It's a living
Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2013 4:26 pmOkay, maybe a thread where we talk about our jobs won't go ghost town after one or two posts.
I'm a truck driver, even though my personality and interests seem to clash wildly with the trucker stereotype. Around three and a half months ago I started a new job at a nearby trucking company that does mostly local regional runs which means I get home every night. The pay is pretty good even though my days can be pretty darn long and start REALLY early. In fact, most of the posts I make here now are done on my new smartphone while out on the job.
For around seven years prior to this I worked for my family's logging business and delivered to nearby mills. The farthest away I would go sometimes is a six hour round trip. However, it just wasn't busy and well paying enough. A two month long layoff triggered by incessant rain (because you can't log in the rain) and generally slow business was the last straw. I hated to abandon them seeing as the only other one with a Class A CDL was my dad (who is more or less the supervisor at this point as well as the main tree cutter) and he was WAY too busy to take up my delivery job. I couldn't deal with going broke again, however, so I had to move on. My oldest brother started working for us a couple of years ago and now he's trying to get his CDL so he can take up the reins. My middle brother has already been a flatbed driver for another nearby company for around five years now, so this will make all three of us as drivers.
When I first got my CDL in my early twenties my first truck driving job was for the big company USA Truck. I went ALL over the country with them. From here in Ohio to Texas, California, Montana, Washington, Georgia, North and South Carolina, you name it. There's only a single digit number of states I DIDN'T drive through at least a little. I stayed mostly within the East Coast states though since that's where most of the industries are. To this day I'm still not sure how I managed to stay with them for one whole year considering how BAD of a truck driver I was. I had no cell phone at all yet and next to no directional OR common sense. After getting my year of experience with them I switched to a much smaller company in Toledo that was more like my current job, but I was still home only on the weekends at most. They must not have had nearly as much patience or budget to deal with me because they fired me after around six months.
Now, though, equipped with all this experience, excellent memory, better but still not very good problem solving skills, not to mention a new smartphone with Google Maps on it (HOW did I EVER manage driving WITHOUT this?) I now seem to be 1000% better than I first was. For the first time in my life I think I have finally found a career that pays well, I'm good at, AND while maybe not 'enjoyable' is at least not miserable.
I'm a truck driver, even though my personality and interests seem to clash wildly with the trucker stereotype. Around three and a half months ago I started a new job at a nearby trucking company that does mostly local regional runs which means I get home every night. The pay is pretty good even though my days can be pretty darn long and start REALLY early. In fact, most of the posts I make here now are done on my new smartphone while out on the job.
For around seven years prior to this I worked for my family's logging business and delivered to nearby mills. The farthest away I would go sometimes is a six hour round trip. However, it just wasn't busy and well paying enough. A two month long layoff triggered by incessant rain (because you can't log in the rain) and generally slow business was the last straw. I hated to abandon them seeing as the only other one with a Class A CDL was my dad (who is more or less the supervisor at this point as well as the main tree cutter) and he was WAY too busy to take up my delivery job. I couldn't deal with going broke again, however, so I had to move on. My oldest brother started working for us a couple of years ago and now he's trying to get his CDL so he can take up the reins. My middle brother has already been a flatbed driver for another nearby company for around five years now, so this will make all three of us as drivers.
When I first got my CDL in my early twenties my first truck driving job was for the big company USA Truck. I went ALL over the country with them. From here in Ohio to Texas, California, Montana, Washington, Georgia, North and South Carolina, you name it. There's only a single digit number of states I DIDN'T drive through at least a little. I stayed mostly within the East Coast states though since that's where most of the industries are. To this day I'm still not sure how I managed to stay with them for one whole year considering how BAD of a truck driver I was. I had no cell phone at all yet and next to no directional OR common sense. After getting my year of experience with them I switched to a much smaller company in Toledo that was more like my current job, but I was still home only on the weekends at most. They must not have had nearly as much patience or budget to deal with me because they fired me after around six months.
Now, though, equipped with all this experience, excellent memory, better but still not very good problem solving skills, not to mention a new smartphone with Google Maps on it (HOW did I EVER manage driving WITHOUT this?) I now seem to be 1000% better than I first was. For the first time in my life I think I have finally found a career that pays well, I'm good at, AND while maybe not 'enjoyable' is at least not miserable.
