The wife and I, looking for the right company.

My wife is currently training with Central in Fontana. Once she is done the original plan was for me to hire on with them and us drive team for Central. Problem is it doesn't look like Central is going to hire me because I have not been in a truck for a year. I'm going to be ready to go in about 3 more months and I'm still going to try to get on with Central. Failing that, What company would hire a team where one person has 7 years experience but has not driven in about 14 months and the other has only 3 months experience?

I have a good driving record, just one speeding ticket. Reason I stopped driving was do to health problems caused by being overweight. I've put in the hard work to get my weight down, total lost since my heaviest is now 100+ lbs which has already made the health problems go away but I still have about 80 more lbs to go. During my time away from driving I went to college for a year and have a 3.48 GPA to show for it. The more I attended school though the more I realized I would rather just drive a truck. I do have sleep apnea and have had it since I was a skinny teenager.

The wife was a little resistant to the idea of becoming a truck driver at first. She had just obtained her B.A. in Business Administration a year ago. Problem is right now 50% of college grads that don't have experience are not employed in a job that requires them to have a degree. The only work she found in the last year was for a tutoring company that turned out to be about as upstanding as CR. England. Finally after a year of unfruitful job hunting she asked me to make a list of trucking companies to apply to. I made her a list from the employment mags you can pick up at truck stops and ranked them from tier one(apply to first) to tier four(last resort). One company that I failed to put on the list was Central because they didn't have an ad in any of the mags I grabbed. I did however have my wife read a thread on this forum and when she did she did so on her computer not mine. Since she's not a member she saw an ad for Central and asked me about it. I told her yeah they seemed to be better then most training companies so go ahead and apply to them.

My wife filled out the applications to Prime and Central on the first day then tried to call them the next day as the applications process directs a person to do. She got a busy signal from Prime but got through to Central and after the usual squaring away was off to Central by the end of the week. After her first time getting to actually move the truck she called me all excited that night and told me she was hooked. So far she's passed her written and skills test and just has the drive test left to do tomorrow.

 

Wife pass her drive test today.

 

If things don't work out at Central they(schneider) seem to be at the top of our list so far.

 

I've run e-logs before and like them. No more arguing with the DM over HOS. Drove a 62mph truck for 5 years at Knight, it's kind of peaceful. Set the cruise at 60 and let all the super truckers rush by you then see them at the same fuel island at the end of the day. Yes we have a long term plan but for us it's not all about the money. It's about making a living and being able to be together at the same time.

 

I had USX in the back of my mind because of there love for teams. I'll keep them in consideration.