I Made $18k My First Year

Thanks everyone for the information. It's a lot to consider. I'll explain the $18k. First of all you have to pay tuition costs out of your check. But also I believe I started at $0.30 per mile. Another reason is the truck is governed to 63MPH and I spend a lot of time in the mountains hauling heavy trailers through winding rural streets where the speed limit is often 55. In the beginning I had a nice route from Texas to California and back. But this was when I was fresh out of CDL school. And I didn't even have my own GPS yet I was 100% reliant on the QualComm. Long story short the QC sent me around in circles and tried to get me to drive off of the side of hills and straight into rivers. It would say turn right, and I'd look to the right and there would just be a giant body of water instead of a road. So probably the first two or three months I was only running half as many miles as I could have because I kept having problems getting lost.

One example of me getting lost was there was a consignee UNDERNEATH a bridge in California in the middle of a industrial mecca. And so the QC didn't like that! So after wasting like 8 hours driving around the most hectic city traffic (I'm from rural Mississippi) I just parked and started walking around and asking people. But even the locals didn't know where the street was because it was tucked underneathe a bridge.I eventually found it but the real problem that I had was that the consignee had the name of a different company plastered on their fence so I only actually found them because I just started driving into every single lot that had trailers in it. So it took me 3 days to do something that I should have finished in a couple of hours. That happened often when I was using the QC. So yeah I wasn't running at max capacity because I was newb okay. I still am a newb but I plan my trips better than I used to.

Besides maintainence there was also a general fear that I had. I mean I would go to a drop and hook and see guys zoom in and out in about 5 minutes definitely skipping their pretrips. While I would take an hour to get in and out becaues I was doing everything so slowly. So I'm SURE that had soemthing to do with me not getting as many miles as I could have. I'm not that slow anymore. But I used to be.
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But yeah bottom line PAM is a company that can help people who are in desperate situations. So I'm not demonizing them. PAM hired me when nobody else would and gave me a chance. So I knew I wouldn't get paid that much going in to it. Thanks to PAM I currently have recruiters blowing up my cell phone and my email and I've never felt so wanted in my whole life. So that's partially thanks to PAM I'm not hating on them.

And again thanks for all the advice.