I'm on hiatus right now waiting for bones to grow back together and it's no fun, so I went next door to talk to an old man who was sitting on his porch selling produce. We started talking about produce, where it comes from and where it goes, and all kinds of supply chain distribution that I had learned first hand. He had lots of questions even though he was 87 years old.
During the conversation I realized how blessed I was to have experienced a part of our countries greatness by hauling just about everything under the sun. My conversation somehow eased the pain I often remembered from some of the frustrating times in trucking, when I couldn't pay my bills no matter how hard I worked, or companies that were poorly managed, or that were run by monkeys. I told the old man stories of some of the topography of this great nation, the weather, the beautiful strawberry fields of California, the tractor plants in Illinois, the beef packing plants of Texas and Kansas, and all the different kinds of people I'd met along the way. He said he'd never been out of Texas and didn't know all that was going on. I didn't either before I became a truck driver. I noticed that he perked up when we discussed how truckers contributed to construction, agriculture, manufacturing and every bit of development in this nation. I think sometimes people take this for granted or just haven't noticed as truckers go about their jobs without incident.
I had picked up a truckers atlas that morning, and every page in it I could point out dozens of towns I had delivered loads. I could recall a lot of them. What an education I had received, and in many ways better than my college education. It used to be "see the USA in your Chevrolet" when I was a child and we did some road trips, but who could afford the view that only truckers can get now? It is an expensive view.
To you future truck drivers that are reading this, don't be mislead by the romanticism of the road early on, but time will change your perspective later on after you've paid your dues, that is if you can endure it. Even some of the dispatchers I had that would drive me up the wall, I think I could sit down and drink a beer with them now. I don't have that anger that used to boil up in me over things that I should have been able to handle in better ways. I can now see why they did some of the things they did because of pressure on them......
That's what a severe injury, three surgeries with one more to come, will do to you. You'll discover what's most important is not what you thought it was. You learn that you are not indispensable or bullet proof, even if you are good at your job, and you put more effort into it than the next ten guys that don't really care.
You'll learn that trucking is a great career, and those that are able to persevere are rich because of it, even if their bank account doesn't reflect it.
I could go on but I'll stop here.........
