Truck Drivers

I said in a recent post that I could write a whole post on truck drivers. Well, I can. I lived the life opposite a truck driver for 13 years. I still kind of do, he does still drive it's just not his full time occupation. He's the truck driver by title but he's kind of a jack of all trades when he's not driving.

Truck drivers come in all sizes, all cultures, all religions, all differing degrees of intelligence. When you say the words truck driver most people conjure up a redneck sort of fellow, not of high intelligence, not concerned with cleanliness, maybe even with tobacco juice running down his chin. When I see a truck driver interviewed on the local news, I think to myself, "Oh my God, did they have to find the most unintelligent form of life to talk to or did the smart fellows just refuse to be on camera?"

Truck drivers are a different breed and inside that breed you have many branches. You have dump truck drivers. My experience with them is that they are the party crowd. They run their butts off during the day and stay up most of the night drinking. Most of them, close the bar down and then sleep in their trucks. They are fun loving and sometimes not the most work brittle.

You have long haul drivers of all sorts. Some pull reefers (garbage haulers), some pull vans(billboards, bedbuggers), some are flatbedders and some pull transports (parking lots).

I, personally, have only had to deal with flatbedders. I dispatched for a brief stint a couple years ago. I had my husband and then I helped with 3 other flatbedders and a van driver. I found that women truck drivers are sort of mental. They want to play head games all the time and they do love to cause a stir. Maybe it's just being out on the road alone, I don't know but I can't deal with their drama I found that out very quickly.

The men, well I found that they are big babies. They whine because you find them a load and it's not what they want. They whine because you find them what they want but it's not paying as much as they want. They whine because you find them one paying what they want, hauling what they want but it's not going where they want. Now, don't forget, these drivers also want to be home at certain times, they want to sleep and you have to know how they are logging this trip so you know if they have enough hours to get to the next town to pick up the next load. Don't ever send one to south or west Texas unless you already have a back haul, either. It's also best to have at least a week planned out and you better hope that at no time does a load fall through. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't world. Dispatching is a thankless job and I give kudos to anyone that does it successfully.

Truck drivers also have families. It's a rough job being a family of a truck driver, too. If you're the wife, you get to raise the kids by yourself. You discipline, you cook, you clean and then when dad pulls in he's the hero. If you have a baby, dad is most usually on your crap list by the time he leaves because he has messed the babies schedule up and you have to spend the next few days after he leaves getting back on schedule just to do it all over again when he comes back home. When you are the primary disciplinarian you also are the "bad" parent because when dad comes home the children get away with all the things you have disciplined them for because dad doesn't want to look like the bad guy.

My mother in law was such a pain when my husband was driving. I heard constantly, "Don't you worry about him having a bad accident while he's out there? I worry about him all the time." She never like my reply of, "If I spent my time worrying about him then they would have to lock me in a padded room. So no, I don't worry about him." Being I knew that he was in a vehicle bigger than most on the road and that I'm a firm believer in "if it's your time, then it's your time and there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it" I didn't and still don't worry about those things. Our lives our in God's hands and that's just the way I look at it.

Truck drivers for the most part are really good guys. Like any occupation you have your jerks. There is always going to be somebody that will "cheat". I never worried about that though. If I did I wouldn't have had much faith in my marriage and so I wouldn't have had much of a marriage. There is always going to be somebody that will steal. There is always going to be somebody that will lie. There is always going to be somebody that is just a dead beat and not worth the air they breathe. BUT, there is always a flip side that by far outnumbers the others.

Truck drivers have to process so much of what is going on around them. They are said to process more information per second than any other driver on the road. A driver has to be able to process what is going on around him, what is happening inside his truck and with his truck, and what is happening with his load constantly. A truck driver doesn't get to drive down the road and sight see. I found this out on the few trips I went along on. "I've drove this road a hundred times and I never noticed that until you pointed it out." was a common thing I heard on my trips.

A truck driver has a hard life. He spends his time in the cab of a truck and unless he has a "house on wheels" then he doesn't have the luxury of home cooked meals. Most drivers eat at the buffet in the truck stops or anywhere that has truck parking. So eating healthy is not usually an option. Three meals a day is not an option because if you're out there to make money you don't have time to stop for three meals.

Sleep deprivation is also a common problem. Even with the 10 hour rule, drivers are sleep deprived. Loads have to be delivered in a timely manner and most have appointment times.

Studies suggest that the risks of cancer, heart attacks, and other disorders may be associated with aspects of long-haul driving such as loading and unloading cargo, irregular schedules, long hours of driving, a sedentary lifestyle, and the nature of drivers' food choices on the road.

In the thirteen years my husband has been on the road, I have heard him say on three different instances that they found "so-and-so" dead in his truck. When he called the first time to me this, it was his trainer from Maverick that they had found. He called me when he worked for TP and they had found a young driver that had suffered a heart attack after unloading. During his last job, he called to tell me that they found a driver dead in the shower. He had suffered a massive heart attack.

Injuries happen galore in flatbedding. Our best friend fell off his load not to long ago and suffered a minor concussion and some back and arm injuries. Steve has slipped on numerous occasions but thankfully never fallen. Throwing those tarps are a injury waiting to happen, especially in windy conditions. Just getting them on top of a load is act of congress.

Truck drivers are the backbone of this country. Look around you. There is probably not many things that you can see that a truck driver didn't haul.

Truck drivers are not unintelligent people either. My husband has ran into doctors and lawyers that gave up their careers to be truck drivers. A doctor that he had dinner with one time told him that the malpractice insurance had gotten so outrageous that he had given up his practice because he couldn't make a decent living. Steve has met people with PhD's, Bachelor's degrees, you name it.

Many drivers have been through my house for dinner over the years. If Steve was passing through, I always cooked dinner for him and whomever he happened to be running with. I've learned heard many a story and met people from all walks of life. Many bikers, a circus driver, a bull rider all turned truck drivers.

Something Steve said to me the other day really hit home. He was talking about staying gone overnight now compared to being gone on the truck. He said now when he's gone he has a bed to sleep in, whether it's at a motel or at one of the job houses, he gets a good meal and he gets to go to bed at 9 or 10 o'clock and get up at 6. On the truck he would have a sandwich out of the fridge, watch a little tv, then sleep a couple hours and go on. If he overslept he had to drive like hell to make up time and hope that he could still get unloaded at a decent time to make his next pickup. The stress was so much more. Coming home now means getting in his pickup and driving 5 miles. Coming home then meant driving with or without load on his trailer for hundreds of miles unless he was lucky enough to get a load to Springfield, getting in at all hours of the day or night spending a day or two trying to get everything done that had to be done to the truck before he left and trying to squeeze in family time on the side.

Truck drivers have one of the most underpaid, under appreciated jobs on the road. Think about this next time you see one driving down the road and appreciate it when you crawl between your sheets at night and put your head on your fluffy pillow. And when you hear one outside your window in the middle of the night, say a little prayer for that driver that he makes it where he's going. I'm sure he or she will appreciate it.