Episode: 3757
Title: HPR3757: Career changes.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3757/hpr3757.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:01:13

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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 style in a couple of 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 of 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 lived 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 it dropped the price of my 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.
There was also like a parking pass and just, you know, get all that school paperwork
stuff out of the way.
I had to do all that.
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.
Class A is a combination 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 and 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, especially
that parking because last thing you want to do is go to class and then have your card
told 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 or they'll suspend your class or something
crazy.
So you got to pay it.
Right there.
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 had 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 get all that out 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 DOT examination certificate.
You have to keep that with you at all times whenever you're driving commercial.
And as you approve 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 coach them like
just the answers were 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 in the class with some of the people who were there
who apparently had done this.
I studied the book from the DMV so that's how I got mine.
They apparently just use the apps or some of the people from the class use 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 say there's 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.
Looking at everything, they started, you know, 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, you know,
all these different parts that you need to understand need to be in order before you take
this vehicle on the road.
This test is to determine rather 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 all, I just named 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 to place the vehicle out of service where issues
have arrived in the past or well still today as well.
I ran into a couple of these issues with my old job as well, you'll 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 we can get back.
No, that's not how it works.
You as the operator have to evaluate and say rather not the 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.
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 requested a different one or requested a repair
before taking the vehicle.
But there's no excuse once DOT gets a hold 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 doesn't
want to hire you.
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 the slack adjusters and the push rod, you can't have more than one inch of play
in your slack adjuster with the brakes on.
And there's like with the leaf springs on the suspension system,
there are keywords you have to say, like whenever you're talking to the examiner
from the Department of Motor Vehicles, I'll refer to as the DMV from here on.
That examiner is the person who certifies rather not your 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 see you're trying and you're,
you know, you're pretty good.
You actually know your stuff, but you missed one thing.
Sometimes they'll say something like more detail.
You know, nothing more, you'll get to a certain point,
where like say you're talking about the radiator or the radiator reservoir,
or anything like that, and you just move past it a little too quickly
without going through all the steps.
And 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 secured.
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 feel to the appropriate level,
because it is the radiator reservoir,
right, it has to be filled to the appropriate level.
If it's empty, that's your reservoir,
to your rating.
You want to make sure it's at the proper level.
So, 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'll 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 the 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 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 lingo 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,
the terminal or whatever, wherever you left from,
they can get to you a lot easier.
And then there are multiple in-trip inspections that you do
because their 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 Hall,
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, inspect your vehicle, 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 and 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, 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 back story behind them.
There'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, um, you test done.
I don't know which examiner,
like if any of you want to go get your CDL later on,
there's no telling which examiner you'll come across
one of the nicer ones or one of the more strict ones,
but they'll fail you if you get out of that vehicle
and do not shut your door.
And that's, 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, uh, that's boarding and alighting the three point contact rule.
Then there's, um, yeah, there's the door.
And see, if, if nobody explained to you how, you know,
serious the door thing is or whatever, you're like,
how could I fail or lose points or anything?
You know, how can I be docked for not shutting the door?
What, what's the worst that could happen?
There have been incidents, depending on what state you're in,
where high gusts, high wind gusts take the door.
Like when you open the door,
and the mirror extends 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, at the mirror breaks your windshield,
that vehicle is now not a service, right?
You know, then, and then there's also the usual
if vehicles are passing close by and then,
and when I'm smack your door off,
where you no longer have a driver door.
So you obviously are out of service there too, right?
So there's a lot of back story, and I guess elaboration,
elaborate on the issues, so that way you understand it,
whereas the book will just sort of give you
like some bullet points saying,
you must do this, you must do that, you must do,
et cetera, with no elaborating.
One of the things that I really liked from the class,
the instructors are, they have years of experience
driving around the 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 fine 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 the 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.
Yeah, so 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 some errands,
and listened to some get caught up on my podcast and everything,
and I just wanted to talk and get a show out.
So, yeah, once you learn how to pre-trip your vehicle,
inspect all the different components and systems,
and you know, you can name them all,
tell what the flaws are, what to look out for, et cetera,
then you learn things like coupling the vehicles.
There are 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 the vehicles I'll be dealing with will 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 learn about your coupling system,
how the coupling system works, how to connect the 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 the 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 the middle of 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 the release arm on the trailer.
So that decouples his truck from his trailer.
You know, that's a terrible thing to have happen.
If you have a fully loaded trailer,
and you pull away and it's not coupled,
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 to mention, it's going to damage the goods you're carrying.
It's going to damage the trailer.
You know, it's a real jerk move to do.
But there's all these little small things like that
that can happen.
You're something that you may not even notice.
That's why you have to constantly inspect your vehicle.
You have to know all of these little elements.
If somebody does that to you and you caught it,
you know how to proceed from that.
I mean, sure, you probably don't want to go
getting into a knockdown dragout fight with 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 line on the ground
and have to explain why all the goods in it are damaged.
Not to mention, 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 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,
where basically you become an owner operator
and you run your own trucking business,
it could be with a single truck
or just you and your friends, whatever.
But you're an entrepreneur with a truck
and you're doing business with the truck.
If you run into one of these broker services,
they'll 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 got a long delivery time on it for like two.
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 A to point B.
By the time they get the load to you,
you'll notice that, okay, now 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 just knew the 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, 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 have X amount of months of experience
and, you know, they get all their different requirements for you.
But back to the story.
So what they're a shady broker will do is they'll then give you
that load, your head out down the road,
they will have a tracker on that load
because they're the broker.
They have to be able to, not have to,
but they will, most people track the loads, right?
They'll send that tracking information
to some shady individuals who will, you know,
come up on you at 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
where the 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.
Your insurance is going to go through the roof.
It is going to be a bad day for you.
This scam's been going on for a little while now.
Amazon's been getting 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, you're new,
you just hand the load over
because they look like they got the paperwork or whatever.
Before you know what your broker's 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 it.
So yeah, 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 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.
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.
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.
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 new students coming in
to, you know, learn a little bit better
because they have some nice resources.
Don't get me wrong, but there's some improvements.
I think I could make from a student's perspective
and I wanted to offer that opportunity.
I think I'm going to license it all
as like CCZero or something like that
and then that way I can share it freely with them
and for anyone and they 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 great scale the stuff
you shouldn't be looking at at the moment in the photo
and do like maybe a green highlight
or whatever on the stuff you should be focusing on
in the photo and give some sort of text information
that says what that item is
or what you're supposed to be looking out for.
So that way they work like flashcards
but they'll be, you know, GPEGs or whatever.
But that's my plan.
I already talked to the director.
He gave me the old K 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 by the DMV again.
That took up a ton of time
and I just couldn't get it done 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 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 on 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 with good traffic.
You know what I mean?
So I don't wanna leave and go,
oh man, I should've 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 the internet
writing about trucking and truck related stuff.
I'll be preparing my kit to record on the road.
So I downloaded a 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 followed that
was a Linux for everyone video on installation
and get it up and running with Linux Mint.
Works great.
I think it's gonna work better for me
if I'm doing like video calls and stuff of that nature
where I can't edit because with the editing
for me to get a noise profile on the noise
that I wanna 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.
Like, especially if I didn't have much time
to do any editing at all,
I just need to just get a recording out the door.
Yeah, that's totally what I'm gonna be using.
Thank you guys for listening.
Now I'll catch you guys in an next episode.
I'm some guy on the internet and this is HBR.
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