Makin' the bacon while local tanker yankin'

"Necessarily for the better" seems to be in the eye of the beholder in this case. You may not think I'm doing better for myself, but my bills are still paid, savings account gets its cut, food is on my table and I can still afford for my wife to stay home with our kids.

Funny thing, is that I don't encounter ANY BS during my day, aside from traffic. I don't deal with people and I load and unload my product without waiting for a shipper or receiver to sign or accept a shipment. I don't have any appointment times, with the exception of whatever reservation time I have for the ferry to Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket if I am delivering there. If the load doesn't fit, I text my dispatcher, and she tells me where to take it and what to annotate on the BOLs. I don't have anyone breathing down my neck, about how I run my day, what routes I take, whats taking me so long etc.

So tell me... what would be ever so appealing about Buster Brown Freight to me, especially with UPSF being over 50m from my home? I could start at the bottom of the city board, peddle freight with a 48' van in downtown Boston for $17.xx an hour. I could get a 0900 start time and peddle till 1900 to make a decent city paycheck, and then drive south through Boston again to get home. I could sit at home for days because there is no work for the guy on the bottom of the totem pole. If any of that was going to be appealing to me, I'd just go back to FedEx Freight and have a 9 mile commute instead of 53.

As far as hopping... I'm not a hopper by nature, up until I went into trucking I had held jobs with 3 companies since I entered the work force as a teenager not long after 9/11. That being said, if the milk turns out to be sour, I'm not the kind of Pu**y to drink it </rorybreaker>.

I do remember your quip about "stable giants v. flash in the pan" outfits. Still never found how its relevant as I still don't work for an unestablished carrier, this year being their 61st in business.

 

During the late spring I would zap under the tank lids with the propane gun for a quick blast before opening the lid. Never had to worry about running out of that as opposed to the noxious wasp spray.

 

Not only did it little the little devils, but it also added a tenth of a gallon to the customers ticket.

 

You’re right about not being able to afford that pay cut, that’s for certain. Well, I could do it for a while, but it would eventually wear down my cash reserves and I’d have to make drastic changes to my family’s lifestyle. At that point.

I’m plenty stable. At 34, The only debt I carry is my mortgage and two car payments. All credit card use is paid in full monthly.

Stability also comes in being able to anticipate the bumps and changes in life. Roll with the punches so to speak. I started using a finance management system called YNAB about 10 years ago that assigns a job to every dollar to your name, whether you spend it or not. Over the years using the built in financial concepts of the software, I’ve built a buffer of about 42 months that I can have zero income during that time and have all bills paid and that is also including paying additional principle payments to my mortgage every month.

I never once worried about a car being repossessed in 2008 or 2020.

On the contrary, you actually cannot afford to do things like the vehicle purchase, because the trade off on the purchase is an astronomical amount of risk against things you can’t control. Your UPS income funds high risk, if that makes any sense.

 

Weather is unseasonably warm here in Massghanistan.

Still lots of propane moving though. Just finished the week with 68 hours,