Think about it seriously. How are you going to feel when you’ve done 3 15hr shifts in a row. Which means you have 9 hours off, take out of that your travel time to work and back and any time you will want to spend with family. So, imagine it’s Wednesday, you have just completed 3 15hr shifts on 4 hrs sleep a night. Now you have Thursday and Friday to go, you can be sure that they will want to max those hours as well.
Then it’s the weekend, they may or may not want you to put in a full shift on a Saturday. Don’t plan on spending any quality time with the family on the weekend, you will be too knackerd. All you will do is sleep and then you get to do it all over again next week. Ad infinitum
I won’t go into the other six thousand problems a driver faces, that’s quite enough to be mulling over at this stage.
If you’re so sure it’s for you, I wish you all the best. I came off the road after only a few years, it was destroying my life and my marriage. I now work regular hours as a shunter, much better money, treated much better and none of the stress or politics that go with being a driver.
I don’t know what the future holds for me, I have my class 1 to fall back on if things go wrong, but I don’t see myself going back on the road. I am doing my CPCS telehandler license soon which will lead to a job on regular days at around 16 quid an hour with none of the routing stress and no sleeping in a tin box in the most stupid, inappropriate places because everywhere decent to sleep filled up by 6 and the office wanted to squeeze every last minute out of me, so at 9 at night, I had to find the spot that everyone else didn’t want.
Sorry, going off on a bit of a tangent there. If you feel it’s for you, go for it! But think it through first, talk to the drivers on here and go into it with your eyes open. Yes, you get to travel the country and get paid for it and meet new people. But traveling the country soon gets old, it all looks the same. Meet new people? Hope to god that the new people ain’t vosa with a 600 quid fine for you for piffling little “offenses “ the new people you will meet are mainly forkies who will want you gone ASAP (if you are lucky enough to find one who speaks English) and as for get paid for it? 80 hours at crap rate is still crap rate. It will seem worth it while you still have your rose coloured specs on, but after a while you will realise that for what you’re doing, the rate is rubbish and the overtime rates (if you get anything above standard rate for overtime) isn’t much better.