Does anyone like their job?

Here's my point of view. It's not about you. It's about your family. I don't know about you but I have 3 kids to raise and put through university. Can't think of many things more selfish than quitting a job like you have to go trucking. You have may have sentenced your kids to a life of truck driving because they couldn't go to school. Unless you never going to have kids then I say do what you want.

 

whoa....whoa there..... my wife and I put 2 sons through college with me driving a truck for a living while she was a stay at home Mom...she even went back to school and up graded her nursing degree while I was driving a truck for a living.... helped one of them through med school too.....while I agree that the OP may want to look before he leaps....his decision to start driving doesn't sentence his kids to a life of servitude......maybe you have a low wage trucking job rank..I don't know...but some of us did OK driving.

 

It's not a job, it's a lifestyle. I love what I do. You won't get rich or get pats on the back but it's a prideful job to me. We keep America running.

 

dude stay a pharmacist. i worked in the pharmacy industry. its better. trust me. but i was a tech not a pharmacist. had i been a pharmacist id be still there

 

ya ia gree trucking is good money. just got to find your niche.

 

A pharmacist? WTF dude? Pharmacists make 100,000 a year easy, are home every night, get at least two days off for each week worked - truck drivers usually get one day off for each week worked. I say you are making a wrong decision.

 

I loe driving, having the responsibility & control over heavy equipment, & knowing that "we" are part of a small minority of professionals. Open road...great.

What I hate; inconsiderate, lying upper management types, so wrapped up in their ego, & "safety" B.S. they couldn't find their ### with both hands. Condiscending "Driver Managers" MANAGERS..? really? I find little in their job duties qualifying them as ANY sort of manager.

Yeah, I know..bitter. Tuff to work for someone having been an owner of 2 still successful businesses. Should lost the ex, & kept the business I 'spose.

 

If you hate being a pharmacist and want to try trucking then go for it. As far as the trucking industry goes it has subdivisions in it and rarely does anyone work doing flatbed and intermodal, and ltl, and tanker, OTR, and Regional, and Local, etc. You can have 10 drivers with 20 years experience driving truck and they could have vastly different experiences from each other. So the whole more time off less time off arguments people are posting in here aren't accurate about you only being home 5 days a month. That is OTR driving. I drive local and I'm home every night and off two days a week and I'm going to make between 55-60k my second year working for my company doing intermodal and I'm still at the bottom of there pay scale. My father works for an LTL company and makes about 75k a year. You will most likely make less driving truck than being a pharmacist but I tried working at my father's company and quite frankly I would've rather been deployed to Iraq again getting mortar attacked daily. The extra 10 to 15k a year was just not worth being miserable at that place. So I get where you are coming from. Making over 70k a year driving truck is not impossible. It really just depends on who you work for, how long you have been driving, your record, and if you actually want to work for places paying that. The only advice I'd give you before you start a trucking career is to look at the trucking industry as a whole and see what you think you'd like to do. Find out if you'd rather do flatbed, Tanker, be a city driver, etc before you start.

 

I was a web developer for 14 years and took my time to find the right trucking company for me and overall I like it. You will also appreciate it more since you already worked the high paying job and realize that the pay isn't everything. After stressing all day and night over complex calculations, going from that to a trucking job where all you have to do is hold the steering wheel feels like a vacation. Truckers who have been driving for their whole adult life will bash trucking since they never had a high paying office job, but you and I know that is it not that great. I was starting to get a little stressed due to the horrible weather but then my company let me go home for seven days and that re-energized me and I feel like a new driver again. I think you will love it especially if you want to do it. Make it happen man!

 

Well here's my two milligrams worth: First off, you have to be comfortable in your own skin. If you aren't happy doing what you're doing, take an honest look at the guy in the mirror and ask him why he isn't happy. You have problems? We all do. Are you certain you aren't just bored? Take a LOA, get a bicycle and ride it from Sydney to Perth. You'll come back five months later feeling refreshed and fit, you'll have a taste for VB, flies will no longer bother you, and you will be able to determine the species of three different marsupial road kills by their odor before you see them. Hint: when you hear a road train coming, get off the road. (but I digress).

Living in Alaska for nearly 40 years, I have seen it time and time again - blokes running away from their troubles down south and doing a reset by moving to the last frontier to find a new life. It SELDOM works the way they imagined it would. It seldom solves anything and often makes things worse. Oddly enough, their problems, if any, FOLLOW them. (Which is precisely what happened to me, ahem!).

Be critical with yourself and ask if your dislike of being a pharmacist is really the issue. It's a pretty respectable career, according to my Second Favorite Uncle, who has been banging away at pushing pills for a half century. The question is; are you going to bring that same dislike of your environment to trucking? Are you going to hate that a year or two down the road? That's something you have to consider very carefully. Read about people's experiences here; this is a great resource for information. You can probably disregard a good fifth of what you hear, negative or positive and get a pretty good idea about what you might be getting yourself into. This is true of most new adventures, eh? Companies you work for are going to use you to make them money; their main concern, and quite a few of them will not be concerned with your comfort or well-being. You will most likely be taking a significant pay cut. Are you going to be able to tolerate that? Are you going to be able to be away from home for extended periods? It can get pretty old, if you aren't wired that way. In some cases, it will "suck" as we say here in the used dog food processing industry.

I'm not saying that this is your situation; please take this as a humble, considerate and respectful attempt at finding the truth and maybe some laughs. I'm a 57 year old rookie who isn't interested in this because I didn't like what I was doing before, quite the opposite; it was over, I finished it, and it was time to move on. I've always enjoyed the idea of being competent at things. I always try to have fun, and I enjoy the challenge of becoming outstanding at something; that's FUN. I heard somewhere that you should find a hobby that you're real interested in and monetize it. In other words, find a job that makes you grin, that you can't wait to do, they have to kick you out at the end of the day, and go do that. Simplistic, true, and this isn't that, but if you can figure it out, you have "worked" your last day. The rest of your career will be terrific. Maybe trucking will be that for you. You've found it if you still wake up giggling after a year at it. Either that, or you should have your doctor adjust your dose.

And that's about all the psych-babble I can stomach. Sorry if I've gone over the top. I think trucking is an honorable profession, requiring a great deal of skill, education, hard work and experience to do well. That's how I'm looking at it; eyes wide open, take it as it is, do your best.

Good luck.