My Journey as a Truck Driver

Thanks. I live right in the middle of Illinois, about 2.5 hours from Chicago, St. Louis, & Indianapolis, so I feel like if I do want to get home occasionally, I probably could, but my intention is to not have housing costs . . . we'll see.

 

My original plan was to buy my own truck and self-broker my loads. I have some good friends in CH Robinson and a couple of other brokerage firms that encouraged me to do so, but I felt like I needed to cut my teeth somewhere first. CHR was going to give me a dedicated 3300 mile weekly route paying $1.40 mile, but I couldn't make the economics of that make sense.

I'm hopeful to make more than $32,000 year . . . at $.31/mile, that's about 2000 miles/week. That seems to be a low average even for guys that get home every weekend. Since I can go anywhere at anytime, I hoping to be 2700 plus/week average . . . is that being naive?

 

Thanks TB John, I anticipate having minimum standards; showering at least 3 x's weekly, I'm bringing my golf clubs, installing a bike rack, working out 30 minutes each day, etc. I'm also finishing my college degree online, and have a commitment of going to church at least half the time on Sundays. I understand all of that will take discipline, but hopefully doing so will also give me some life balance.

 

Thanks Meltom! Sound advice!

 

So I didn't do a very good job of making friends today. A "recruiter" from Star Transportation came to my CDL class today. The term "recruiter" is a misnomer, most I've met clearly look at prospective truck drivers as being completely below their station in life. . . and most of them are slicker than used car salesman.

This one from Star was particularly slimey. Lots of double-speak and false innuendo. I was quickly getting fed up with him talking down to us as if we were either children, or idiots. One of my classmates asked about trainers and sleeper situations. When we were told that they were only 1 bunk to a training sleeper, he inquired if we were getting trained, or if we were essentially being run as a team. Not only am I not excited about sharing a bed/sheets, etc with another random stranger, but clearly we were not going to get trained if there was only 1 bunk.

When I brought that up, the "recruiter" insisted at first that one bunk wasn't a problem. I pointed out that that meant someone was sleeping in a chair, or we're running teams; 10 hours for me in berth, 10 hours for trainer in berth = 4 hours of co-driving time. If trainer is in cab while I'm driving, that means we're both on same duty/drive time, meaning we're both sleeping at the same time. I wonder who's going to get the bunk, and who's going to end up in the chair?? or . . . we're running as a team, which means I'm not getting much training.

At that point the "recruiter" then tried to say that Star would put us up in a hotel each night . . . uhhh, yeah. At that point I told him that its useless for him to be there if he wasn't going to give us straight answers. He said he didn't need to stand there and be disrespected like that. I told him I didn't want to sit there listening to a line of crap. To which he lost it, started yelling about I had to respect him, and demanded the CDL instructor to "set us straight". I calmly told him, "listen pal, the CDL instructor works for me, I paid him $3500 for 4 weeks of instruction . . . direct your conversation to me".

He gets in my face yelling that I can't call him a liar, and I need to respect him. I'm still fairly calm, but I'm not sure if he's under control or not, so I instruct him to back up. He does so, and packs his stuff and storms out.

He called the CDL instructor an hour later apologizing, he's been under pressure and concerned about losing his job. . . . Huh, interesting.

 

I wonder how long it'll take trucking companies to understand that the driver caliber is changing. Sure, I know there's still a lot of bad drivers, idiot drivers. But with CSA, and DOT regs, and health restrictions, and the retirement of the "old school" drivers, things are changing. Here's an interesting article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...-gain-in-u-s-truck-cargo-freight-markets.html

I hope to be a part of the "new generation" of truckers. Trucking is an honorable profession, always has been. But lets be honest, mainstream society views truckers as being low class. Hell, most warehouseman look down on truckers. Some of that perception is valid, if unfair, we can understand where its coming from. But again, things are changing. Those that don't treat the profession honorably need to be "driven" out (pun intended).