This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3757 for Tuesday, the 27th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Career Changes.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 27 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, chatting about recent career changes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio, I'm your host, some guy
on the internet.
I just wanted to chat for a little bit.
Give you an update on what I've been up to over the last, I don't know, a couple months
here.
So I left my job and I wanted to get a new job, a better job.
Okay, so before I could get a new job or a better job, I need to update my credentials.
So here in the United States, I have what's called a CDL and I wanted to upgrade that
from a class B to a class A so that way I can make more money.
However, I needed to take courses and things in that nature so that way I could learn
all the different requirements and it took me about four weeks to do that.
I enrolled in a local community college program.
The community college program allows you to do what's called a fast track program and
it costs about $5,000 to do it in my state, which is the state of Virginia.
If you live in the state of Virginia, certain programs will offer a sort of financial aid
called domasile assistance or something like that.
So if you live in your state for more than 12 months and this is just for the state of Virginia,
I can't tell you any other state of province.
So in the state of Virginia, if you live in the state for more than 12 months and you can
prove it, they will offer you domasile assistance for certain courses and I qualified for
that.
So I dropped the price from our program from $5,000 down to $1,500.
So you know, a significant decrease in price.
At the time when I learned about this program, a class was coming up in like the next week.
It was like right around the corner, so I had to act fast.
First thing I did is I went to the website.
I got a student profile.
I got all signed up there.
They sent me information.
It helps me get the other accounts that I needed because you had to sign up for the actual
company that was doing the training as well as the school, which hosted the company that
was doing the training.
It was also like the parking pass and just, you know, get all that school paperwork stuff
out of the way.
I had to do all that.
Then I also had to go to the Virginia DMV website so that way I can grab the CDL manual.
I hadn't read that manual in a year since I first got my CDL and the class B is different
from the class A.
Class B is mostly dump trucks, buses, things of that nature.
You know, just a straight vehicle that is very, very heavy.
Sometimes they can be straight vehicles as well in the class A, depending on the weight and
the material being carried, but you're usually going to find a lot of combination vehicles.
And that's what I went for.
So I got the manual from online.
I started reading up on it and you know, checking in with the school to make sure I had
all the proper paperwork out the way, and especially that parking, because last thing
you want to do is go to class and then have your card towed while you're in class.
And if they don't tell your car on the first time, I think they give you like a $200 ticket
or something like that that you have to pay out there.
So spend your class or something crazy.
So you got to pay it.
So after I make sure I got all that out of the way and I got the book, I started studying
the book.
Then I had to hurry up and go down to the DMV and get the Learners permit, which is called
a CLP commercial Learners permit.
I had to go to the doctor because the course required you to go see their doctors.
You got to go see the doctors, go get a medical examination, you know, basically like a physical
to make sure that you're fit to do the job, as well as a drug test.
Whenever you're getting a CDL, you got to take a drug test.
So I went and got all that out of the way, I forward all the paperwork over to the instructors
from the school or I guess the instructors for the course.
They confirmed on my paperwork was accurate and then I was able to, you know, basically
have a seat in the class, but I still needed to bring a physical copy with me on the
first day of the class.
Now, you have this thing called a medical DLT examination certificate.
You have to keep that with you at all times whenever you're driving commercial.
That is your proof that a doctor verified that you are fit to handle a commercial vehicle
that is required in the United States.
So the class started up with no problem.
The first couple of days we did a bunch of modules where the teachers or professors, whatever
you want to call them, instructors, something, they wanted to make sure that you knew what
you said you knew.
My guess is in the past, they may have had a bunch of people who had others coached them
like just the answers for the tests, but they didn't actually understand why they were
going through all of this.
So they would just come in with a memory of what to select in order to pass a test.
And they wouldn't actually know why they had to know these things.
So the school had their own test that they put you through.
It was something like four modules and each module had about 15 tests within them.
For the most part, each of the modules had the basic information for becoming a commercial
for handling commercial vehicles.
Now it was worth it to be more difficult.
Like you may have, if you look on the Android or the iOS app stores, you'll notice that
there are CDL apps that just basically give you multiple choice questions to help you pass
a test.
I didn't find this out until I got into class with some of the people who were there
who apparently had done this.
I studied the book from the DMV so that I got mine.
They apparently just used the apps or some of the people from the class used the apps.
It really showed in the end who actually did the study and then who didn't because when
the modules came out, people were kind of lost.
So there's about...
