Considering Trucking, looking for advice

Don't even need to be a high school graduate either. 3rd grade level reading and writing is enough to pull down a 6 figure salary.

 

Yeah, trucking has saved my life completely. I went from being a total bum with no hope or direction, to having complete and total stability in my life. I went into hauling fuel to prove to myself, that I am capable of rising to the very top. The thing I want to stress to the OP, is try to get on with a good company first. Try to stay there 1 year or 2 years. If you can stay at one carrier for 2 years and keep your nose clean, you will be the most competitive applicant for any future position. Don't go into this thinking it will be a short -term career. That's not what you want. The profession of trucking is not what it used to be. We're not all methamphetamine-smoking parolees who go on a killing spree across 15 states. You want to know what it takes to make it in this industry... it's tenacity. Show up to work every single day and don't have accidents, don't cause any losses to the company, and you will find the work very rewarding. It still trips me out when I go to deliver a gas station, and I'm the ####ing celebrity of the gas station for 45 minutes as I'm delivering fuel. I'm sitting there waiting for the compartments to drain making $25 an hour. Just to watch the hoses drain. Don't go into this thinking you have to settle for anything. You want to go into this thinking it will be a long-term career. Unfortunately many people don't make it because they get hired on with some horrible megacarrier who chews you up and spits you out and defame you on your DAC report for no good reason. Alright, I'm rambling, you get what I'm saying though.

 

This is the interpretation to many people see when looking into trucking... They look and think its a 9-5, 5 days a week $65k a year easy deal... And then reality hits. Long hours...

 

Yeah it's long hours indeed. But in my opinion, those hours go by better than any other job I could do. I couldn't handle customer service for 13 hours a day. Driving a truck by myself and listening to there radio isn't so bad. I could take a load from Sacramento clear out to the Nevada desert in Fallon, drop it, and drive back over the sierras in one night and it would barely feel like work. More like a sight-seeing trip. And reno is beautiful in the middle of the night. I always blast my horn when I'm driving thru downtown at 2:30am-- right next to the hotels which are built right up on the freeway. Haha, yeah I'm that guy... sorry about it.

 

Roehl Transport can keep you in the Southwest and has a school in Phoenix. They pay students $500.00 weekly for classroom work, then training pay after graduation and on the road. Roehl does hair follicle drug test.

Freymiller is a good company for new cdl school graduates, but they do long runs, usually a thousand miles or so. New cdl grads go through the "Restore Program" which is described on the website.

 

Any opinions on Werner? I am starting with them this upcoming week. Hoping to do exactly as you pictured it. Get one or two years in. I almost went Navajo but that fell through unfortunately but I hear they are like the rest of the mega carriers. Plus I decided I'd rather do dry van for now. I've thought about starting locally at Sysco or QCD but QCD wanted two years experience. (great avatar by the way. Lemmy is god or one of them)

 

And if anyone can give me some advice on whether I should do OTR with Werner or do a dedicated/regional that would be a bonus. Thanks.

 

Well, I have heard that Werner is not too bad. But I have no OTR experience. Whereabouts in the USA are you? If you have a CDL and a beating pulse, you can get in with a local company hauling tomatoes or grapes seasonally, and work your way up. That's what we are doing out here in California right now. Tomatoes all day from Bakersfield to Stockton.

Sysco will work your tail off and you'll be sprinting up ramps with dollies loaded with 100+ pounds of food products... it's hard work. They won't always require 2 years of experience, that's just something they say to keep uninterested or unmotivated candidates from applying. You could apply anyways and see what they have to say.

UPS Freight is also good. Nice solid union contract and excellent benefits. Low pay to start out at, but it's hourly. Get 4 years in over there and you're set for life. Better yet, go UPS parcel and try to get on as a feeder driver. That's a career nobody can ever touch.

Just go into this thinking that all companies are going to find ways to screw you over. It's an industry where your boss doesn't know the law, or he thinks you don't know the law since you're just a truck driver. You're going to be stereotyped as an uneducated idiot, so you will be the one to prove them all wrong. Don't be afraid to assert yourself with these dispatchers. They could give a #### if you roll a truck and kill a school bus of innocent, white-skinned children on the way to church. You're going to find this dynamic where management will say one thing and do another. They'll act like they're on your side, but they're just playing the role of "good cop" in a good cop bad cop spiel. Dispatch of course, are the bad cops. So you're going to have to document everything very carefully. The name of the game is C.Y.A. and I'm not talking about a correctional facility for troubled youths.

Thanks for the compliment on the avatar. Lemmy Kilmister was a dude I barely even knew of. i was sitting there listening to BBC one night just about to load a truck at the rack when I heard the news. Started blasting his nasty riffs all night long for a few months there.

 

I think you should do a dedicated regional account. The familiarity will be of great benefit to you as a new driver. You'll have that entire stretch of road memorized after 30 days. Every turn, every traffic pattern, every scale house. You'll establish your own comfortable routine and do the same thing day in and day out. The predictability would be a great advantage just starting out. This will mitigate your chances of having an incident, getting a ticket for being on a no truck route, getting lost because the GPS took you to the wrong place...