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Between the instructors and my uncle warning me about it, I'm going to be terrified of the kingpin getting over and stuck behind the skid plate for the rest of my life! LOL.

I've gotten pretty good so far with judging where the front of the truck and back of the trailer are so far even though I thought I would never figure it out on the first day. I pulled forward about five feet too far my first time when I was trying to get the back of the trailer right at a certain spot. Then I was really close when backing up and thought I was figuring it out and was happy with myself. Then the head instructor comes over and directs me through the box and tells me to stop. I looked back at him and asked him if I was really far enough forward. I didn't think I was close. He said I was good and had me back through the box so I did. Thankfully when I was over on the side with my normal instructor, he asked me where I thought the back of the trailer was when I was setting up my last attempt at backing through. I told him that I didn't think I was all the way through honestly but the other guy said I was good. He asked me where I thought the cones were in relation to the trailer. I thought they were right about the middle of the axles on the trailer. My normal instructor just nodded and said that's exactly where the cones were. That was a huge relief because it turns out that I wasn't crazy and did actually know exactly where I was in relation to the end cones. If he wouldn't have asked me that question and verified that I was not in the right position like I thought, I don't know how far off I would have been the next time. I might have pulled through halfway across the yard or something really stupid!

And agreed on the other drivers. I find that once I remember the steps and marks to line up all of the maneuvers so far, they are really easy. You're dead on that people for some reason can't stand being behind a truck so they'll fly around you and get in front of you. If you come across a vehicle that takes longer than you to stop... why in the heck would you really want to be in FRONT of that vehicle so bad? It makes no freaking sense at all. I am also wary of getting out there and somebody trying to sneak past on the inside while I'm trying to make a right turn. And then of course those 90 degree turns on and off narrow roads. I just saw a video of a truck taking a bad approach at a railroad crossing last week and his trailer getting destroyed by a train. Thankfully there were no injuries but it has made me even more aware of making sure everything is set up right before approaching a railroad crossing during a turn and hoping that I can plan a route to avoid that situation as much as possible. My uncle also told me that something similar happened to him down at the end of Grand there at 70. The arm at the crossing came down with the end of it between his cab and trailer as he was trying to negotiate a turn to get into the lot he was delivering to. Thankfully he was able to just power through and the arm bent a little and snapped back with no damage, there was a little damage to his fairing on the truck... but the important part is that he was able to get clear of the tracks entirely before the train got there and created a huge mess.

Here's another laugh from today. We were working on passing our offset backing and I was getting pretty good at it, faster every time and confident. So of course on my last one I went from one side to the other beautifully. Then I go to put it in the other slot that I started from before and somewhere in the middle my brain just completely got out of line. All of a sudden I was thinking, I'm way too straight with that lane and I still have a couple of steps to do. I did those steps anyway even though I could have backed right in. I got the trailer right in and signaled that I was done and hopped out thinking it wasn't my best but it was correct. Nope. Somewhere in the middle my brain decided that I was going to the lane on the right when I was supposed to be putting it in the lane on the left. I put it right back where I started. That one clearly doesn't cut it. Thankfully I already had enough successful attempts without any help and well under the time limit to pass my offset backing and we get to move on to the next maneuver tomorrow. My roommate is still paired up with me and when I got out him and the instructor were just laughing at me. I laughed too and while my roommate was making his last attempt, the instructor and I laughed more about it more saying that I was doing everything perfect and then all of a sudden they just had no idea what in the heck was going on. Yeah, me either. My reply was at least I gave him a laugh instead of a heart attack.

I'm getting much more confident every time I try something, learn from every mistake that I make so I don't do it again and overall am just having a blast. I'm really enjoying this training so much more this week. Last week the classroom stuff was pretty fast pace and boring even though there was a TON of information to learn. That stuff was easy for me though. Monday was a bit stressful and sure put me in my place at first because I was so nervous and getting into my own head overthinking things but every single time I get in that truck now, I feel more confident about things and make improvements at a decent pace. Other guys want to compare times on their maneuvers and I will tell them my times but I don't care how fast they did it. I'm here to learn the skills and get my CDL. When somebody hears another person's time and gets a little down because their time is slower, I just keep reminding them that you don't get style points. You either pass your skills tests and get your CDL or you don't. If the time limit is fifteen minutes and you get it done in fourteen then great, you passed. If you get it done in four minutes, you don't get a Platinum CDL or anything. It's the same license so don't get in a rush or frustrated because you are slower than somebody else.

