You’ll find plenty of articles out there giving advice on how to get a better job in trucking. This one focuses on how to ensure you’ll get one you’ll hate (or wind up hating the one you’ve got). The 7 steps here are guaranteed to land you a trucking job you’ll hate.
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There’s just something about trucking that you don’t find in other fields.
There’s camaraderie. Some would argue, with validity, that in recent years, that feeling of “us” has dissipated. But there’s still an “us” in the trucking world that an outsider just doesn’t get to see. We’re all out here doing the same job- trucking, flat bedding, car hauling. Essentially, all kinds of truckers are out here traveling, away from our homes and families, and rarely appreciated for what we do. You may hear two truckers arguing on the c. b. radio and threatening to fight, but, as the trucker stories go, those two are likely to get out of their trucks in a rage and wind up headed in to the truck stop restaurant to grab a meal together. Some of the things that make trucking special are our language, our way of acknowledging one another, the code we live by, and our appreciation of common courtesies.
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These days, trucking companies will let just about anyone train a new driver. As a result, there are more and more drivers who know less and less about the common courtesies truckers are supposed to extend to each other. To combat this problem, we’ve come up with a list of trucking rules that used to be common knowledge. Maybe if we all start following them again, we can all just get along!
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When truckers know there is a weigh station ahead, they will get into the right lane to be ready to exit. If they have a transponder in their truck for a pre-clearance service (PrePass, Best Pass, Green Light or Norpass), they may not exit, but they’ll get in the right lane until their transponder gives them “the green light.” Sometimes the weigh station is closed and the truckers don’t have to exit the freeway.
But when truckers don’t know there is a weigh station ahead, they may get caught out in the left lane. If they are passing slower moving vehicles (most likely other truckers who have slowed down in preparation to exit to the weigh station), they may have to do some tricky driving to get over into the right lane in time. Or they may miss the exit altogether and pull over on the shoulder of the freeway. These truckers walk into the scale house with their paperwork in hand and their heads hanging low.
You can blame the trucker for not being prepared in those instances, but what about weigh stations that have been closed down for a while? What about new weigh stations or scale houses that aren’t marked correctly on the trucker atlas? Truckers want to be prepared, but sometimes there are factors that at truck driver just can’t control.
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A Frito Lay trailer burnt to the ground on Saturday in Clines Corners, New Mexico. There will be no shortage of chips, however, and no one was hurt.
Driver Mark Hobgood had hauled his last load out of the Frito Lay distribution center in Lubbock and was on his way back with empty cardboard boxes when the trailer he was pulling caught on fire. He was just a few miles north of I 40 on route 285 in New Mexico when the ABS light on the dash of his International lit up. He also noticed as slight loss of air in his tanks. He decided to pull over next to the New Mexico Department of Transportation lot just a mile north of I 40 rather than continuing down to the truck stop at the junction. Read the rest of this entry »
There seems to be an obsession with poultry in the trucking industry. No, I’m not talking about chicken fried steak, I’m talking about Chicken Trucks and Chicken Coops and all kinds of other chicken-related terms in the truckers’ vocabulary.
The general public may not know about it, but truckers talk turkey a lot.
Anyone who has ever listened to the CB radio knows that truckers have a language all their own. If a rookie driver or a vacationer dares to tread on the truckers’ territory, he’ll find out quickly that he isn’t one of the flock yet. It’s what you say and how you say it that gives you away.
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