On Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:15:17 PM UTC-7, Tye McCandress wrote:
Truck driving is a pain in the ASS. In fact, long after you QUIT being
a truck driver, the fact that you WERE a truck driver is still going to cause you major headaches.
Several years ago, I needed a career change. The only other thing I'd
ever thought of doing was driving truck. Got my Class A license. (big mistake, but it seemed like a good idea at the time)
Went out on the road for a few years. Was pulling just about every load there is to pull, all over the United States and Canada. Racked up over 400,000 safe miles. Made decent money, but the lifestyle caused irreversible damage to my family life, and my wife almost left me.
I stopped driving truck, as I didn't want to lose my wife. Went back to
my previous career. Thought everything was OK again...or at least I had
a good start on rebuilding my marriage.
Then several months later, I got laid off. Now I know that getting laid
off has nothing at all to do with truck driving. But, when I got laid
off, I learned that truck driving was still ruining my life, even though
I hadn't touched a truck for almost a year.
I applied for Unemployment Insurance. I was qualified to collect it. However, the terms of the UI state that (in order to collect it) you
must be willing to accept any job which you are qualified to do. I
still had a class A license. I kept it as I would have had to pay money
to convert it, which didn't make sense. I mean, why get rid of a
license that is still good for several more years? After several weeks
of job searching (and collecting unemployment benefits) I had someone
from the DOL call me to offer me a job (wait for it) as an OTR truck
driver. I honestly would rather kill myself than ever touch a truck
again. But if I refused a job referral without a damned good excuse,
I'd lose my unemployment benefits. Luckily, just the previous day, I'd accepted another job (a desk job). So, I no longer needed unemployment.
But then a few months later, I was laid off AGAIN. And this time, I was
in the situation where I had a choice:
1) Try to survive on no income at all.
2) Collect unemployment until someone offered me a job as a truck
driver, at which point I would lose my unemployment benefits.
Bottom line, don't ever get a Class A license. If you do, you will be desperate to GET RID OF IT eventually. Having that commercial license
in your wallet will really fuck up your life...even if you aren't using it.
you got it wrong. i quit trucking otr and started collecting unemployment food stamps for 200 a month, i told them, it wasn't for me, i can't have a job gone all the time any more. they didn't give a crap i didn't have a job for a while so i was allowed
to get food stamps. i later on my own decided i wanted to go back into trucking but this time a local trucker and home daily, not long after that i found a trucking job local, and realized there is LOTS of local trucking jobs out there, almost as easy to
get a local trucking job if i have 1 year experience as it is to get an otr job as a rookie trucker. those otr trucking jobs will hire anyone, doesn't mean any one should work there, any one on food stamps they'll hire if they get their class a and
cleanish record.
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