Trucker Forum - Trucking & Driving Forums - Class A Drivers - Need Advice Please...Career Change To Becoming A Driver

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cummins Lvr

I guess the most important thing for me is being able to get home after 5 days or less on the road. If it has to be a minimum of 2 weeks on the road, it won't work out.

It's possible, but don't quit your day job until you find something, because it's not going to be easy to find starting out.

Lots of people advertise "home every weekend." I haven't been a job hopper, so I don't know how true it really is across the board from personal experience. My own story is that I was trying to find something very like what you are now, but I also needed money, so I eventually had to give up and just take anything I could get, to "pay my dues" as an OTR driver, so I could work into something more suitable later. (And in retrospect, looking back at a recent job hunt after 10 years of experience, these premium jobs are hard for someone with only 10 years to get, so my "six months to a year" was probably delusional. YMMV depending on your local market, of course.)

I wound up at Great Coastal Express, and made it all the way through orientation there before the man I subsequently went on to work for for the next 10 years rolled by and snatched me out of the jaws of the driver mill just in the nick of time. I didn't quit under load, because I didn't quite get that far, but it was a close thing.

One of the most noteworthy parts of that experience was the "Hometime Equivalence" diagram they made me sign. It had boxes and arrows and lots of words in bold, and basically the point of the diagram was to explain that "home every weekend" really meant "home for one day every other week if you're lucky."

But I escaped all that after all. Before Great Coastal, I had gotten Jerry's phone number from my trucking school, and I had gone in to interview with him. We had a good chat, and it sounded like a great job for me. After an hour, he said "I like you, but I don't have any openings."

What?! You just talked to me for an hour, and you don't have a job to offer?

Big letdown, that. As it turned out, I was the only person who had ever followed that lead from that school, and he wasn't used to cold calls from prospective drivers. I completely flabbergasted him.

In the end though, somebody quit, and he needed a driver. He called my wife, and when I called her that night (this was before mere mortals had cell phones,) she told me Jerry had called with a job offer.

$350 a week to start at New Energy vs. Great Coastal was promising me $750. I had dollar signs in my eyes, and I was going to pass on that job, but some of the other drivers in the motel at orientation listened to my whole story, and talked sense into me. I called Jerry. He took the Virginia Beach run himself, and picked me up from Great Coastal orientation on the way back. My road test was driving the truck home from Virginia Beach.

Talk about putting everything on the line! If I had blown the road test, I would have wound up with no job at all, since I just walked out of the last bit of paper signing that would have put me on the road for Great Coastal, and I had been struggling for a month or so by that point to find a company willing to take somebody as green as I was. I was GREEN out of school. (I flunked the road test for two other companies before I wound up there at Great Coastal, and things were looking really grim.)

It was the best decision I ever made. New Energy was a great job for a family man, and in all likelihood, that "$750" to start as a rookie trainee at Great Coastal was unrealistic too. For somebody who didn't need to make a huge amount of money, and somebody with plenty of things to do at home, that was a fantastic job. I was making $650 a week at the end, which many would sneer at, but it was enough, and the balance between making enough and not working too much was excellent for me.

So what's the lesson in all of this for you?

What you want can happen, but it's going to be a really bizarre fluke if it actually does. You need to find yourself a New Energy somehow. Unfortunately, my New Energy let me go last February, and I haven't been able to find anything like that job either. The market forces that put them under would make it hard for anybody to make as little money with a truck as they used to. Case in point, where I'm at now I'm working harder and making more money, but I don't have the option to do less and earn less, because that wouldn't pay for the truck's expenses. I'm really kind of on the margin of the least this truck can run and still be worth keeping on the road, and that's 2,500 miles a week, which is big culture shock to me. I used to feel horribly put-upon and over-worked to pull a whopping 2,000. (Though 2,000 miles of making up to 18 stops a day unloading furniture really is a tough week.)

You can't follow my footsteps, but I wish you the best of luck finding a similar path. It's possible, just not very likely.