local driver misses the otr driving

There is a member on this board who is a states man of mine and he's a night time road driver for a regional LTL company. He is home everyday, yet he clocks OTR miles like a big time serious OTR sleeper cab driver. He goes from terminal to terminal, but the beauty of it is and I do like this my self, he goes to different terminals all around. He'll go in a nights time to Lousiville and then maybe Cleveland or Columbus to Indianapolis to Lousiville then back to his home terminal. He's going all over a little bit gets a good variety and yet gets to be home with his family.

We have internal volume drivers at GFS and it's not a job you can walk off the street and get you have to have some time in, but Internal Volume is our own trucks moving our own products from warehouse to warehouse and you get depending on where your out of some variety doing that, but you get to go home too so there is a best of both worlds out there I think. I believe that you can split the difference.

 

A couple hundred years ago, we OTR types would have been the type to heed the call "go west young man". See what's over the next mountain.

 

Two years of it was enough for me and then I got into hauling/loading milk tankers since 2012. Single, no family here. But I like being able to tinker around with my various "arts and crafts" projects when not running. Not trying to knock another one's wishes, but I tend to get a little spooked when I have to drive an unassigned sleeper cab for the night. "Oh no!! Not again!"

 

I hate otr. I can do like out 2 or 3 days max. But otr no way.

 

Different strokes for different folks. I work my arse off for my mortgage payments and the comfy couch I sit on each night.

No way in hell would I go be out on the road for weeks at a time and "earn" one unpaid day off for each week out.

 

I get the itch every now and again while sitting in Los Angeles traffic, hauling 8600 gallons of gasoline while being paid by the hour. Then I laugh and think to myself there are guys who would kill to be in my shoes. I can remember being on the other side of the fence thinking that lucky SOB local driver gets paid to sit in this crap when I was OTR.

 

not me, i like my lifestyle just fine, thank you. my days of Long Haul came to an end, when a great local job came up. why would i want to miss the highly inconvenient lifestyle of today's OTR drivers?

home daily, eat my own food, use my OWN CLEAN bathroom ans shower, watch my OWN tv and what i WANT to watch, park my car in my yard, park the truck on company property, we have onsite fueling, you have to get out in all weather and do your own, my laundry room is ALWAYS open, i never have to sit and watch it to make sure no one steals anything, i get to do my errands around town, and i get to unwind in peace and quiet, and never have to worry about some jack-wagon hitting my truck. always having a good food supply during a snowstorm, and no need to find parking in one.

i like my lifestyle the way it is, NEVER have i ever had the pains of going back on the road.

good luck to you, i wish you well, but once i left that lifestyle, i vowed never to go back, and to this day, i will continue that vow.

 

Why not just do line haul if you just wanna drive for hours on end? Three to five hours out then come back home. If you break down or get held up, they pay you by the hour... If you run out of hours, they put you in a hotel... Private room with shower and everything. Home on weekends and most holidays. Plus the pay is usually higher too.

 

Yep, but so is the stress level. They expect you to keep to a schedule, regardless of weather, traffic or being just plain tired. But they schedule these things pretty tight. And if you're doing a turn where you meet another driver and exchange loads, well let's just say that when a turn driver has to wait three hours or so for you to get there, tempers get pretty short all around. Not just the other turn driver, but BOTH dispatchers, both dock managers, and on up the line.
They just run things on too tight a schedule for there to be an problems. And face it, in this business, there are ALWAYS problems.
My personal feeling on it is that "It's just freight. It'll get there when I get it there." But the brass, who is (often foolishly) committed to JIT service gets a real knot in their shorts when everything goes to hell.