Should I drive for this lease op?

I did end up getting a truck to go solo. I'm very happy with it, and I'm not going to call the lease op. The man at the terminal that issues trucks (I'm unsure of his title) said he was impressed with my attitude, and he gave me a Cascadia with 97k miles on it, manufactured 04/2013! It is very clean, and everything looks brand new. It has a 9-speed and a Detroit engine. I took a short load and got home to spend some time with my family.

He did seem desperate, or at least burned out on training students. He had asked at least two other drivers. He was offering the guy with whom I'd shared my hotel room the previous night a bit more, but he had >10 years experience and hadn't driven for about 4 years, so that made sense.

Yeah, unless he's wanting to hang around for my hometime, the logistics would be terrible.

He did keep trying to compare his offer's gross pay to my presumed net pay, and he was lowballing what my potential earnings would be, even at $.25/mi.

Thanks for the offer, but I think I'm going to enjoy this sweet truck for awhile.

I had thought about that, and it comes out to about a wash. I think some people that complain about low pay here might be forgetting the deductions they have for school, the lock kit, insurance, and whatever else. Sure it's still not great compared to what most drivers get, but it's a fair wage for starting out.

I am somewhat intelligent with some things (I missed one question on the math portion of my SAT, but I'm not sure that's a good measure), but not so much on common sense, which means I look like a fool when asking some questions (I had to ask the shop how to open the side box on this new truck). I'm a 4x college dropout, and I worked two different IT jobs for a few years, but I've always had a dream that I would be a truck driver. I can't believe I actually did it, to tell the truth, and the reality of that gives me a giant smile when I wake up in the sleeper, especially now that I'm solo. I was getting tired of doing the office work and wanted to do something different. This is certainly different.

We don't have APUs, but I've talked to other company drivers, and as long as we turn off the truck when we're not in it or when it is comfortable with vents, the managers don't do anything except send a message every once in awhile. I think that probably also depends on performance.

A contract is a good idea; I'll keep that in mind if I ever decide to do this.

He didn't go into detail on how he'd track pay, but that would have been a good question to ask. I think he did mean just a split.