I said it was about eight or nine of us in the beginning.
One person, I don't know what happened to them.
They came for like a couple of days and we didn't see them again after that.
I don't know what happened to them.
They just kind of fell off the map later on.
A couple of other people started having difficulty and they couldn't leave the class to go
do the hands-on portion.
They were stuck on the modules for a while.
But for those of us who had completed all the modules and I completed mine, all four
modules each one having about 15 tests within the module.
I completed mine with a grade point average.
I think it was like 97% or something or I guess that's not a grade point average.
But I guess it's just your final score of completion of all four modules.
I got like a 97%.
And then after that, we left and we went out to the truck.
And there were three trucks out there.
Big trucks connected to trailers, tractor trailer or in the manual.
They call them the tractor would be referred to as the power unit and the trailer would
well, that would just be the trailer or the tow unit.
So we went out there.
We got hands-on.
We started looking at everything.
They started, they lift up the hood, start pointing out all the different elements underneath
the engine.
They broke things down by system.
You have your braking system.
You have your suspension system.
You have just all these different parts that you need to understand need to be in order
before you take this vehicle on the road.
This task is to determine whether or not the vehicle is road worthy.
Those key points, parts that they pointed out, if there's failure of certain types within
those different systems that I have not named them on, I just named them a couple of them.
But if there's any sort of a fault in those systems depending on how severe the fault,
it places the vehicle out of service.
You as the operator of the vehicle have the place to vehicle out of service, where issues
have arrived in the past, but still today as well.
I ran into a couple of these issues with my old job as well.
You have your employer or a supervisor from your employer who will say, oh no, that's quite
all right.
You can operate it just like that.
Just make sure you write it up and get it checked out when you get back.
No, that's not how it works.
You as the operator have to evaluate and say rather than not to vehicle is safe to do so.
That's why they put you through all these tests and things beforehand.
If you get stopped by the department of transportation, that's what we have in the United
States, I don't know what it's called elsewhere, but we refer to them as DOT.
If you get stopped by DOT and they inspect your vehicle and find that fault, you're
to blame.
I mean, the company also has some blame in it as well.
They have this thing that they put out, it's basically joint blame.
You can't say my manager made me take the truck and I didn't want to blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, you could say it just would not matter you're still going to be held at fault
because you are the operator of the vehicle.
You should have refused to take that vehicle and request it a different one or requested
a repair before taking the vehicle, but there's no excuse once DOT gets ahold of you.
Now, if it's severe enough, it goes on your record and I mean, the more bad things that
go on your commercial driver's license record, it makes it difficult for you to get hired
at another job later on down the line.
So CDL positions are open all throughout the United States of America.
You can get a job anywhere with the CDL, however, if you have things like speeding tickets,
DUIs, reckless driving or those DOT infractions, yeah, you're going to have a hard time
getting a job because it's not the company that is on the hire.
It's the insurance company behind the company that wants to employ you.
If the insurance company says that we're not going to ensure your vehicles, if you hire
that man, then you know, you're just out of luck, maybe you can get hired at a different
position, but you're not going to get hired as an operator with your CDL.
So while going through the course, you know, studying all the different elements on the truck
understanding what needs to be where, because there's all these small things like what
to slack adjusters and to push rod, you can't have more than one inch of play in your
slack adjuster with the brakes on, and there's like what the leaf springs on the suspension
system.
They're key words you have to say, like, whenever you're talking to the examiner from
the Department of Motor Vehicles, what I refer to as the DMV from here on, that examiner
is the person who certifies whether or not you're qualified to get a CDL.
So you go with the instructors from your course to learn everything and once you're up
to par, they take you over to the DMV, where you will then meet up with, they have several
examiners there.
You schedule it all in advance.
They have your name, your driving record, everything pulled up ahead of time, and they
take you out there with the vehicle.
The examiner will listen to you.
They will not give you any pointers, they will not tell you whether or not you missed anything,
or at least they don't have to.
Some examiners will, if they say you're trying and you're pretty good, you actually
know your stuff, but you missed one thing, sometimes they'll say something like more detail.
Nothing more, you'll get to a certain point where, like, say you're talking about the radiator
or the radiator reservoir, and you can just move past it a little too quickly without
going through all the steps.
Here's an example.
So the radiator reservoir, let's start there.
