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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   732 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 22, 2026

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One Year in the Trucking Office

Well, it’s been 11 months, but the company sent me my one year pin, so close enough I guess. Things are going reasonably well. The job can be a lot (24/7 on call, but luckily most of my drivers aren’t vampires and we don’t do that much weekend work.), but I don’t hate it, I’m not terrible at it, and hopefully I’ll be getting a raise fairly soon, so that’s nice. I was recently interviewed for a promotion, but turned it down because it was completely out of my wheelhouse (an IT job, when I have no real IT experience/qualifications/desire to do it for a living, nor am I interested in moving to Craptown, Mississippi, but I appreciate the opportunity. Apparently my name came up because scuttlebutt around the corporate office is that I’m smart and can be taught things). The good news there is that I discussed it beforehand with the corporate operations guy and he told me that there was no wrong answer: take the corporate gig if you want it but you will be promoted, and soon if you stay in the trucking division. Apparently the VP of trucking is relieved that I chose to stay, and I know that my boss is. The learning curve was steep for a few months when my workload went from nonexistent to running day to day operations more or less overnight, but it’s not a terrible workload as much as it is inconsistent, unpredictable, and frequently frustrating.

This will soon degenerate into a bunch of unfocused observations/musings about the job in the form of bullet points, but I will elaborate on my boss. We met when I was a barback and he was a customer at the bar I worked at, and he’s the one who tipped me off about the job some years later. We work in a small terminal, but have our own offices. He’s kind of lazy, infuriatingly bad with details (I tell him we need insurance cards, and he asks for registration cards, or he forgets to ask me if we can cover something before making a promise.), and occasionally ill tempered (He’s short tempered but gets over it quickly, while I’m more patient but less forgiving.) but pretty easygoing (just show up before 8AM!). We get along and complement each other well, and he has talents worthy of respect. He has a nose for company politics, a talent for self-promotion (and he says great things about me to his bosses!), and is a genuine people person. He’d kill it in sales (and I believe he will be promoted into that at some point), and I believe that really does respect me. I may joke about some some annoying quirks (he *cannot multitask/pay attention to more than one thing at a time, and he likes to have Fox News on all day), but we all have quirks and my read on the situation is that he has coattails worth following. Apparently we’ve cultivated a reputation for doing well among people that matter.

