I need some advice.

I reached the same level of burnout with a comfortable & easy trucking job. For almost 20 years I was home every night, drove a route with 1 stop, got regular & acceptable pay from a great realiable company with great benefits and predictable management.

Trucking was still stressful because the spoiled children that drive 4-wheelers will attempt sucide by truck many times per day. Shippers/receivers take zero responsibility for doing their job on time.

If you go OTR it fixes some things, like rushing to get home every rush hour Friday, for example. But it also creates problems like not getting a shower or having to share a public restroom with animals, or living on a diet of fast food, fighting to find a parking spot/getting stuck between loud reefer trailers where one or both of those drivers dumps a gallon of P on the ground beside your driver side door, etc.

There is a huge variaton of conditions in trucking depending on the job type, trailer type, location, customers, weather, traffic, dispatcher, etc. You can filter out some of the negatives by an comprehensive search/research on any job before you take it. But there are many aspects of the job you will only learn after you start doing it. For example, almost every new driver quits the industry before they complete 1byear of work. Almost every new driver, the ones thst don't quit the industry, will leave their first employer as soon as they get the 1 year experience because they learned some things they never knew would be important.

From my 18 year stay at a good company, before I started HazMat tanker, and then dry van in the Pacific Northwest, and now another job search, I learned that changing your attitude/expectations is both the easiest solution and the most difficult obstacle. I switched the type of freight, switched the area of the country I drove, and switched from home daily to OTR home weekends and OTR with no days off for 14 months. They each have advantages and disadvantages. They way you think about both is usually as important than what the advantages/disadvantages are. But changing your "operating system" while you continue is pretty difficult.

If you enter trucking be prepared to be viewed as a subhuman by most of society. Your partner may even change their opinion of you. I always tried to address this by never looking & acting like what most people think a truck driver is. But I am specially sensitive to that topic. Others may not think it too important. You can be whoever you want to be and be successful in trucking.

Starting over, I would put more effort into changing my mind wherever I am than trying to fix my mind by moving to different conditions/jobs. I do like the podcasts, and not being shoulder to shoulder with the boss in trucking, but your boss is able to monitor you 24/7, including watching you on video as you drive if he wants to.

If you want to maximize your outcome you will need to do lots & lots of research, ignore company web pages & recuiters. They range from outdated to highly optimistic to dishonest. Your most reliable info comes from drivers currently working at the company, doing the job you will be doing, at the location you will be doing it. Avoid at all cost any work that sends you to dollar store accounts, regardless of the name of the store chain. It's a career suicide mission where companies send new drivers with no backing skills to stores with the most difficult backing situations and highest likelihood of wrecks, etc.

 

I’d suggest that you do NOT quit your current job until
You have another one lined up and the offer in writing .

If you have some vacation time , use some to lower the stress

or see if you can use one day a week or something .

if you have kids at home , trucking will
Be a terrible job for you.

unless you and they enjoy never seeing each other for weeks at a time .

and when the trucking companies mention average weekly earnings , be sure to ask
How many hours you have to work to earn that.

they will
Expect you to work 70-80 hours a week .

so be sure to calculate that into the hourly wage
You will find that you can earn
The same working at the local
Hardware store , if you worked there 75 hours a week .

also ask the recruiter how much turnover they have .
Most companies brag if their turnover is under 100%
This means that if a trucking company has
75 drivers , then 75 or more will quit every year. Usually about 10 or 15 drivers will be long term over five years , and then the company will have to hire 100 or more drivers to keep the remaining 60 positions filled .
This is because most companies treat their drivers worse than garbage , and pay them poorly when you consider how many hours you’re working every week .


imagine the crisis on the news if the annual turnover at the local elementary school or hospital staff was over 100%

 

The local no parking lot for your truck and so much freight to unload by hand with many stops per day.

 

Dollar Store accounts; some companies try to get new drivers on these because experienced drivers know better. Those accounts are an easy way to derail a trucking career. Think about backing a 53' trailer with sleeper truck through a Dollar Store parking lot full of cars and no dock at the store. Also, have to back in off of a busy street.

 

Satellite views of customer property is a tremendous benefit, but those pics may not be recent. The pic you may see may not show the fence recently installed. You may have the wrong address. It's very common to receive the address where the receptionist has her desk, not the truck entrance. You may be given the wrong or old name of the shipper/receiver. Both GPS & satellite solve many problems but also generate other less obvious problems. Use the tools you have but use them wisely. Google is not going to pay the fine you get. The dispatcher or broker is not going to pay a fine if their bad info puts you in a jam. Your primary job is protecting your clean record. Once that is accomplished you can and move freight.

By "dollar store account" I mean stores like The Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Five & Under, etc. I mean any store that operates as a dollar store, not just stores called Dollar Store. The dollar store TYPE of store, whatever their name may be, are often very small, stand alone building, in very rural (tiny road and driveway) or in ultra-dense urban locations with only enough room for a few employee & customer cars. They have absolute minimum parking lot area. They will have no room for a 70 foot truck & trailer to maneuver and what room they do have will be used for cars, shopping cart corrals, displays, dumpsters, etc. All of those are hazards and backing into them is an incident, if not accident, waiting to happen. As a newbie your CDL school will provide just enough backing practice to pass a test for the license and not one bit more. They provide zero real world backing practice. Your trainer at whatever company you first work for often avoids backing or teaching you to back up. Backing is the most important skill in the industry and you will have to insist you get that training. I recommend you back into a marked parking spot using a 45 or 90 degree backing technique every time you stop for any purpose, including just to fuel, use restrooms, eat food, etc. Avoid pull-thru and the commonly used 3000 yard straight back technique that seem like a shortcut or the safe alternative. All those do is set you up to be terrible at backing for years to come or have another type of backing accident because you are backing from an unexpected direction with limited visibility. You wouldn't hire a surgeon that cannot cut or a plumber that will not get his hands wet. LEARN TO BACK.

Dollar type stores & no skill backing is a recipe for getting fired quickly. Being a new driver with a termination or a few incidents/accidents on your record is a very difficult position for getting any decent job for the next few years. Working for companies that hire drivers with black marks is volunteering to work under bad to terrible conditions.

 

You can make good money with YRC/Yellow and still be home every day.
If you want a taste of running the roads, then the others I listed will do for that.

 

Dollar type stores are among the most common customers numerous trucking companies have and push on new drivers. Any customer of whatever type with no room for a truck to maneuver or back are just as difficult for new AND experienced drivers. "Dollar Store" is a short hand way of referencing no room, cluttered parking lot, hostile employee/customers etc.

Many times trucking companies pay a couple of cents per mile CPM more than OTR and may even have a somewhat more regular schedule fir the same few locations. The recruiter will make the new driver think he just accidentally walked into a much better opportunity for better work. Those accounts are chronically in need of drivers because experienced drivers won't touch them and the new drivers are gettingbfired as fast, or faster, than they can be hired.

 

You are in demand. You should not feel like you need to compromise on your requirements to find a job. The more perfectly the job fits what you need the better the outcome. There his enormous variation between trucking companies. There is no good reason to take a job at one of the big megafleet companies, the ones like CR England, that advertise everywhere for anyone and everyone that wantsca job.

I'd recommend you avoid any reefer outfit and avoid any dollar type store until you have a year of experience. Dry van is the type of trucking that requires the least from the driver. A lot more customers with dry van, sometimes called van, freight have more reasonable appointment times and seldom use lumpers. Dry van customers usually have much shorter delays than reefer getting loaded/unloaded. The vans don't have some of the issues reefer trailers have. Vans are the best trailers for learning to back, IMO.