So you want to be a truck driver (Schneider)

So you want to be a trucker. What a great life that will be. Driving around, no bosses, meeting interesting people, seeing great things and making LOTS OF MONEY. Yeah all that great trucker pay. WOW Well first you got to get educated. So that means school. If your lucky Uncle Sam or the state pays the fee but, if your not, you pay and it's not cheap. You got to pay to play, right? Private schools range from $8000 to $6000. Community colleges around $1600 because their subsidized by your state. So if you live in a state that supports the trucking industry, your lucky, but fewer and fewer states do. So, after getting your cdl permits, which is another expense, your off to school. At the school you shine, you get a great instructor. You clutch like an expert and back like a pro. You calculate time and the log book like an old timer and you graduate at the top of the class. Now the company recruiters show up. It used to be that there were good and bad companies. They all had lousy pay for new drivers but some were outright liars and some were straight forward. You could usually tell or get an opinion. Now they all shine you on. To them all drivers are just another cost of doing business and they want them as cheap as possible. So you go with the great pumpkin. You hear their the best. They claim to reimburse driving school and pay you .29c a mile with a quick upgrade to .30 and then .32 after you prove yourself and survive. So you sign up and are off to training. At Charlotte the pumpkin uses Red Roof Inn and it's not the ritz but it's not bad. If you have high standards you might not be happy but it's better than the england dorms or an old mobile home. Schneider used to have a training academy at most OC's but now there is only a vestige of that left. At orientation, they indoctrinate you into the schneider way. The training is still good and the instructors are thorough and not abusive in an abusive region of the country. Their bonuses are dependent on you passing so this isn't magnanimity. Everybody in this company lives for their bonus. So you pass with flying colors and are assigned your truck. This is the luck of the draw. You might get one that's like new or one that pig pen lived in for years. The service group cleans them but not really. Most have about 400000 miles and the reliability will be a matter of luck too. If you get a turkey you can trade it in, maybe. Now you get your first load and accept it and download the route. The pumpkin gps is configured to get the shortest possible truck route, GREAT, maybe. It also avoids toll roads. This means that you will be on state highways or two lanes even though an interstate runs the same way but it's a little longer, if you pick the interstate your out of route and bye bye bonus. If you've always wanted to drive all the local roads across NJ and eastern pa, this is your big chance. There's a section of highway where I-70 meets I-81. The navigo gps routes you down 340 and 7. That's 100 miles of traffic lights and two lane that eats up your hours and drops your average speed to 25-30. You will be hard pressed to make that time up since the trucks are governed at 60mph. You can stomp the pedal and get to 62mph but the overspeed kills your bonus. You can try racing down hills to make up the time but anything over 70mph really sets off all the alarms and kills your bonus. The navigo routes can be convoluted and outright bizarre but any other route is OUT OF ROUTE and the computer will tell you about it. The pumpkin training calls the voice in the computer Jill. You will quickly call it something else. A talking company computer is a true mechanism of torture. They should use this one on Al Quada. It's very similar to being locked in a closet with your mother in law. You can turn the voice off but for navigation it's better to get the voice prompts instead of squinting at the screen and with the voice off you might miss a very important email from the dbls. You will be bombarded with emails. This company is now run by and for the cubicle trolls. This is an office company that happens to have drivers. The dispatchers, dbls, managers and recruiters are college people. There isn't one dispatcher that's an ex-driver. These people don't know or even like drivers. They might as well be making widgets and to them you are a widget. Widget number 24567. That's you. As a new driver, you are on the 90 day board. This board is supposed to help the clueless newbies survive the harsh cruel trucking world.In reality it's the blind leading the blinder. Some of the dispatchers are helpful and all touch type like champions and zip through the schneider IS like a video game but for the new driver, for any driver, the 90 day board is a bigger challenge than shifting or navigo. The 90 day board brings the driver, without realizing it, into the culture of the OC. Some OC's, like Carlisle, are benign. Some OC's, like Charlotte, are mendacious. Dallas, Memphis, Fontana, Indy, Green Bay fall higher and lower