So you point out the radiator reservoir, you say things like, it's properly mounted and secure,
it's not broke, bent or cracked, I see no leaks, the radiator cap is on tight, and then
if you were to move on from there without giving the rest of the information, they
could say more detail.
Now what that would mean is, you probably missed a part where you said, filled to the appropriate
level, because it is the radiator reservoir right after you filled to the appropriate
level.
If it's empty, that's your reservoir to your radiator, you want to make sure it's at the
proper level.
So you know, it's small stuff like that that they can do for you, but a lot of them don't.
They won't say anything, they would just let you move right on and just breeze through
the test and at the end, they'll grade you, and that's the pre-trip test.
There's a pre-trip inspection, a trip inspection, and then a post-trip inspection that must
be done to the vehicle.
Your pre-trip is just like it says before you take that vehicle from the lot or wherever
you are and take it out on road, you need to make sure it's roadworthy.
During trip inspections happened within the first 50 miles of your trip, so as soon as
you get out, you go down a road a little bit, then you know, you got to pull over and
inspect your vehicle as well as your cargo.
You need to make sure that your cargo is, you know, tight and secure all the different
angles that comes with it, because sometimes issues happen shortly after you leave, you
want to catch them as soon as possible.
When you're 50 miles away from, you know, determine all the way wherever, wherever you
left from, then get to you a lot easier.
And then there are multiple in-trip inspections that you do because they're requirements
that the driver has to do, like, for instance, after at first 50 miles, then you have
to do multiple inspections throughout your trip, depending on how long your trip is.
If you're doing like OTR, which stands for over the road or long haul, those are two ways
that people explain it.
You have to stop every three hours or it could be every three hours or every 150 miles
depending on which comes first.
Pull over and inspect your vehicle and inspect your cargo.
You got to go through all the points, make sure everything's functioning in up the par, stretch
your legs while you're doing so, and then, you know, keep going.
If you notice there's a problem, you contact your dispatcher, you let them know the problem
you try to get it fixed, but all of this is done because sometimes, you know, issues happen
and you want to catch it before it happens on the road.
When it happens on the road, it turns into a nightmare, much, much easier to take care of
when you're parked safely on the side of the road.
But these are all things that they teach you in the course.
I mean, you can actually learn this from the book as well, but the course actually stresses
a lot of these and gives you the backstory behind them.
It's one thing for a guy to tell you, hey, make sure you shut your door.
That's another thing that happens when you go to the DMV to get your arm.
You test on, I don't know which examiner, like if any of you want to go get your CDL later
on, it's not telling which examiner you'll come across one of the nicer ones or one
of the more strict ones, but they are fail you if you get out of that vehicle and do not
shut your door.
That's one of the big ones out there too.
There's a specific way you have to enter the vehicle and exit the vehicle, you have to
be facing the vehicle and maintain three points of contact while getting into and exiting
the vehicle.
So that's boarding and alighting the three-point contact rule, then there's a door and
see if nobody is playing to you how serious the door thing is or whatever you're like,
how could I fail or lose points or anything, how can I be docked for not shutting the door?
What's the worst that could happen?
There have been incidents, depending on what state you're in, where high-guests, high-wind gusts
take the door, like when you open the door and the mirror stands about a foot or more from
the door and the door has blown to where it hyper-extended and the mirror went through
the windshield.
Now obviously, if the mirror breaks your windshield, that vehicle is now not a service.
And then it's also the usual if vehicles are passing close by and one of them smacks
your door off where you'd no longer have a driver door so you obviously are out of service
there too.
So there's a lot of backstory and I just elaboration, elaborating on the issues so that
what you understand it, where as the book will just sort of give you some bullet points saying
you must do this, you must do that, you must do it with no elaborating.
One of the things that I really liked from the class, the instructors are, they have years
of experience driving around a country and they can give you a lot of the places where
they went wrong, you know, where they got overconfident and made mistakes.
Luckily the mistakes didn't cost them too much, they may have gotten a find or something
like that but it didn't actually like ruin their career or anything otherwise they
wouldn't become instructors so you know, you get all that experience when you go to
class and all of that kind of helps submit your understanding, you remember to shut
that door versus if you just read it in the book, shut the door, you could possibly forget
that.
But once you hear all the backstory it's like, oh yeah, I better make sure I don't
ever let that happen to me.
Yes, I know I'm a little bit all over the place but I'm just recording because I got
a little bit of time right now and I went and ran to Mary and Erin's and listen to
some get caught up on my podcast and everything and I just want to talk and get a show
out.
