Ok yes I wear sandals and shorts when not at the customer. Yes I have long hair and I wear do rags because sometimes you just have a bad hair day(not that the bald guys would notice LOL just kiddin) But its your attitude that gets you respect. I have no problem gettin loaded or unloaded cause when I get to customer I look descent and am Clean. That what people wanna see. And I have watched the gangsta wanna be's sit for hours oh well wanna look that way well sorry nobody wants to be around you

Add to all that change, female truckers. There's an increasing number of them out there. I am one... Did not have a dad or an uncle trucker to teach me in a farm when I was a teenager. No, I went to CDL school... but the best I could get in my state because I really wanted to become a good professional driver. I hear old timers saying back on old days where there was no power steering, there were no women truckers and drivers were tough, had big muscle arms... and how fun and free and lucrative this job used to be. I can only imagine. Well, back in my early twenties, in the country where I was born and raised, I lived on the road for months at a time and used to hitchhike a lot with truck drivers. I LOVE LIFE ON THE ROAD!!!!! Someone here said the government got involved, CDL schools and big cos. started promissing mountains of money, immigrants came, etc.... Yes, that's all true. More people, more competition, more regulation, less money, less freedom, less fun... Many people are lured to become truck drivers.... but they don't take any pride, don't love this way of life.... that destroys our image

My wife loads/unloads trailers all day. She sees the kinda drivers. Most of them dont speak a BIT of english. I thought that was a requirement?? She has a hell of a time trying to discuss something minor with them...



Yea, she has the turban dudes and dark socks and sandals dudes (maybe they are somewhat the same) - but they act like they own the world and while they live in our USA - they don't even have the decency to learn and speak our language here.

It's Spanish...right?
..cause I was in Wally World the other day. They made an announcement overhead and repeated it. Oddly, the first time was in SPANISH. The second time was in ENGLISH.

WTF ?!

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J.D. Hanadarko
Milwaukee WI USA
Facebook: Hanadarko

Honestly when i was a kid i'd laugh about those "cowboys". Infact, i remember one time seeing an ad in the newspaper for a trucking job..."Cowboys need not apply!" hahahahaha

I'm 23 now, and this country is a lot different now than when I was 10 or so. Instead of cowboy hats, I'm laughing about truckers wearing turbans.

Also, americans in general are changing in a bad way. The other day i got steaming pissed off because I got confused in East Chicago, IN. I was supposed to take in912 to get to i80 from i-90, it was closed and i had to take a detour that seemed realllllly long. I could not get any drivers to help me. I pulled over and semi-legally parked the truck and the first person i asked didnt speak a word of english. Then a cop showed up, and I thought he was going to write me a ticket, but he was stopping to get food from the guy that didnt speak english (The only business nearby was a chinese restaurant). I asked the cop, and he truly didnt understand why i was confused but gave me the directions i sought.

Also, when I first "processed out" to solo here at werner, I was given a brand new daycab with 20 miles on it, to pick up the cascadia im in now. The truck was shipped with one fuel tank shut off, it was getting dark, and maintenance told me it had no fuel shut off valves and it was probably a clogged fuel line, and they ended up sending out roadside with a few fuel cans, and planned on getting it covered under warranty. Well, anyway, i didnt have my cb plugged in but i plugged it up and everyone was talking about the werner daycab on the shoulder. i asked about the shutoff valves, and a guy said he was goign the other way and would pull over on the left shoulder and cross the highway and helped me....at night. He risked his life to help me, you know how other drivers are. He got up under the truck with a flash light, and wow, neither of us could find the shutoff valve. (I found it the next morning when it was light again)....

But yeah, he was one of those American Truckers. Infact we were about two hours north of OKC and he flat out told me "I'll seeya later, I gotta be in Minnesota in the morning and I got 800 miles to go!".....talk about running legal. He drove a peterbilt 379, had a southern accent, wasnt wearing a hat at the time and i didnt get to look at his boots.

We need more truckers like that. Maybe they dont need the cowboy hat and boots and southern accent, but its the personality thats the important part.

I also was trained by one of these american truckers when i worked at crst. I learned a lot from that experience.

