new driver turnover rate

For someone to last in trucking you must be easy to get along with. If you have the attitude that everyone is out to get you and your a jerk, your life on the road will be hell. In this career you can kill yourself by letting everything get to you. Expect life to be hard and enjoy the good times when they happen. Don't expect them because they will be far and few between.

I left a furniture factory job in 1994 to drive a truck. My best days @ Drexel Heritage was not as good as some of my bad days driving. You have to love this job if you don't you will not last. It will consume you and you have to accept that. I have seen people say I'm just going to do this to make some money then get out. They either leave a few months later because it's to hard or they retire because it gets in their blood.

 

While it is true that the lack of not being home each night can drive people out of this business, companies need to shoulder some of the blame. I have been at this long enough and done many different types of trucking, but for a company to keep a driver out longer than 10 days is asinine. I will concede that concert tours and the like are an exception, few if any newbie drivers do that kind of work. Most fleets, especially the big carriers, really have no excuse for keeping people out for weeks at a time, unless the driver chooses it. It shows a lack of proper freight planning at the expense of the driver. Like most, it took me a little while to figure this out, but there is really no logistically sound reason to keep drivers away from home as long as some carriers do it. I don't buy any arguments that new drivers have to "pay their dues". That is just another excuse made by carriers to justify their poor management style. As for income, I am by the house once or twice a week, home during the weekend (to be honest, not the whole weekend every time), and I make and keep more income than I ever did running for weeks at a time.

If companies choose to stick with these archaic ways of running drivers, their complaints of driver shortages and such just fall on deaf ears. Here is the worlds smallest phonograph playing "My Heart Feels For You".

 

i don't mind being run hard , I just would like to uild up a enst egg in the next thirty years , and cowboying don't make money no more , so trucking it is , those trucks can't be tougher than any green broke colt .....

 

Sometimes you can rope and lope but other times you will feed and lead Dino Bob.

 

well at least I won't wake up in the same county more than once a week ....

 

Bob the thing you'll like the most is no Manure to pickup. Just lot lizards. They don't smell quite as bad, but they look way worse.

 

I heard about those , just tell them to sta the heck away best I figure . as far as the no manure part , that would be a plus .....

 

Add in poor training from top to bottom, for most and to many of us new drivers are to #### proud to ask for help because the old hands may think we are nebies, guess what guys they already know we are newbies.