It's a living

[Ganthan]

Okay, 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.

[Ganthan]

Okaaaay. Either everybody else here lives on welfare, nobody wants to talk to me, or there's simply nobody else here. Doesn't anyone want to talk about their jobs?

[Happygun]

Well, I am currently a graduate student in a Biochemistry and Molecular biology Ph.D. program, but I'm nearly finished and will be probably be receiving my degree at the end of September. I've yet to find a job or post-doc, though. This is the kind of economy where even a Ph.D. holder in a relatively hard and applicable science - biochemistry -has trouble finding a job out of college.

[Toast]

I quit being a materials scientist when the abusive work environment drove me to attempt suicide. A year and a half of treatment and retraining later, I sit here waiting for a callback from an interview for a high school physics teaching position. Should I ever get a job, I'll post in this thread.

[Happygun]

Material scientists? I know a few of those guys. Brilliant and knowledgeable, but bat-shit insane. It combines hardcore organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, chemical engineering, metallurgy, electronics, and a few other disciplines depending on your specialty.

[Kris@WLP]

[Ganthan]

Boy do I love dragging myself into the yard at three in the morning only to discover that my trailer is in the shop.

[Happygun]

...And just today I was awarded my Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

*DING*

(Yes, my school actually has a bell they ring when someone receives their doctorate)

WLPComics has at least one reader who has a doctorate in the biological sciences. Huh.

[Ganthan]

Grats.

Good luck on the job hunt.

[bar1scorpio]

Not only that, but happygun has a degree in a field of study thar Peter & co. are in. ans getting the anwers to.

Wow, a BioChem, a native French speaker whom we haven't tapped yet.

We wouldn't happen to have a professor of parapsychology on the boards, do we?

[Kris@WLP]

[Happygun]

[Kris@WLP]

[Happygun]

That's not so much biology as it is a violation of the first law of thermodynamics - energy/mass cannot be created nor destroyed. Getting past that it's mostly a matter of tissues and bones not being able to withstand the strain associated with radical growth and/or transformation.

[Kris@WLP]

[Happygun]

And tomorrow I will be moving to San Francisco to start a postdoctoral appointment at the UCSF Medical Center. Wish me luck!

[Ganthan]

[Kris@WLP]

[Ganthan]

Well I just made an embarrassing mistake. I drove my truck under a train viaduct that was EVER SO SLIGHTLY too low for me and ended up scraping the roof of the trailer.

Man I hope this doesn't screw me over too bad. I really like this job. I guess I'm lucky it wasn't a lot worse. The police didn't even write me up for it.

[bar1scorpio]

Come home from YoumaCon, double shift, training meeting, go out and vote. Then go to sleep, then come back to work.

[Kris@WLP]

[bar1scorpio]

I will. Got the important stuff on me at least.

[Happygun]

I just finished a phone interview for a lab manager position...for a company that manufacturers edible medical cannabis products. The interviewer wants me to come for an in person interview in Sacramento. Recreational biochemistry is certainly a growth industry.

[Happygun]

[Ganthan]

Maybe that's a good thing. It means you won't try to take your work home with you like Dave Chappelle in Half Baked.