybe three weeks into being a first seat driver when my father whom I lived with at the time, had a really bad seizure and put his head through the wall and his neighbor that called me and told me that it didn't look like he was going to make it. I contacted my driver manager (Don't remember his name) and told him that I needed to get home ASAP so I can take care of the various things.
I was in Laredo, TX while this all happened and I even offered to pay for the fuel and extra mileage I was going to put on the truck to get home. My driver manager said it was OK for me to do so. I was going back to Chicago which was a good hike, but wanted the clearance for me to go home...even if it was on my dime.
Four days after being home, my truck got towed in the empty parking lot that it was sitting in. I had permission from the lot owner to park there. I only had the bobtail so it's not like I was taking up lots of space. I guess the police had a problem with it being there. So I called PAM and told them what had happened and my driver manager tried to find where the truck was on the GPS but couldn't find it. So I went to the police station to find out where it got towed to and they told me and I proceeded to go there to bail it out. They wanted almost $1500 for me to get it out and there really was nothing I could do about it other than pay it. I called my driver manager back and told him how much the impound fines were and explained that I would pay it and go back to work. Well well well....that's when I got fired due to "racking up expenses" even though I paid for the fuel out of pocket with my own CASH and was going to pay the towing and impound bill. So now I owe Driver Solutions almost $8000 and they can just lick it. I was unfairly terminated and I'm pretty sure they jacked up my DAC. Like I care, trucking sucks anyways and I'm much happier doing what I do now.
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