Some here want to compete and be the fastest. I try and talk to the others when they are frustrated or down on themselves because I don't care who is the fastest or 'best,' I want every single one of us who started this process together to get through it and graduate together so we can get out there and start a new career and actually learning how to drive. They're just teaching us how to pass the tests here. The learning is just beginning once we get that CDL so let's all get through it together by helping each other out instead of making it a competition and then if any of us stay in touch and share any experiences that we run into that will help the others out after we leave then great. Let's all get through together. My roommate actually started out the first day on the yard saying that he wanted to be faster than me. Then his first attempt on day one, he got his butt kicked. Now he's not talking about times anymore. He was humbled quick just like me. In the classroom, we did have a competition going though. Both of us had perfect test scores until the final. Before the final, neither of us missed a single question on the daily tests. We were always the first two to finish every test by a pretty good margin and we finished the final way before anybody else. On the final he got something like a 96% and I got a 97.9% I am pretty sure that I missed just 2 of the 80 questions and ended up with the highest score in the class. It was an open book and open note test so I'm still not happy that I didn't get a perfect score but I swear the answers to the two I missed were nowhere to be found in the book and were not mentioned in class at all. I spent more time looking for the answers to those two questions that I wasn't sure of than I did answering all of the other questions combined. So did my roommate. I wasn't even going to ask what my score was but he thought he had me beat so I asked. When the classroom instructor said that everybody passed and all the scores were in the 90s, I was good enough with that and didn't care what my actual score was.

Awesome man, glad it's going so well for you!

I can parallel park an 18 wheeler as of today! As long as you get set up properly (truck and trailer straight and parallel to the box you're trying to fit it into, a foot to the outside and your bumper within a foot of the start of the box), it is actually insanely easy to get in there. Heck, it might even be a little easier than backing straight into a box... as long as you get set up correctly. Crank the wheel one way until you see the middle of your landing gear just outside your drive wheels in your mirror. Crank it the other way until you are straight in line with the trailer. Back up straight until your outside trailer wheels are centered on the outside line of the box. Crank it again until you see the center of your landing gear in the middle of the other mirror and then just pull forward a little to make sure the tractor and trailer are straight and that's it. Done. Easy.

And I also did the coupling and trailer pre-trip inspection for the first time and almost nailed it. I only forgot two things and one of them wasn't my fault in my opinion. I forgot the mud flaps on the trailer which was stupid. And then I didn't mention inspecting the marker lights on the top of the back of the trailer. Those marker lights were not my fault. The janky trailer we were using didn't even have them! I would have mentioned them if I saw them just like every other light I covered. Thankfully the trailers on the trucks that we use for the actual skills tests will have everything and actually be road legal. The trailers in the yard are beat to heck. They are just bad.

Sure seems like you're on your way for your new career!

So far, so good. I'm having a great time in the training. We'll see how next week goes with being on the actual roads for the first time and having to actually shift gears. So far it's only been first, reverse and then yesterday we got to start out in third so we could get out of the alley dock, turned around and set up for the next attempt a lot faster. In first, you are going at walking speed and takes forever to get anywhere. Heck, you might not even be going walking speed! I still make mistakes but I am recognizing when I'm starting to get into trouble and have gotten my distance down really good. I know exactly where the end of that trailer is after a rough start. The first time I thought the back of the trailer was dead on but I was five feet further than where I thought it was. After another time or two, I've got it down to the point where I am within a couple of inches of where I think it is. As long as I keep learning from every mistake and making progress, I'm perfectly happy and this stuff is a lot of fun. The instructor I've been paired up with seems to be happy with me too. The last couple of days when he goes over what went right and wrong with me, he's chuckling which I take as a good sign. I get out and he asks me what I think I did wrong and he just chuckles as I tell him exactly what I screwed up and then lets me know that even though I screwed up, I'm right about where it went sideways a little and how I struggled to fix it before he gives me tips on how I simply it should have been to fix. Either way, he's smiling and laughing with me instead of being frustrated so I take it as a good sign.

I still need some practice but what I need practice on seems kind of weird and I thought would be the easiest part. The actual backing is a piece of cake if you get set up right. If you get set up right then you can almost blindly follow a series of a few steps and you're in. I have the steps for each maneuver and my marks down. The actual backing and controlling the trailer in reverse is easy. My biggest issue is when I need to pull forward to make corrections and getting set up for the maneuver while going forward. If I'm too far right then it should be a simple pull forward to get the trailer a foot or two over to the left and then back straight in but I end up moving the trailer over like five feet and then I'm in trouble on the other side. Heck, I'm probably not even straight enough because I ran out of room to go forward and needed another ten feet. If I can get that down then I'm going to nail the skills tests for the backing maneuvers. I feel really confident on my pre-trip inspections. We'll see how the road driving and shifting go in a few days though. That starts on Monday.

Hopefully I can go in early this next week a few days and work on the backing maneuvers a bit more and now that I think of it, being on the road going forward could really help me with my issues on the set up since I'll finally have some experience in going forward. When he showed us the parallel parking and how to get set up for that, I looked at the other two in my group and realized they were thinking the same thing I was... we don't really know how to control the trailer going forward in any way other than either straight or cranking it all the way to a side and pulling forward until our door is lined up with the lane. Never have we worked on actually adjusting the trailer position while going forward. When we get out of position and need to adjust while he's teaching us the maneuver, he just tells us which way to turn the wheel and then tells us when to stop and what to do next. We are paying attention to him and not the marks we should be picking. Although now that I think about it, what I just mentioned about cranking it all the way and going forward until your door is aligned with the side of the lane and then doing it the other direction before getting straight in front of your trailer is probably a key. Those two steps are designed to get us centered in the lane when offset backing and I should have realized this earlier. Dang. I think I literally just had a break through while typing here! I just hate that I have to wait until Monday to test this out.

