I've been a trucker for the last ten years but now I am back home at "Camp Chaos" and I will be working at the Fontana terminal as a safety specialist. I hope now that I'm home I'll have a lot more time for blogging!


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I arrived in Omaha Sunday afternoon around 1:30 PM. I had a 1 1/2 hour layover in Salt Lake City. It was nice in SLC, around 60 degrees. As the plane flew east toward Omaha the clouds kept getting thicker. When we began our descent into Omaha I was somewhat alarmed as we kept going down and yet I couldn't see the ground! Down, down we went through white cotton. I felt the landing gear come down but I still couldn't see the ground. Then suddenly we broke out of the clouds and we were only a few hundred feet above the ground.
It rained on and off all the rest of Sunday and part of Monday.

I am staying in the nicest Hotel I can remember. I have my own studio apartment. I have a full kitchen with cooking utensils, dishes and silverware for four; microwave and full size refrigerator. There is a living room with a fireplace! Reminds me of the houses at Pine Summit.

Every morning the Hotel has a complete hot breakfast. A waffle iron, scrambled eggs, sausage long with fruit and juices.

At night they have a mini-dinner. Tonight was baked potato night. There is also a large electric skillet like thing full of cooked broccoli. Warm melted cheese too!

Werner is treating us (there are three of us here for training) like royalty! Everything is paid for by Werner. If I do spend anything they will reimburse me on my next paycheck.

This computer I'm typing on is pretty old, but the Internet is free. The hardest thing is the space bar doesn't work very well. I type a sentence and then look at the screen and find I have put the whole sentence together like some horrendously long e-mail address! I just found out the 'Delete' key doesn't work at all!

I am having a great time. A little nerveracking though. Today I spent most of the day with one of Werner's head Safety officials. He is teaching me how to use Werner's computer system. I think there at least five or more programs running simultanously. I'm sure that's not unusual but I have to keep track of what each one is doing and what it does.
Besides e-mail, there is the program that keeps track of all the drivers in each of the ten or eleven terminals around the country. Then there is the main program that keeps all of the data about all 10,000 drivers and some 20,000 trailers and the loads they are carrying around the country.
I have to know how to access the drivers info instantly. Each time a driver has an accident or any incident from a logging violation to a student complaining about his trainer, he is brought into the terminal and must see a safety specialist. That is what my new title is. I have to know as much as possible about how everything operates because I will have to make decisions that could affect a drivers whole career.

So, here I am sitting next to Al, head safety man. He put together a training program that uses some data from drivers who no longer work for us. Then using Exel, he created numerous fields holding data about how many accidents a driver had, how long they were employed, how many log violations they had, how much training they had received etc, etc. My job was to look up the info for each of about 20 drivers and fill in each of the fields. This required me looking into just about every nook and cranny this huge program has! To make things worse the programmers wern't always consistant with their commands. On some screens, I have to push F12 to exit out of a screen, others I have to remember F3 does the job. If I hit F3 on a screen where I should hit F12, I exit out of the whole program and have to start all over! It's great fun... really!

This afternoon, I got to do some actual live data entering. Several drivers were in the Omaha terminal today and were due for their annual reviews. I got to enter all of the info, then we had to look up their motor vehicle record from the state they live in and check to see if they had lied about anything. All drivers have to report all tickets, accidents and also have to keep their commercial drivers licenses current. We have to make sure all these things are correct.

I think I have covered most of what's going on here. Today the weather cleared up and it's beautiful here in Omaha.

I am going back to my apartment, it is getting late and I have to get to bed early. I have get up around 5:30 because I have to be at the terminal at 7:00.
posted by Tom at 5:04 PM