So yeah, once you learn how to pre-trip your vehicle and expect all the different components
and systems and you know, you can name them all, tell what the flaws are, what to look
out for, etc.
The you learn things like coupling the vehicles.
They're multiple different coupling types, your book will give you the different coupling
types of today.
There's like the panel hook, there's the fifth wheel and I forgot what the other one
is.
It's some sort of other one that I don't expect to encounter.
Most of you, because I'll be dealing with, we'll have a fifth wheel unless I was to do
like doubles and triples, which I may actually end up doing doubles and triples.
I'm not sure yet, but we'll see, you know, it all depends on where the money is and that's
kind of what I want right now, but I also want to stay away from over the road right now
because my daughter's still young, I don't want to be gone, her entire childhood, just
to say, you know, sure I got to make money, but I also want to be a part of her life.
But yeah, anyway, yeah, I'm getting all over the place again.
So yeah, you learned about your coupling system, how the coupling system works, how to
you know, connect vehicles and what to look out for in the way of flaws.
We also learned about there's sort of like a brotherhood between truckers, along with that
brotherhood, you know, truckers will look out for each other.
There's a few in the community, just like every other community where you're going to find
bad actors, right?
We've seen videos of truckers at, you know, like a flying J, or loves or whatever, these
different truck stops where I guess one guy had a beef with another guy goes he gets out of
his truck in a middle night and does something to the other guy's truck, you don't really
see what it is, but later on it turns out he disconnects the guy's trailer, he pulled a
release arm on the trailer.
So that decouples his truck from his trailer, you know, that's a terrible thing to have
happened if you have a fully loaded trailer and you pull away and it's not couple,
your trailer is going to drop to the ground and it's fully loaded, you cannot get that back up.
Now you have to call a record service to come out and basically lift your trailer up.
Not the mention is going to damage the goods you're carrying, it's going to damage the
trailer, you know, it's, it's a real jerk move to do, but there's all these little small
things like that that can happen, you something that you may not even notice, you know,
that's why you have to constantly inspect your vehicle, you have to know all of these,
you know, little elements, and somebody does that to you and you call it, you know how to
proceed from there, I mean sure, you probably don't want to go getting into a knock down drag out
fight, but other truckers, but at the same time you also don't want to pull away and look like
a jerk out there with your trailer lying on the ground and have to explain why all the goods
in it are damaged. Not to mention there's a, there's a lot of fraud and stuff that we learned
about as well, especially surrounding Amazon right now. There's these guys going around like
this, like these shady broker services, and you're going to run into them if you decide to go
what they call it, if you do your own authority, or basically you become an owner operator,
and you run your own trucking business, it could be with a single truck or just you own your friends,
whatever, but it is your entrepreneur with a truck, and you're doing business with the truck.
If you run into one of these broker services, they all broker a load from Amazon,
give you the load, you know, it'll seem all up to date and legit, there'll be some small things about
it, like say for instance, they broker that load about, it's, it's got a long delivery time on it
for like two, let I'm just going to throw out numbers here, so don't, you know, it'll be like two
weeks before it has to make it from point eight to point B. By the time you get the load to you,
you'll notice that okay now, you, you've got like a week to get this load delivered, but they've
had it just sitting on it for an entire week, you know, Amazon loads move pretty quickly and most
of the people go directly to Amazon, but even if they don't, you know, they go pretty quickly,
because, you know, they pay well, and especially if you're just new to trucking whatever you can
get in, get out pretty easy, Amazon isn't going to hire you or work with you if you're new,
you, I think they have like their own rating system or whatever, if you're going to do
trucking with Amazon, same thing with other companies, I think Walmart's like that as well,
if you're going to move goods for Walmart, you have to, you have to have X amount of months of experience
and, you know, they get all their different requirements for you, but they're back to the story.
So what their shady broker will do is they'll then give you that load, you'll head out down a road,
they will have a tracker on that load, because they have a broker, they have to be able to
not have to, but they will, most people track the load right, they'll send that tracking information
to some shady individuals who will, you know, come up on, you had a truck stop somewhere,
whenever you go to stop for the night, they will then tell you that they're there to recover the load,
they'll have some sort of dodgy paperwork or something like that telling you hey, yeah,
we're from the broker or we're from whoever and we're coming to, you know, recover the load.
