Day Eleven

Finals day. 

Major bad news last night. My wife called to inform me that my grandmother had passed away. I cried for a while. She would have been 100 this June. I wanna go home.

We showed up at the OC at 06:30. After waiting for a few minutes, we were taken to a classroom and the Training Manager and TOM talked to us for a couple of hours. Mainly on what to expect and what was going to happen next in the process. Then we took our final written exam. After lunch we all sat around and waited for our drive tests. The tester that I was assigned to was supposed to start at 1430, but he didn't show up until two hours later. So the three of us that were testing with him had to do everything in the dark. They didn't train us in the dark! It's different.

I butchered my backing, though. When we trained at the school, we had plenty of room to pull forward and reposition ourselves. At the OC, we had about 70 feet...and there was a tractor coupled to the trailer directly in front of where I had to put my trailer. Not much room to move around. Luckily there was no trailer on the far side of my space or I really would have messed it up. I did pass, but with a lot of work needed on backing. Whew.

Now it's time for a midnight trip home, some sleep and a lot of laundry. Then I'm back on Sunday evening for a week of JumpStart...followed by OTR training.