Quote:
Originally Posted by GMAN
If you want to work 40 hours per week and make $300 then by all means, go to McDonald's...
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You're grossly over-estimating what you can make at McDonald's, Walmart, and the like my friend. At least around here. For one thing, what makes you think you're going to come anywhere close to getting 40 hours?
I can offer the perspective of someone who pretty much got burnt out on trucking, hung it up, and tried everything at my disposal to find another way to earn a living. The unpaid time was definitely part of my thinking at that point in my life. I was driving for an O/O who had a truck leased on with Nationwide Express out of Shelbyville, TN. They were a
fantastic bunch of folks to work for, but they got an F in the maintenance department. Because I actually gave some kind of a crap about what kind of equipment I would pull, I was donating 20+ hours a week sitting in this shop in the middle of nowhere, waiting on some fat, slow moron to hurry up and fix the laundry list of problems. I tried not giving a crap once, and I got cited for three bad wheel seals, four bad sets of brake shoes, a bad brake valve, a leaking airline, and a broken spring;
all on the
same trailer that had
just gotten a federal sticker a week previously. Thank God that was before CSA 2010!
That kind of thing put me of a mind that going back to Wally World to make $10 an hour would put me better off than sitting around all that time for free, earning nothing. So I went back, and worked in the tire shop for three years. Now I have a fresh perspective on why trucking is about the best job you can get unless you have a degree in astrophysics or engineering or something. Believe me, I looked at going to grad school for a second/better/improved degree, because my first university degree just isn't marketable, and I could find nothing to gamble my time and money on. I think our universities would be going out of business a lot sooner if we had a larger number of experienced people crunching the numbers before signing the dotted line on all those loans. I'm no genius with business stuff, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to plug some titles and certifications into job search engines, and find out that nobody is hiring anybody with those letters appended to their name, so it's pointless to pay for them.
You want to know what people are hiring? A lot of useless scam offers where you can make $500,000 a day in your underwear selling Chia pets by mail, retail/food service drones, and truck drivers. That's what.
At the end of the day, even if trucking only pays $8 an hour, you're never going to get 70 hours working anywhere else. Wally World will write you up and eventually fire you if you accidentally work 0.01 hour of overtime, and you have to be in a pretty important position there to get remotely close to 40 hours in the first place. 40 * $10 is $400. 70 * $8 is $560. Trucking wins, my friend. If either of these incomes seems to suck, you need to take a look around at what wages are doing in this country. We're a
lot worse off than we were 10 years ago in terms of how much the average earner is bringing home when compared with the cost of living. Wages are plummeting for everyone everywhere, and expenses are skyrocketing.
What's that, you say? You'll just get a second job, and work 40 hours at one job, and 30 at the other, and make $700 a week? Lots of luck with that, my friend. Everybody wants you to have open availability, and they'll damn well schedule you whenever their business needs dictate, or you won't get the hours. Try juggling two jobs that flip your schedule around constantly, and never work you the same hours two days in a row, or give you the same days off two weeks in a row. Try getting two employers to coordinate with you on your schedule here and there, and they'll both decide you just aren't worth the bother of keeping on. It's an employer's market right now, and if you want to stay employed, you have to take even the most crappy joke of a job very seriously, or they will can you so fast your head will spin. Call in too many times, can't work these hours because of a conflict with another job? Buh-bye.
At the end of it all, I'm pretty glad to be back trucking. Working (or commuting 110 miles a day; ouch) 500,000,000 hours a week and having utterly no life whatsoever really sucks, and the only advantage to being home every day is that I never have to sit around in some truckstop or factory somewhere waiting on dispatch to find me a load. Even so, I'm
good at this, and it's the most money I can get in a week doing anything legal, even though I have a four-year degree with a 3.43 GPA.
I get where this guy is coming from in terms of the job not seeming to pay that much for the level of danger involved. I get that much more than the average truck driver, since I pull a gasoline tanker now. This is pretty much on the upper end of being as dangerous as trucking gets, but it really isn't in the very top tier in terms of the pay scale. The pay is good, but not great, and it definitely feels a bit light when LTL pays a good bit more for work that's dramatically less dangerous.
I like my job though. LTL rhymes with hell. This gas haulin' thing is alright, and I've pretty much found a new home after wandering in the woods since 2007. The pay isn't great, but you either love this stuff or you hate it, and I'm pretty amused so far. Especially when somebody reminds me to turn in a pay sheet for some trivial thing I wouldn't have remembered to charge them for, like waiting on my day driver to get back.
I didn't have much of a life when I was working at Walmart anyway. You can take the trucker out of the truck, but you can't take the truck out of the trucker. I'm a solitary person who hates punching a damn time clock, and I like to go do my thing and go home. Most days are kind of screwed up for one reason or another, but on those rare days when everything clicks perfectly, I can earn my money in 7 hours and kick back, instead of trying to find some way to try to look busy for another 5 hours so I don't lose pay. Punching a clock
sucks.
YMMV, but making $X an hour really just isn't everything.