I am an american trucker. I don't wear cowboy boots (but darn i want some!), I do wear boots but sometimes i wear sandals. I never wear a hat. But i have that personality.

the DOT offices in oregon (not coops, but offices) have brochures on the counter, "DID YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO SPEAK ENGLISH TO DRIVE A TRUCK IN THE US?" ..best part is it is in english. I wanted to take one but they only had one left. I figured they might need it, since its oregon and all.

I remember a while back i pulled into a consignee...in laporte, texas, and saw another werner driver wearing a turban and he had a beard and...my opinion is that he looked like Noah. Real raggedy beard. I went in and had to sign a sign-in sheet. I saw his name on there, and haha if i wouldve tried to pronounce it. I know it was him. He also signed with the wrong timezone.

I always thought the asphalt cowboys were clowns too. Real drivers wore work clothing and steel toe boots. They dressed more like mechanics, or machinists.

That cowboy hat wearing "trucker lifestyle" driver was the beginning of the downfall.

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A red is any son-of-a-##### that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re payin’ twenty-five!’"
--John Steinbeck

Pretty well confirms you havent been out here "ANY WHERE NEAR 35 Years" LMMFAO!
You clowns blow your own skirts up everytime . . . . .
Where were steel toe boots 35 years ago ? ..... Buwahahahahahah KMA!
My newest 20X is older then youve been driving.

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real drivers


My brothers were real drivers. My brother John drove for 40 years. He also ranched so he wore his boots, jeans and his silverbelly. Sorry you think he wasn't a "real" driver. I'm pretty sure he could drive you into the dirt.


My brother Mike also wore boots, jeans and his black stetson. He too farmed as well as drove and he drove for 45 years. I'm pretty sure he could and would run you off the road. He wasn't as nice as John.

Real drivers.


sheesh

I bet most of the turban dudes are from Canada . Michigan DOT upset quite a few of them several months ago by putting them OOS for not being able to communicate well enough in English . There's a lot of them in Canada . Down here they own motels and 7/11's . In Canada they own trucking companies and truck dealerships .

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2 Timothy 4:3,4–”For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

When I was a kid, my family had a retail lumber yard in the Catskill Mtns of NY. Anytime a trucker would bring a load to the yard, they got out of the truck and their appearance was professional and well kept. Company drivers wore uniforms, OO wore jeans, usually western shirt. Flat bed drivers usually put on overalls before unloading and untarping. ALL OF THEM said "yes sir" or "yes mame" when addressing people.

In the 80s, I started noticing the trend. The uniforms were gone. The clothes started getting torn and dirty. The last to go was the addressing of the customer.

We can't all blame it on the driver. Companies and frieght brokers have been treating drivers worse over the years and it eventually kills the moral of the driver. Still, it's up to the individual on how they interact with the customer and how they address their FM. Over the years, I've held my tongue most of the time when dealing with dispatch with a rare outburst of tempered volume. BUT, profanity to dispatch only creates problems for the driver in the long run. If it's that bad, time to find another cab.

As to drivers not speaking english or able to read english, I've seen it too. It's not just from those from south of the border. Ukrane imigrants, those from India that refuse to speak english (but they do), etc, etc. If you look at the requirements for a CDL, it clearly states you MUST be able to speak, read, and understand ENGLISH in order to obtain the license. Still, state DMV offices will get translators or have computerized testing for specific languages to allow for those unable to meet the criteria. It's a case of common scense loosing to Government PC yet again.

We all know that all the road signs in the USA are written in english. Speed limit signs, direction signs, street signs and warning signs are in english! Most companies have signs on site for which dock to go to. I even had a driver approach me at a shipper in SC to ask in broken english to where he could find the factory on his paperwork. I looked at his paperwork, then pointed to the 4' tall letters on the building we were standing in front of. The company did have a long name, but he couldn't translate from the paper to the building!

When you think of how the NTSB, DOT, and ATA have been trying to put the safety blame on the driver and then you realize that they are allowing drivers that can't read road signs on our highways each and every day, you have to seriously wonder what the root of their purpose goes.