Quote:
Originally Posted by youngster
I've been doing this for 11 yrs., mostly LTL. Stay out of it unless you want to wake up one day hating it, realizing your too old to do anything else; and if you have go through another truck company interview, where some suit-and-tie asshole blows more smoke up your ass-you're probably gonna f'n snap.
I can definitely relate to that sentiment. I have strong feelings of there being no good future ahead in this business. Every year, I make less money than I used to, relative to how much everything costs. You hit the top of the payscale early in a career, and the only way to get more money is to do more or more nasty work. There is no getting paid more for time served like there is in the real world. Not really. My wife started at Wally World at $5 an hour, and now makes $14, just a few cents an hour a year at a time. It adds up, but not in trucking. No matter who you drive for where, the pay just doesn't keep growing like that, staying in the same job, with the same company.
OTOH, once you've trucked at all, it seems you're largely screwed trying to find a job in the real world. I'm not too old at 35, but when I was out hunting for anything but another driving job, I got a lot of "you used to be a TRUCK DRIVER?" None of these people ever called for a second interview.
I have mixed feelings about my whole situation, which is painfully obvious to anyone who reads my tortured ramblings, but if one thing is certain, it is that I am really unhappy about not having any other
viable choice. I
have to keep trucking, or go completely bankrupt. The thing is, the only thing keeping me from going bankrupt as a truck driver is my wife's annual raise, which keeps up with the bills enough that my making smaller and smaller contributions every year (relative to inflation) doesn't upset the apple cart.
I don't know how you hands out here whose wives stay home manage to avoid going broke over a career. I really don't. Especially if you look at what a house cost in 1997 and what one costs today, for example.