  • Dispatching tanker trucks is different than food delivery drivers. It’s not as fast paced, but you have to think in a 3-7 day window and there are a lot more details that can get you. Not all tanks can haul all products/deliver to all places, not all drivers know how to do everything, and certain products can’t be cleaned at the average tank wash. Speaking of tank washes, many of them suck and while most things in trucking work 24/7, tank washes (and repair shops!) do not. Most of them are closed on weekends/holidays.
  • From someone with a decent (if non-professional) background dealing with cars, the quality of the semi trucks (and trailers!) we deal with is surprisingly poor in comparison. Maybe other manufacturers suck less, but PACCAR (aka. Peterbilt and Kenworth, like Chevy and GMC are both built by GM) is like some bad stereotype of 70s domestic cars. Get a brand new truck? Better get ready to take that piece of shit straight to the shop to get the kinks worked out, and truck dealers aren’t any more fun to deal with than their automotive counterparts. I understand that diesel emissions tech is, shall we say, undercooked at the moment, but the amount of failures I see on trucks from stupid components that rarely break on cars boggles the mind. I just had a ‘24 model have to have the gear selector switch and fuel sending unit replaced because both failed. One of our new ‘26 models had its engine explode at 20K miles. I’m sending another brand new ‘26 to the shop tomorrow because the air compressor is bad. Pretty much all of our trucks leak coolant, usually from the APUs, and getting this actually fixed seems to be impossible. We just received an allotment of brand new trailers and the hydraulic hand pumps have a ~50% failure rate. NEW doubles as an acronym, “Never Ever Worked”.
  • Our software is...not great, and in many ways significantly worse than the software I used dispatching for a small Doordash clone. Doing payroll is very time consuming because nothing is automated and every line item on every driver's check has to be added manually. For some reason beyond my comprehension our software does not send the addresses of the shipper and receiver to the driver's ELD, so I have to manually look these up on my phone and text it to them.
  • I don’t have a CDL and have never driven anything bigger than a small U-haul, but I haven’t had any issue with that with the drivers. I’m up front about that, tell them that I’ll be honest with them when I screw up, I can’t promise them that they’ll never have a bad week but I’ll do my best to make sure that every week isn’t a bad week, etc. and it seems to work out okay. As one put it, “You haven’t driven a truck, but you have a brain and you listen to us.”.
  • As for the drivers themselves, we have a mostly solid crew: a few great ones I couldn’t run the terminal without, more that have flaws but are serviceable, and a few divas (At least the diva who unnecessarily blows up my phone is decent conversation, and he rolls with the punches when plans constantly change.) and stains (I hope that my worst stain is about to leave before safety fires him, and I hope he goes to a doctor and gets a fucking CPAP before he dies at 45, because I do like the guy. I just wish he would get his shit together.). Our new hire worries me. The trainer likes him but he doesn’t strike me as being overly bright or having a sense of urgency. Hopefully he’s just being cautious as a new guy and proves my intuitions wrong.
  • Trucking has some of the fattest employees I’ve ever seen, and the offices are far from immune. It’s here that I’ve learned that GLP-1s are not a miracle for everyone. Many are afraid to take them and some have quit them due to finding the side effects intolerable. That said, one of our dispatchers lost over 100lbs and completely turned his life around on them. Our biggest success story (and this is what success often looks like when dealing with morbid obesity, not a perfect ending but a significant, life improving improvement) managed to drop from 470 to 290lbs (The first guy is tall and the second is not, but 290 with controlled diabetes and hypertension is still a lot better than 470 and near death’s door.).
  • A lot of our drivers are also older, so between obesity and old age we have a lot of diabetics, sleep apnea, etc. You do not want your blood pressure or A1C to be high enough that the DOT fails your physical, but it happens. One of my more reliable guys is out on FMLA because he just had heart surgery. Mercifully, after some form wrangling he will be paid his short-term disability. Our health insurance is decent, but it’s still United Healthcare and he’s currently freaking out about his insurance saying that his hospital stay for chest pain was “not medically necessary” as I reassure him that they’re shooting from the hip and denying everything, the hospital’s billing department will fight them, and they may or may not have goofed up the initial claims paperwork.
  • Trucking is a hard job, and being an owner-operator can be more rewarding but also financial ruin if you’re not mechanically inclined, bad with money, or go into it without enough capital. Seeing an owner-op drown is depressing. Winter sucks, and a lot of our drivers are afraid of snow, problematic given how much of our freight goes up north. In my experience the midwest is much better at dealing with snow than the east coast, but my understanding is that this last winter was unusually bad for them.
  • Nobody wants to go to NYC (or Philly, Connecticut, etc.), I don’t want to deadhead someone eight hours east to pick up a load going to New York where it’s hard to get a backhaul, and I really don’t want to send them there with a product that’s difficult to get washed. Naturally, our backhaul department has lots of loads from the Georgia coast heading to the NYC area with a hard to clean product, and to my perpetual frustration the terminal we opened in coastal Georgia has been slow to ramp up, so I’m still being asked to cover loads from there.
  • As much as I’m grateful that I don’t have to deal with freight brokering, our backhaul department, aka. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, are frequently incompetent and a pain in the ass (but a necessary evil, because they aren’t going to be fired and it’s worth eating some of their shit when they hook my guys up with nice runs). Speaking of backhauls, most of the freight out of my terminal runs on dedicated trailers, so while the rates are good the lack of backhaul opportunities really hurts how much money I can make those guys, and the longer runs can soak up a full workweek. Some of our other terminals’ dispatching is a train wreck, but some of them are well run or at least reasonably put together, and it’s nice to have relationships with those guys to keep my trucks rolling. I’m personally more comfortable having to think, beg, and push because we’re busy than I am telling guys that I don’t have work for them, because I don’t want my guys to be broke.
  • The logistics manager for my biggest local customer is fun to talk to and reasonably forgiving of my screw ups, but can be remarkably inept at, uh, logistics (No, lady, my driver can’t drive 200 miles to pick up a trailer and then 950 miles to a shipper in the same day.) and taking her out for dinner and drinks (on the company dime!) has a habit of turning into a therapy session about her husband and the fact that she needs her hair pulled in bed.
  • Something I’ve learned is that my biggest personal pet peeve is making a mistake out of ignorance. My biggest pet peeve from drivers is being late/barely making it because they started late (If I tell you to pick up the trailer at 11, that doesn’t mean 12:30!), and that goes double if they don’t tell me that they’re going to be late and I find out the hard way. I hate not feeling like I can trust someone to do what they say they’re going to.

What kind of product is hard to clean out of a tank?

Of the stuff we deal with, our main trouble categories are asphalt, latex (If not washed immediately the stuff dries and has to be scraped out of the trailer by hand), and a particular class of water treatment chemical.

The latter isn't regulated as hazmat, but requires a polymer wash and apparently has a habit of expanding upon touching water, which is troublesome for a lot of plumbing systems. Furthermore, many places either prohibit or limit how much of that product can be washed in a given time frame due to wastewater regulations.

a particular class of water treatment chemical

has a habit of expanding upon touching water

That sounds exciting to try to use.

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