Thinking about school, but..

This. No joke. And to get 50k you'll put in more hours than you currently work. It's a grind with little upside at the moment.

 

CEI is based in MO, they offer a CDL apprenticeship. Best of luck to you!
Certified Express, Inc. - Logistics Company in Neosho, Missouri

 

I would too. Using your own bathroom, sleeping in your own bed, having time off to socialize or do errands is better for most people than living like a stray dog.

 

The frustration from traffic and 4-wheelers casually trying to commit suicide by truck driver several times per day,every day, is quite shocking to many newbies. The standard way 4-wheelers exit is to pass every truck between them and the exit and swerve across all lanes of traffic to exit. If this job was like the long car trip everyone had as a kid, there would be 100 million truck drivers. Driving is the easy part and is about 10% of this job. The frustration, being accused by both shipper and receivers as the cause of the delay that the shipper/receiver caused and lied about is frustrating. Having the shipper tell you 7 times "relax, go have some coffee, we're almost finished while being 5 hours late is hard to take eventually. If your dream job is to man a toll booth on a closed road, trucking is for you. If you lose your mind not talking to SOMEONE everyday, it probably isn't for you. Everyone outside the truck seems to be rejects from the Dept of Motor Vehicles employee recruiting department. They don't care about their job, your schedule or if the world burns down because of their incompetence. "they can't fire me, I'm the only one that applied for this job." Then the daily battle to find a parking spot and the adventure of seeing if all of your truck is intact after you slept in a noisy truck stop full of people that can't back a truck without hitting something. It's an adventure.

 

My dad and brother helped me get into the industry and I followed the path they followed so I didn't wander off into dead-ends that got lots of my classmates from CDL school. I had a job waiting for me the Monday after CDL school. I feel an obligation to help the next guy also follow the path to a job and not get stuck in a brier patch of company web sites and recruiters who will say anything to get a butt in a seat. I know how much their advice helped me from making big mistakes and I try to pay it forward. This industry is NOTHING like what most newbies and outsiders think it will be. This industry gives very little of the practical day-to-day training that is very common in other less risky industries. For example most retail and fast-food jobs have too much oversight and too much training just to do something relatively simple. In trucking you get some addresses and phone numbers and you'll figure out the other stuff later, or else. "you should have done the thing we never told you about, it's used to be on page 304 of the orientation PowerPoint". Even fueling the truck is different from how you do it for your car. You need to already have an adult supervision operating system inside or it's difficult to succeed. "I'll just do what they tell me, isn't enough." The people that can tell you what to do have a 8-4 and weekends off schedule and you need answers at 2am in a different time-zone.

My advice is like the Chamber of Commerce, white bread, middle-school video of how the world works type of advice. If I can't do it like a gentleman in a top hat I don't want to do it at all. There are MANY others who have done it different;y from me and done better than I have done. But I never had to get creative with some things and hope nobody finds other things nearly as much. I wanted to be the best boy scout. That limits some options and it also preempts having to fix certain problems later. My way isn't the only way. It was the only way for me.