67 to old to start driving again?

We have a driver who's 81 at our company. He'll work circles around guys half his age.

 

We have a guy that’s 79, people 50 years younger than him have a hard time keeping up with him.

 

About 10 minutes give or take. I have a fast word speed.

It would be much easier if reduced in some way. Im working on that always have been like this short post here.

I hate writing on paper however. I'll do anything not to.

 

I’m working with man who’s 72 now in Oakdale, CA. Still running hard takes a lot of naps during down time haha

 

Both companies I worked for had a lot of gray haired men
Retired military men divorcees living in trucks
Etc etc
My brother in law is 70 and has a 2 year medical card.
I'm always surprised how many drivers have had vascular and heart surgery and still get more frequent medical cards
Health care is too expensive so many keep trucking as many doctors don't wanna deal with Medicare or even good insurance
I enjoy x1 heavies comments

 

The ones walking with heart issues are not really interested in driving. Just the behavior of drivign a big rig in a bad company or grouch etc is a pressure on their hearts. Any good Doctor with a scope can pickup issues. I know they do on me with that mitral valve (known as insufficency or aka heart murmur) when it's absent then I pass the DOT physical. But it's there. It does not manifest itself to be a problem until a situation comes up that cranks the adrenaline in the body and that seriously causes my blood saturation to fall really bad because the heart cannot get fresh blood from lungs. And there I drop. HEart doctor wants to put a stent in one area, replace the main valve in another and go after that mitral with a new one.

Thats about 120K of work and a year recovering.

I may do it this summer or fall. I hae watched family have that done to them and come out good. So... who knows.

 

I'm not saying an older person can't do certain aspects the job, clearly, an older person may have trouble climbing around a flatbed, or finger printing a load of strawberries, heck, a child or self driving truck can run a truck down the interstate, it's just, the whole time I was trucking, I couldn't WAIT to retire, at 12:01am on my 62nd birthday, I applied for Social Security. What bothers me, for whatever reason, the older drivers CAN'T stop, you can't tell me they love it that much, compared to fishing. I've heard it many times, "just one more year, just one more year", finally retire and die in 6 months. Some retirement.

 

We have mostly older drivers at our place. We have several in their sixties and a couple in their seventies. Our youngest driver is in his forties and the other guys call him "the kid".
The drivers that have retired from here are mostly alive and well and enjoying their retirement. Most of them hunt and fish and hobby-farm or raise livestock. In other words, they stay busy doing things they enjoy. Some of them come back and work part time when we get busy or drive pilot car for us.
We're losing four drivers to retirement this summer and probably a couple more next year. They'll be hard to replace. We've given some thought to scaling down our operations and not replacing them at all. The three of us that run this place aren't young anymore either.
Do the older guys move as fast and get around as well as they used to? No. But they know how to work and how to make every move count. Watching them load and tie down OS is a lesson in efficiency. They do a good job without tearing anything up.
Our tanker drivers are the same way. They never look like they're doing much but they get a lot of work done in a very short time. They get it done right, too.
That being said, the older drivers have spent a lifetime learning to be good at what they do. An older person just starting out doing the kind of work we do probably wouldn't be as good at it.
But if an older driver wants to work and can physically do the work involved I think they make a better employee than some young kid with more right foot and bad attitude than brains.