What I love about my job

In general, I find my job as a trucker to be boring, annoying, even maddening, with general regularity. You might ask, then, why don’t you get a different job? I haven’t changed jobs for numerous reasons, but the main one is this: I’ve been generally bored, annoyed, even maddened, by every job I’ve ever had. I’m just not a happy worker bee.

I should have been born independently wealthy. If my parents, and their parents, and their parents’ parents had been properly considerate of what their genetic influence would eventually create in me, then they would have been out there greedily plundering and taking advantage of the average working man in order to amass a fortune to pass onto me. But oh no. They had to be farmers, teachers, bookkeepers and redneck ne’er-do-wells.

Thanks to my thoughtless ancestors, I have no choice but to hump it here in the working world. Hedon seems to think we still have a shot at independent wealth. Me, I’m doubtful. Hedon = glass half full. Stace = glass damned near empty. Seems to me our best chance at wealth would be to win the PowerBall lottery. Problem is, we don’t play the lottery. Well now, actually, a couple of times I have played it when the prize was over $100 million. But since I consider those few times to be somewhat embarrassing moments when my imagination ran away with itself, they don’t much count as indicators as how much I will play in the future.

So, things being as they are, I have resigned myself to the understanding that I will likely have to work as long as I live. Might as well be trucking. At least it pays better than 99% of the other jobs where I live. And there are things to love about it other than the pay.

In the five years I’ve been driving out here, I’ve worked for four different companies. Makes me sound like a real job hopper, but that has not been the case traditionally. For instance, before I quit to become a trucker, I stayed at my former job for nearly five years (I worked in the composition department at a community newspaper). We’ve hopped around so much in trucking because the companies either weren’t, shall we say, exactly honest in what they offered their drivers, or because we were offered better pay elsewhere. And this is one thing to seriously love about trucking: jobs, jobs and more jobs. I could call and quit the job I have right now and have a new one within five minutes of hanging up the phone. With our experience and clean records, Hedon and I have an endless choice of companies, small and large, for whom we could work. It’s nice to not feel wedded to one place.

Another thing to love about trucking is the scenery while driving. I get disgruntled at drivers who glibly say, “Trucking is like a paid vacation!” Numbnuts. If trucking were like a paid vacation, then over half of new drivers wouldn’t quit the industry in their first six months. A huge number don’t even make it out of the training stage. Anyway, the scenery is interesting. You get to see the fabulous sights of skyscrapers, mountains, rivers, canyons, plateaus and weird rock formations. We spend a lot of time in cities in the underbellies, as some call it, where we get to see things like panhandlers, prostitutes, pimps, strip clubs, massage parlors, drug dealers, gangs, homeless people (both crazy and sane), chop shops and rotted condemned buildings with people living in them. I did not say, please note, that all the scenery was pretty.

Drivers who work for big companies should never tell someone that they love trucking because in trucking they don’t have a boss always looking over their shoulders. This is untrue. All of the big companies have satellite tracking systems on their trucks. They know where we are every minute of every day. They install systems like QualComm and DriverTech so they can constantly harass us with messages; they particularly like to message you when you are asleep at which point you are supposed to hop up out of bed and answer whatever moronic request they have to make of you. And still … in a sense those drivers are right about the boss not always looking over their shoulders. If you manage things correctly, you can mostly ignore your boss. Hedon and I turn off the volume on our DriverTech and blatantly ignore messages from fleet managers when the mood strikes us (too bad you can’t do this with a QualComm unit; we used to tape stuff over the speaker to dull the beeping). It is important to not peek at the messages then not respond. They can tell whether or not you have read it. So you must not give in to curiosity and open the message. If you properly balance how much you respond with how much you ignore, then you can get away with all sorts of stuff you couldn’t get away with at a job where your boss is physically present. Definitely something to love about trucking.

I love trucking because most truckers are surly and enjoy complaining. It’s pretty rare to meet a trucker who is like those annoying people you can get in offices who arrive at work every day with a chirpy, “Good morning! Isn’t it a beautiful day? I got up early and puttered in my garden where my daffodils have …” Blah, blah, perky blah, until you want to smack them upside the head and tell them to get a grip on reality, but you can’t because you have to pretend you actually like coming to work or some tattletale who wants your job might rat you out to the boss and convince them you’re bad for company morale. Nope, most truckers enjoy the freedom of ranting to anyone who cares to listen about how crappy other truckers are, how dangerous four-wheelers are, and how the company they work for is filled with liars and sons-of-bitches. Truckers are so vocal about how they feel, while I was writing this very post, a driver came up to our truck and started telling Hedon all the things he hates about They Who Must Not Be Named. Never seen the guy before in our lives, and yet he took for granted that we, too, were disgruntled. Fairly recently, when we were at one of our company’s terminals, Hedon discovered a big pile of human crap (literally) prominently sitting on the floor of one of the showers in the terminal. I think whoever left it there certainly made their point.

Lastly, I love trucking because it allows me to be with Hedon 24 hours a day. You’d think we’d get sick of each other, but 99.9% of the time, we get along swimmingly. We rely on each other out here and we have a division of labor that suits each other’s styles. And we simply enjoy one another’s company. We’ve been having a particularly good time of late since starting this blog. I love reading what she writes, and always have.

So, seeing as I’ll never win the lottery, it’s a good thing there is stuff to love about trucking. Looks like it’ll have to do.