in between. This is office culture and the word frienemies comes directly to mind. With every phone call into the board your exposed to this culture. You have lived your life to be away from offices and office people but here your up to your eyebrows in it. This is the next facet of schneider problems, practically every load needs phone calls. The load planners don't plan and the box schedulers don't have any idea where the trailers are. You will get a work assignment that looks good and is covered with numbers. You then roll up to a customer and not one number is right. If your lucky, the customer will help puzzle it out and, through the destination or trailer number, work out your load. Mostly the customers just cuss about schneider and document other schneider screwups, wasting your time. So now your on the phone to the 90 day board, on hold, waiting, for 10,15 20 minutes or more. This time comes off your 14, so their burning your time, eating your lunch and pay. Wasting your hours and phone time. So now your stuck. Emails don't work. While the board blizzards you with worthless emails, they ignore yours. When finally you get connected maybe you'll get help maybe there will just be more miscommunication. This is once more where luck is all. You may be assigned a good or bad dbl. You might be assigned a steroid pumped control freek or a Mr Rogers clone. Luck is all. This is a ###### happens kind of company. If you get a bad dbl you either tough it out, try for a replacement or walk. In this instance your first and only mistake was showing up. All this will be ok once you open that pay stub and see that big pay check. Right? Well once you have finished orientation training, you get the news that, by the way, you are required to be a per diem for the first 6 months. This means you make .27c per mile. That's $8 less on a 400 mile run. It's like working one hour for free at your last job. You did that all the time, right? While we are taking about pay let's do some figuring. Truckers work long hours. That's given, but used to be made up by decent pay. Now with the low pay and the HOS rules it's almost impossible to make a living wage. If you can run 400 miles a day, and that's hard with traffic, live loads and unloads, heavy loads and 60 mph governed trucks, you will make $756 gross, in 7 days. That's almost $19 an hour at a normal job, but this isn't a normal job. Your on the job 24/7 for however many days your out. If you work regional you get 34 hrs at home a week. Most of that will be used getting home. If you work national, you get 1 day off per week. Maybe. If your dbl sucks you get less or use most of your time at home just getting home. So let's be generous, even though the company is not, and figure your 10 hour break is time off. Even though your locked in a truck in a nasty truck stop, rest area or at a customers yard. Paying good money for crap food and peeing in a bottle. On a 14 hour day running 400 miles a day, you make $7.71 an hour. Minimum wage. Less in some states. The girl cleaning the showers in Pilot makes more than you. If you figure on working 24/7 your pay drops to $4.50 an hour. That was minimum wage in about 1979. Schneider pay is in the cellar and their planning to keep it there. While Google and Apple recruit workers from Ireland. Schneider recruits from english speaking Africa. They sponsor them for work visas and train them to drive. Ready made slaves. I talked to one and he said " I can make what I made in a year in a month here." Great, America, what a country. While your trying to figure how to afford that car your wife wants and pay the mortgage too. This dude is thinking about a tar paper shack and the price of monkey meat. This is why all truckers hate Schneider and will generously abuse you at every chance. Schneider drives the price of freight into the basement and they do that to pay too. So you want to be a truck driver, Good Luck. You'll need it. PS: For a lot less money and a little more time, you can get certified as a machinist, welder,mechanic or HVAC tech at just about any community college. That would get you a $50k a year job with no luck involved. You also wouldn't be a slave to a ###### company and a crazy dispatcher. PPS: You just live to drive and that other stuff is just too hard, but understand this. If your high school or young college age now, in your lifetime, the google trucks are going to show-up. This, just like drones are replacing pilots, is going to eliminate truck drivers. All the high pay point to point line haul, dedicated and bulk jobs will go first. The B-school grads at the fancy side of the terminals and OC's are counting on this. Everybody's going to shout this down, but what do you think the gps, proximity and tip over sensors are about. A few more sensors and drive by wire and the computer will take over. What's backing anyway but geometry. So then when your 100 lbs over weight with high blood pressure and your butt is shaped like the freightliner seat, the B-school beauties will tell you to take a walk.