Driving a truck can be a really crap job, long hours, crap hourly rate, chasing around all day, and being pushed to the max to get deliveries done despite the fact that Britain’s roads are over crowded and it only takes a minor incident to cause a traffic jam and some delivery places seem to want to use you truck as free warehousing and will take an age to unload it and try and gee them up or even ask what happening and you might be lucky to get a civil answer.
The days of sitting in cafes for hours have long gone.
And then if you’re looking to do nights out, finding suitable places to park can be a total nightmare, MSA’s are full by about 6pm, cafes and truckstops are far and few between and also fill up quickly, even finding a space in a layby can by a mission late at night.
Ok that’s the bad stuff, now the positive stuff, been doing the job on and off for many years. I’ve done jobs I hated, but I’ve also done some cracking jobs, been to some great places and met some really interesting people and really enjoyed it, I even don’t earn too bad a wage these days, but that has taken time.
If I were you I’d give it a go, you’ve got a degree to fall back on, and if you don’t try you’ll never know, but go in with your eyes open, expect some knock backs and try a few different jobs as they’re not all the same.
muckles:
Driving a truck can be a really crap job, long hours, crap hourly rate, chasing around all day, and being pushed to the max to get deliveries done despite the fact that Britain’s roads are over crowded and it only takes a minor incident to cause a traffic jam and some delivery places seem to want to use you truck as free warehousing and will take an age to unload it and try and gee them up or even ask what happening and you might be lucky to get a civil answer.
The days of sitting in cafes for hours have long gone.
And then if you’re looking to do nights out, finding suitable places to park can be a total nightmare, MSA’s are full by about 6pm, cafes and truckstops are far and few between and also fill up quickly, even finding a space in a layby can by a mission late at night.
Ok that’s the bad stuff, now the positive stuff, been doing the job on and off for many years. I’ve done jobs I hated, but I’ve also done some cracking jobs, been to some great places and met some really interesting people and really enjoyed it, I even don’t earn too bad a wage these days, but that has taken time.
If I were you I’d give it a go, you’ve got a degree to fall back on, and if you don’t try you’ll never know, but go in with your eyes open, expect some knock backs and try a few different jobs as they’re not all the same.
Great post muckles lots of positives and negatives
Any holes a goal mate remember a few years ago delivering to asda and my God this driver could of been a bloody model… I went home that night and gave the wife a right ploughing!!
yt03:
Any holes a goal mate remember a few years ago delivering to asda and my God this driver could of been a bloody model… I went home that night and gave the wife a right ploughing!!
yt03:
Any holes a goal mate remember a few years ago delivering to asda and my God this driver could of been a bloody model… I went home that night and gave the wife a right ploughing!!
Getting back on the subject and slightly relevant to the previous posts.
Of course the other thing to consider if you a woman and want to drive a truck is being something of a freak show when you turn up somewhere and almost every other driver immediately weighing up if they would, eh well I’m sure you understand.
muckles:
Getting back on the subject and slightly relevant to the previous posts.
Of course the other thing to consider if you a woman and want to drive a truck is being something of a freak show when you turn up somewhere and almost every other driver immediately weighing up if they would, eh well I’m sure you understand.
Is that why I get all the funny looks and winks then?
So you want more good looking females. You will then find they will flash their eyes at you but nothing else. You will see the ridiculous spectacle of older drivers offering do fill up for them, do the curtains and hook trailers up because tbey cannot manage the red line but the most frustrating thing is the way tge planners favout them giving them easy runs etc. Oh yes you are welcome to them. At some places they won’t e tertain thdm at all. I know of 3 firms that apply simple tests to avoid employing them. For instance one asks them to demonstrate their sheeting technique. I have not met a woman yet who can throw a taup over a load.
alder:
So you want more good looking females. You will then find they will flash their eyes at you but nothing else. You will see the ridiculous spectacle of older drivers offering do fill up for them, do the curtains and hook trailers up because tbey cannot manage the red line but the most frustrating thing is the way tge planners favout them giving them easy runs etc. Oh yes you are welcome to them. At some places they won’t e tertain thdm at all. I know of 3 firms that apply simple tests to avoid employing them. For instance one asks them to demonstrate their sheeting technique. I have not met a woman yet who can throw a taup over a load.
Actually agree with you on something here, we had a female doing a hook loader before and she couldn’t manage the door by herself, obviously all the guys where helping her out… But that first time she was on her own she was pretty screwed!
alder:
So you want more good looking females. You will then find they will flash their eyes at you but nothing else. You will see the ridiculous spectacle of older drivers offering do fill up for them, do the curtains and hook trailers up because tbey cannot manage the red line :roll: but the most frustrating thing is the way tge planners favout them giving them easy runs etc. Oh yes you are welcome to them. At some places they won’t e tertain thdm at all. I know of 3 firms that apply simple tests to avoid employing them. For instance one asks them to demonstrate their sheeting technique. I have not met a woman yet who can throw a taup over a load.
now…filling up and ‘hooking up’ trailers are ABSOLUTE BASICS of driving a class 1 vehicle, if someone cannot do that then they should not be doing the job I agree.
some females accept the help as they find it rather amusing that men want to do it for them and just let them get on with it, they probably prefer the easy/lazy life and/or like to make fun of the male counterpart, but if the ‘really’ cannot do this themselves that is pretty bad regardless of male/female. (PS why not pump out some air pressure if the red line is too hard? that is what I have done especially at the moment as I have bad tendonitis in my wrist which makes it very weak and painful to do the most minuscule of task…)
as for throwing a taup over a load I am afraid I have never seen this done or never had to do it so I am sure I would probably ‘fail’ in doing that…but there again I have only driven box-trailers/fridges in my life so I guess it would be a bit difficult for me to find a situation where I have to do it…on the other hand if I had to drive for a firm where this is needed then I’d make sure I’d learn, and if I can’t learn then I would have to skip it/find another job.
Not all females are the same and not all men are the same, of course generally speaking men will be stronger 9.9 out of 10, it is ‘basic biology’ not a fact of who is more clever/less clever, there are some very important reasons why nature made us different, the main two are ‘procreation’ and ‘survival’.
Anyway, being a female myself who likes things which are usually preferred by males (so living in male-dominated environments all my life) I am used to all this sexist talk and it does not make my blood boil anymore like it did when I was a teenager. Oh and by the way: I have never accepted the help of my fellow male-truckers in filling the tank or coupling/uncoupling trailers but always ‘thanked them’ for offering.
remember a few years ago delivering to asda and my God this driver could of been a bloody model… I went home that night and gave the wife a right ploughing!!
but the most frustrating thing is the way tge planners favout them giving them easy runs etc. Oh yes you are welcome to them. At some places they won’t e tertain thdm at all. I know of 3 firms that apply simple tests to avoid employing them. For instance one asks them to demonstrate their sheeting technique. I have not met a woman yet who can throw a taup over a load.