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You don't really have to be a hard-ass to be a trucker, but it does require some toughness. And it doesn't have anything to do with your size or your gender. Probably the most physical job in trucking is hauling a flatbed. I've never done it, but I hear those tarps can weigh as much as 150 pounds a piece. But if you are not up to slinging 150 pounds around, there are other jobs in trucking that anyone can do regardless of their physical strength. The kind of toughness I'm talking about is mental toughness.
A good example is a woman I taught to drive a truck back when I was a trainer for a cross-country gig. She was 4'11" and 110 pounds. She told me about her life and it was heartbreaking. She had her first child at 16 and eventually married the father. He turned out to be an abusive prick and she turned to alcohol. They divorced and she lost custody of the children because she drank. She then became homeless and had been living out of her pick-up truck for the two years prior to getting a job in trucking. She did what was asked of her and never complained. Yeah, she was going to make one fine little trucker.
In contrast, I also trained a 22 year old man for the same company. His daddy was a trucker and by god he was going to be one, too. There were several times when I was showing him how to back up into a tight spot where he got flustered, whined and cried like a little baby and gave up. After I knew he could handle the truck okay I turned him loose in L.A. All we did was go into the city, drop and hook, and come back out and he said he wasn't driving for the rest of the day. That was nothing like going into L.A. with a 5 stop load on and driving around the city all day in a 70 foot rig, which was not uncommon with that company. By the end if his training he was talking about driving team with his dad or maybe getting a local job. I'd lay money that he was out of trucking within a year.
The difference between the two? My male student hadn't been kicked in the teeth by life enough yet to be able to handle an over the road gig away from his family. I met another driver like him who told me that trucking was a "dog's life." It might well be to someone who hasn't experienced a lot of difficulty in life, but to my female student described above, she saw a free place to stay with air conditioning and heat and more money than she'd ever seen in her life. And she was just getting started! :)
Me? I lived through ten years of psychosis- six of them as a trucker. I could hide out in my cab from all of those voices.
I was driving down the road one day with a new team driver. We'd been driving together for about a week and had gotten to know each other alright. He was new to trucking and was thankful to have a teammate who knew what he was doing. I was thankful just have a teammate that I could get along with. He got a phone call. His sister had died suddenly in a car crash. We were 1000 miles away from his home and headed the opposite direction.
I work with a guy whose father was a trucker. He said he never got to know his dad until he was about 16. His father was only home 4 weekends a year up until then.
There are people out on the road right now missing birthdays, anniversaries, and funerals. There are some who are missing their children taking their first steps. There are old truckers out there who've never known anything different, their bodies broken down, but their spirits alive.
Yeah, you gotta be tough. It's not for everyone. After 12 years, it isn't for me anymore, and I have a local gig now. I'm hopping out of that cab permanently at the first opportunity I get. C'mon Obama. Work some magic on that economy. I'm busted up enough.
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