If you give that load to them, you are on the hook for the entire load, so that could be like
$200,000, $300,000 worth of products, you know, TVs, laptops, whatever, inside that load,
if you hand that load over to them, you just bought it. That's right, all of it, that's
you are on the hook for that. You are insurance, so you're going to go through the roof.
It is going to be a bad day for you. This game has been going on for a little while now,
Amazon is beginning a lot of calls about it because apparently, you know,
especially when you're new to the business, you don't know your broker or whoever sends some guys
to come recover the load from you. You think there's a problem, your new, you just hand the load over
because they look like they got the paperwork or whatever before you know what your broker is going.
I didn't send them. I didn't. I don't know who those guys are. I don't know anything about that.
And now you're on the hook for that load. You sign the papers, taking it away from point A,
and now when you get the point B, you don't have the load, so you have to pay for. So yeah,
it's, it's a lot of shady things going on out there. And we were able to learn about a lot of this,
you know, these guys being truckers staying up the, up the speed on a lot of this stuff. They're
just handing it down to us, making sure we're aware. You're going into a new career,
look out for XYZ, keep your eyes moving all of that stuff, you know. And I appreciate it every
bit of it. I learned a lot. I'm not going to be doing OTR. I'm just going to work for a company
and, you know, try to do local. The thing I learned about local is local is more hands on.
You're going to be in and out of the truck a lot, moving freight. They call it touching freight.
Where you, you know, say, for instance, you're delivering beer or something. You got to get out,
get the pallet, move it into the stores. You may even have to set up a display for the product.
Put the signs on it and all that stuff. Then, you know, you bring all your equipment back
to the truck and then you load up. And you head out, go to the next location over and over again.
That's the local side of it. Now, you may have heard that the HVAC came on just now. So I had
to pause recording real quick so I didn't get too noisy. I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up now.
Now, I am going to go back by the school. I talked to the director of the course. And I told
him what I wanted to do as far as making flashcards for a new students coming in to, you know,
learn a little bit better because they asked some nice resources. Don't get me wrong. But there
are some improvements. I think I could make from a student's perspective. And I wanted to,
you know, offer that opportunity. I think I'm going to license it all as like CC0 or something like
that. And then that way I can share it freely with them. And for with anyone, then it can just
do whatever with it. And I'll probably even make a show out of it once I'm done who knows or just
upload it and tell you about it. And you can grab it if you want. But I'm going to go there.
I'm going to take my DSLR camera, take a bunch of photos. And then just basically gray scale the
stuff you shouldn't be looking at at the moment in the photo and do like maybe a green high
lighter, whatever on the stuff you should be focusing on in photo and give some sort of text information
that says with that the item is or what you're supposed to be looking out for. So that
what it work like flashcards, but they'll be, you know, GPGs or whatever. But that's my plan. I already
talked to the director. He gave me the OK on it. I was supposed to go by there today, but I ran into
a number of the things that just like I had to go about a DMV again that took up a ton of time.
And I just couldn't get it down again today. So I plan to try to get up there tomorrow and get
that done. I'm charging my camera, my LED light and everything today to make sure that I, you know,
have everything ready to go when I'm ready to go up there. And yeah, I'll start shooting first
thing in the morning and sit down while I'm in class up there while the new students are studying
and doing anything. I'll just sit down in my laptop, start to edit, make sure I got all the shots.
I need before I actually leave that area because the school is about 45 minutes away. And that's
what's good traffic. You know what I mean? So I don't want to leave and go, oh man, I should have
got a shot of this. You know, I'll do it all while I'm up there or as much as I can until I feel confident
and leave. But that's all I have for you today, guys. Just some guy on internet writing about
trucking and truck related stuff. I'll be preparing my kit to record on the road. So I downloaded
no noise torch. I can't remember who did a show on that recently. Thank you for the show. By the way,
I used it. I installed it. I follow that was Linux for everyone video on installation and
get it up and running with Linux Mint. Works great. I think it's going to work better for me
if I'm doing like video calls and stuff that nature right can't edit because with the editing
for me to get a noise profile on the noise that I want to reduce, you need a little bit more
of that noise in the audio recording and what noise torch does is it eliminates a tremendous amount
of it. So you get very little to build your noise profile with. So yeah, you know, it's still
very good to have though. Especially if I didn't have much time to do any editing at all,
I just need to just get the recording out the door. Yeah, that's totally what I'm going to be using.
Thank you guys for listening. I'll catch you guys in the next episode. I'm some guy on internet
and this is HPR.
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