Truck Driving School, Final Entry Part I

Final Entry/Last Days Pt. 1

What do you call someone who finishes last in their class in medical school? Doctor.

What do you call a guy who fails his CDL exam the first time but passes it the second time?  Truck driver!

It’s been awhile since my last entry, but there had been only one or two more driving and range sessions, which were largely uneventful, and then the CDL exam last Thursday, which I absolutely did not want to write about. 

One final road session gave me confidence heading into the exam, as we covered the examination route and I felt like I drove it pretty well, hitting the upshifts and downshifts without too much trouble. There was only one curb that was of concern, but as long as you can be patient and wait out the traffic, eventually you will get an opening so that you can make the right turn into the oncoming traffic lane, giving the trailer plenty of room to clear the curb. The day of the exam I had a four hour range session, of which I used only about two hours… after you get the hang of backing up, it almost becomes mundane. Wow, never thought I’d say that. Wonder how it’s going to go in the real world, when I don’t have cones to my left and in front that I’ve been using as markers, turning the wheel one-and-a-half-times at that cone and straightening the wheel at this cone… should prove interesting. I do have the concept down, which is the goal. 

Our CDL exam is split roughly into three parts, as I imagine most are, and we figure we have about 30mins per part. The first part is the pre-trip inspection + air brakes test; no problems whatsoever with the pre-tripping. I was prepared and could have easily pre-tripped the whole truck, but was only given the approach & engine, and the coupling devices. Everyone does the coupling devices, and beyond that it’s either the approach + engine, the driver’s side of the tractor, the trailer, or the whole thing. Then it’s to the in-cab, where we pre-trip the interior of the cab, finishing up with the brakes & air test. Guess where I botched it? 

After performing a safe start and completing the in-cab inspection I began the brakes test well enough, doing the tug test against the tractor, trailer, and service brakes, but after I shut the engine off and turned the electronics back on, I proceeded directly to fanning the brakes down to 60 psi to activate the low pressure warning gauges, and then further down to 20 psi until the two valves (red & yellow)…(trailer brakes & tractor protection) popped out. And then declared “Done.”  And that, my friends, was an automatic fail. I completely forgot to perform the one-minute air loss test, where you depress the service brakes for one minute, making sure that you don’t lose more than 4 psi (3 psi for a single vehicle) during that one minute. 

Unlike the other parts of the exam where you are allowed to miss pieces of the pre-trip, or allowed mistakes on your backing maneuvers, and afforded mistakes on your road portion of the skills test (with a few exceptions such as running the rear tandems over a curb or stalling out in the middle of an intersection), with the air brakes test there is no margin for error. None. Nada. Zilch. You screw up any one part of it and you’re done. Thanks for participating, see you next week. A horrible feeling washed over me that remained for the rest of the day. My re-test was scheduled for the following Thursday. I had to wait another whole week! At $60/night in my hotel, that was going to be a very costly mistake. 

What was I going to do for an entire week? I already knew the pre-trip, and really, I knew the air brakes test, I just farted inside my head and left something out. It’s like testing on numbers and having to count to ten, and forgetting number seven. You know there’s a number seven, you just forgot to say it. The despair I felt left me shaking for several hours. Fortunately, as I was about to leave the building, one of the instructors mentioned that you can view the CDL exam schedule on-line, and that sometimes there are cancellations and you can move into an earlier slot. So I checked that night, several times on Friday, and several times on Saturday, but to no avail. ...

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