We got out on the roads today for the first time! It was a blast and I'm picking up the shifting pretty quickly. The instructor said that myself and one of the other guys in my group were already shifting and handling things better than some guys in their third day and that we made his job easy today. That was a nice boost for us.

And I also got confirmation this morning that my epiphany Friday evening was dead on with regards to making corrections pulling forward. I have a different instructor this week so before things started today I got a minute with my instructor from last week and ran what finally hit me by him and he just started laughing and told me that's exactly right and that's all I need. That really put me in a good mood too. My brain works but sometimes it just works in weird ways and things click at random times.

Day one down of week three and still having a blast and making progress every day!

Hit some busier roads and the highway today. People are penises on the roads, I even had another semi turn left in front of me so that I had to slam on the brakes and come to a complete stop while I had a green light to wait for him to get through. But it is hilarious when you go to get on the highway. People see a semi coming down the ramp with "Student Driver" across the sides and back and they can not move over to give you room to merge fast enough. EVERYBODY gets into the next lane like their life depends on it... and honestly, it just might! It was a bit nerve wracking at times because we're still working on hitting all our shifts properly even without cars around but it got a lot easier as time went on. Yesterday we were in an industrial park without a lot of traffic and much fewer distractions and potential hazards so it was easier to relax and nail your shifts. You add the general public around you on busy roads and for the first few miles, you are so nervous that it seems like every shift is the first one you've ever attempted in your life. It gets bad before getting better, that's for sure. I will say that navigating the turns and making sure that you don't hit curbs or anything is a lot easier than I thought it would be when you are on normal roads and not something super narrow. The hardest part is getting used to going forward WAY farther than you think you should. Unlike a car, (obviously) when you are making a right turn, you have to go straight until your bumper is in the middle of the road and only then do you start cranking it to the right. If you do it correctly, you shouldn't have any problems but there is just something that isn't natural about going straight to the middle of the road with nothing but a ditch on the other side before you crank that wheel. Definitely takes some getting used to.

Start the turn too early and you are running over the curb at best, maybe even taking out street signs or parked cars. We actually watched a student driver from another school run over a curb right in front of us while we were waiting to make the same turn today. We all know what that driver was dealing with as far as nerves, stress, etc. so nobody laughed. It was the opposite and our instructor was laughing at us because he loved the fact that all three of us students recognized things going south the instant that the wheels turned too early and without us even realizing it, all three of us were quietly urging the driver to make the correction before it was too late. Again, it's a lot easier to see that from behind while you are stopped and not a part of the action. But yeah, they ran way over that curb and barely missed taking out the stop sign too. Missed it by inches.

In the end, I got 45 minutes of driving on the main roads in pretty heavy traffic and then on the highway and covered about 15 miles in those 45 minutes. The highway is easy but I was only on the highway for maybe a mile or two. You just get up to speed and then all the pressure is off because you just have to maintain your speed, stay in your lane and pay attention to traffic, no more shifting. Driving on 4 lane roads with other impatient drivers and a 45mph speed limit will take years off your life at first though. When you are still working on getting the downshifts right, stop lights and stop signs are your mortal enemy. But at the end of the day, none of the three of us hit a curb or anything else so it was a good day. It is definitely not easy to get those 'bad habits' we all have from driving manual transmission cars out of our system and takes some time because shifting in these trucks is completely different than in a car. It is actually easier to teach somebody to drive a truck for the first time than it is to teach somebody to drive a car with a manual transmission if that person has never driven either. Which of course means it is also easier to teach that person who's never used a clutch to drive a truck than somebody who has. The people who drive manual transmission cars are having all kinds of issues at times. Two people even told me today that when they get in their car after class, they are having trouble driving back to the hotel at first because they initially forget to give it the proper gas to get moving since you don't touch the gas in a semi until you are moving and completely off the clutch. They put the car in gear, release the clutch and then stall because they didn't give it any gas. They've been focusing so intently on what they are doing in the trucks that they forget to switch back over mentally when they hop right back into their cars from the truck. One guy said he accidentally put on his emergency brake this afternoon when leaving class. He had never driven a manual before so he's been so focused on the clutch that he got in his car and his foot just went for the clutch, only there isn't one but there was an emergency brake there and he accidentally set it. Of course the feel is completely different and he released it before trying to drive off but he just got so used to and so focused on that clutch. He was also the only person with his instructor today so he literally got about 3.5 hours straight to just practice his maneuvers over and over. I'm a bit jealous. We still have 10 left out of 13 that started in our class so we have three or four of us paired with an instructor most days. Their class was supposed to be 12 but only 7 showed up and since then, one dropped out so they have six people and there are four or five instructors available on the yard. They get a ton more practice than we did!

I also don't know how these instructors do this for a living. It takes balls of steel to go out on the roads with people just learning how to shift for the first time and get them into traffic. Somehow they manage to remain perfectly calm and keep us out of trouble though. How they can still smile and joke after a few hours with us idiots behind the wheel is some kind of miracle. I'm assuming they are paid pretty well, or at least I hope they are.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. I’m living vicariously through your stories.