10-4 Magazine February 2024

10-4 Magazine / February 2024 47 The most glaring example of this is when fleets sell their overpriced, excess tractors, to over-zealous and ambitious drivers. They have convinced them, the driver, they can earn more money and get a bigger piece of the pie if they are the owner of the truck. The reality is that the fleet is still the owner of the equipment, since most are “purchased” on a lease contract. Lease contract means just what it says – you are renting their stuff! Very few contracts allow you to go outside their system to contract freight on your own. The carrier has access to and controls the potential freight, therefore it’s called leftovers. Every company will, as a rule, cover all their own trucks with freight first, or at least with the most profitable loads. None of us are so important to a company or the carrier that they will feed us the cream of the crop to keep us from leaving their organization. Yes, they will throw you a bone every so often, but that is just to keep us interested. But they are not going to take a loss just to make sure you don’t. Remember what I wrote last month about recruiters and politicians? You don’t always get what you are promised. I normally tell the drivers who ask me about leasing to STOP, DROP, and ROLL. Stop looking for that easy money, drop the pretense of Super Trucker, and roll all your energy into becoming a better version of yourself. Sounds like a solid plan, right?! Now, if I haven’t offended my readers, let’s get to the reason I’m saying all this. Driving trucks is a true family affair. The hours drivers are required to spend on the job is considerably greater than most occupations. An OTR (over the road) driver is gone 24 hours a day, oftentimes for multiple days or even weeks, without getting home. This puts an unusual strain on the partner at home, and if there are children in the house, it will affect them, as well. Driving can be a blood sport, and when drivers miss appointments and family functions, their family screams bloody murder! That’s where it helps to have a mentor from within the industry. People today, and not just young people but most folks who enter this occupation, think it’s nothing more than a sightseeing tour. Thank you to the recruiters for glamorizing a difficult job. If you listen to the hype, truck driving is all rainbows and sunshine. There are rainbows, but only after a storm, and then no one says the sun will shine. Those storms can be real, and they can come as rain, snow, wind, and even sandstorms. Some of the most severe storms, however, come as what I call the “wife storm” – that’s when you get hit with an unforeseen force of nature where you don’t know which way to turn or how to react so you just answer your phone and say “yes dear” as quickly as possible. It’s all a part of driving, and it will affect every one of us, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. My wife and I were fortunate to have not only my father-in-law, who was teaching me how to drive the truck back in the day, but also my mother-in-law, who was supporting my wife when I was gone. Even though my wife came from a truck driving family, she had never experienced the day to day lifestyle of a driver/husband’s home. We got married a few months before my enlistment was up in the Marine Corps, so she had some sense of abandonment – just kidding, but I was sent on a field deployment the week after she reached California and we set up our house. There is a certain alignment with military life and trucking life, and the recruiters play on it to direct prior enlisted personnel into trucking. The abruptness of dispatch can often be the difference between a normal and an obsessive lifestyle. For those of you who didn’t read last month’s article, I spoke directly to the seasoned drivers, asking them to reach out to the new or young drivers. This month, I would like to compliment the men and women who teach their kids not only what they do for a living, but also how and why they take the actions they do. The old phrase “do as I do and you will be forever satisfied” may play well here. I realize not everyone is cut out to be a truck driver or to work in our industry, but a basic understanding of the life and lifestyle can save some of them from themselves. Whatever do I mean? Once a driver gets bitten by the bug, he or she will never be the same again. Now don’t get me wrong – we still need doctors and lawyers and people to do all those boring jobs, too. I can’t imagine why they would want to, but more power to them. This is where some folks go wrong by picking a partner who is not going to be home much of the time. The freedom of pushing yourself and the equipment you trust to its limit is an experience few people can comprehend. But, to a driver, it’s the essence of life itself. Seeing the sun rise every morning in a new or different place can offer a sense of peace and harmony, and hammering down an open stretch of blacktop and taking in the scenery along the way is, in a word, priceless. To the person who has never sat behind a well-tuned CAT engine and experienced the rumble and the roar as you press the fuel pedal, or felt the vibes of a V8 Detroit as it winds through the gear box, all I can equate it to is the same feeling I got as a 16 year old kid getting my driver’s license for the first time. When I first backed that 1965 Mercury Monterey out of the driveway and onto the street, I couldn’t stop smiling, as I fist-pumped the air in rhythm to the music on the radio! As we say, “THAT’S TRUCKIN!” If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. But I am probably preaching to the choir here. Every couple will butt heads at some point when the job gets in the way