TURNOVER

What about the "Hey, I am an antisocial loser who needs a place to live. What company will hire me?" Or the, "I've been thinking about trucking. I took a trip to grandmas house, and I really enjoy driving. Think I can be a trucker?"

CAN YOU GET THE JOB DONE?

Any half dead moron can drive a car for 300 miles in perfect weather. Can you do it in the rain? The rain makes it more stressful, doesn't it? And that extra stress greatly increases the fatigue. Wow...at the end of a 300 mile drive through heavy rain, you're so tired that you feel like a zombie. But what if instead of 300 miles, you have to do 600 miles in the rain for 4 days straight? Lethal dose of stress for the average commuter. So what if instead of a car that's relatively simple to drive, you have to drive an 18,with all of its blind spots, the heaviness, and dealing with traffic? Every single day.

You will find out that local route jobs can be worlds more stressful than driving OTR. Tighter schedule and lots more work. You're going to earn every dollar you get.

 

I'm still looking for the "Right Fit". There will unlikely be a "Perfect Fit". But life is too short to stay where you are miserable. Especially when you start this career at 50 like I did. Very few retire from their first company.

 

Very true !

These companies , take the one I drive for instance . They had a class of like 45 students ok not all make it , but that's why they don't care .and next week they will have 30 more all waiting to sign that contract , and in worse case scenario they probably get half of them to lease a truck after 2 months,

 

Wait , so someone really said they drove 300 miles to grandmas house and wasn't tired ... lol hahahahahahaha

That's probably the same a@@hole that swerves all over the road , cuts us off , rides right along side some guys truck .
I leteraly read that and started laughing .....

 

There's very little turnover in the ltl side of this industry for some strange reason or another.

 

truer words have never been spoken!

 

I'm trying to figure out how they draw up a business plan. It boggles the mind just thinking about it. It's almost like it's not about transportation but shuffling people around. If your housing people in motels and training continuously how could you possibly be making a profit. Better yet, if you upped the pay to keep quality drivers. Wouldn't your profits increase with dependable drivers.
It would be an interesting conversation, if you could sit down with someone in the headshed and figure out how they view their trucking company.

 

The first company I worked for invited me to come back immediately after I left, so I may end up "job hopping" in a circle (while "turnover" sounds more like a preventable accident to me). Although I've also left a few of their trucks in my rear view mirror (if you will) on my subsequent trips in faster trucks, and I was doing the speed limit (while they used to tail gate me and pass too closely in slower zones, as I don't speed, unless I'm avoiding a more dangerous condition, like a bunch of merging motorists with no depth perception). I'm planning on job hopping again soon, because team driving is not for me (and I think actual turnover is inevitable on my co-drivers' parts, so I'm getting out of there before winter comes around again). Call me fickle, I'm just trying to be a safe driver and not cut corners (literally or figuratively, it's funny how so many figurative sayings become literal when applied to trucking).

Anyway, I dislike looking for jobs as much as employers dislike hiring (I suppose—not that they seem all that rational in general), though I have my standards too and they are in writing, and everyone knows it, so they really should read my fine print before encouraging me to value time and money over their own lives as I drive circles around them. Yeah, this is my first year of professional driving (and I gathered about as much in a day), not to toot my own horn (because I don't pretend to own it), but I drive better than 90% of the experienced truckers who take pride in cutting corners and are probably rewarded more than me for doing so, always will be (more power to them, I'm just trying to keep my distance, and promises—conflicts of interest are difficult to be loyal to, and the only solution to them tends to involve leaving a company that builds them into their business model—there's a fine line between critical thinking and trial & error, and it's pretty much black & white, down the center of our road (supposedly we're going the same way, in circles for what it's worth, so it's kind of a farce by nature, until someone gets hurt)—I'll err on the side of critical thinking there and leave the trial & error elsewhere in my rear view mirror, where hindsight is always lacking—that would be in someone else's mirror that I don't pretend to own, even if they think that means they own everything in the truck, including me, we'll see).

It isn't merely the trucking companies either, as their customers have tried (and failed), time and again, to kick me off of their lots before I can do a pretrip inspection on their collective trailers. Well, well, and everyone screams of safety, yet only when it involves their particular insurance policy—I have a sledge hammer to maintain order in this courtyard, because the squeaky wheel needs to be dealt with appropriately, thank you very much (I will come and go as I please, in all of our best interests).

Well, I fancy the thought of making an honest living, as that would be a perfect job description in my humble (or not so humble) opinion—not that it necessarily involves trucking (pick your battle I guess, since I once jumped on a frog in government issued combat boots to dissect my potential for senseless killing, I don't care to drive a mile in those shoes, I'd rather job hop).

"Reason for leaving" is a question on some job apps, though I don't go into all of this—who wants to hear it? "You can't handle the truth", I might as well say to myself, as it carries too much weight for a truck driver to uphold (we wouldn't need trucks for that matter, to go nowhere faster, maybe it's good practice to be philosophical about it, until time machines take us back to our paved over roots—reason for leaving, I was making like a tree, and keeping us [poor slobs] breathing, duh, it's both the least and most I can do in this profession). On a human level, most of us going down this path of progress don't seem to comprehend that regulations governing truck driving exist because not following them kills people, repeatedly, and making truck driver's jobs expendable, perhaps in favor of statistically fewer who get away with getting the job done (in a game of russian roulette) keeps this mentality going, while mostly nobody is there to enforce the rules of the road, loyalty to the money tree looks better on paper. Personally, if I anyone will let me do my job, money won't be my incentive to stay there, but then following that line of thinking would bring us to a higher purpose, if a happy medium is beyond comprehension, otherwise (you tell me, I didn't make up the rules).

 

I believe Diner Fights are 30 points against your CSA nowadays and 10 extra if you didn't use the right Macro to log it... But I would have to check on that.

 

Plus how many people want to work 70 hours a week? Plus you have to be at your place of employment 24 hours a day/7 days a week.

Not many people want to be at their place of employment 24 hours a day and get only 4 days off a month and 35k for doing so.

Life is short, a lot of people don't want to live that kind of life.