What did you do before trucking?

Cargo Agent for UPS and FedEx Express, Armed Security, Help Desk (read: IT guy that got blamed for everything), and a Private Investigator (which paid less than the Cargo Agent positions).

 

Cell center 2 years - Inbound only (Holy crap I hate the telephone now because of this job.)
IT System Admit - 4 years (Glad I'm still paying off my debt from going to college for this this! -.-)

 

Electronics tech, fixed long range radar in the Canadian military. The old pine tree line. Stuff was built in the late fifties early sixties. Had a lot of electron tubes in it.
Our data was fed to Cheyenne Mountain. The Defcon codes were supposed to be secret. Then the movie "War Games" came out and everyone knew about it.

 

20 years of hard labor making clay pipe and flues.

The recession of 2008 really hurt the place and it has never fully recovered, nor will it ever.
I was one of the loudest workers there and one of the hardest workers too,
My last day there was tough, still friends with a lot of the co workers??.

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I was in the Mafia, then the witness protection program set me up driving a truck. Keep that between us though, if you will.

 

There's a machine shop (lathe, milling, etc) the next town over....He has more work than he can handle, and he's pulling in a good coin, a real good coin....So much that there's quite a lead time to get something made by him....Seems there's quite a bit of work for a good machinist that is capable of reproducing parts that are no longer available for older stuff like cars, trucks, tractors & other equipment....Parts that are needed for a resto and $$$ is no object.....Start up cost is likely a killer though, but something to chew on.....

 

A wide array of skills for sure. I can relate to the IT stuff, people only recognize them when stuff is not working, and a liability of costs when it is running smooth.

 

Went to college, partied, and worked production in the summers.

I've worked the lines at Honda, Toyota, and Cummins. I still miss production sometimes, if I ever need a break from driving I'll be back on the line.

If autonomous trucks ever really hit the industry full on, I guess I'll sack up and grind out the last bit of my business degree and ironically still not be able to find work

 

My boss wanted me to explain what the point of keeping me around was because I rarely had things go down. My responce was "Thats the exact reason you pay me. So things don't brake." He wanted me to drop to half time. And thats when I started to realize that maybe I didn't want to be in IT any longer.

 

I was thrown to the wolves for Desk. I'm lucky that the people in the building had a since of humor including the boss because I killed 3 computers (when I say killed, I mean KILLED!) within my first month of working there. But eventually I learned how to do all the fixes and whatnot. Learned enough to be a Syst Admin but never officially held that title.