Keith A. Hamblin
This Essay published Truckers USA. May, 1996
My childhood dream, besides to become a writer, was to become a truck driver. In 1977 I joined the Army and in January of 1978 my company commander put me in a truck hauling sick troops, mail and chow. I was seventeen at the time and with only a few short breaks, I have since made my living with a steering wheel in my hand.
Trucking is a hard life. If it were not for being trapped by an income I can't seem to find elsewhere, I would walk away from the transportation industry forever.
Things are different now than when I was a kid. It seemed to me back then that most people respected the truckers. To us kids they were heroes. Now the prevalent attitude towards truckers seems to be annoyance at best. In almost every group of people you can find those who will adamantly profess out and out hatred for trucks and drivers.
If we drive slow then we're a royal pain in the neck that shouldn't be allowed on the road. If we drive fast we're stupid S.O.B.s that shouldn't be allowed on the road. Our very livelihoods depend on us maintaining a safe driving record and yet, if there is a truck within a mile of an accident, it is automatically the truckers fault until he can prove his innocence.
There are dispatchers who are constantly on our backs to hurry up. We tell them we are out of hours and we need a shower and some sleep. They say, sleep later, the load is hot.
It is illegal for a dispatcher to force you to run over your legal time limit of 10 hours per day. Every company in the country will adamantly proclaim their respect and strict adherence to the law. But there are still many who will find a way to get rid of a driver who refuses to drive illegally. Most of them get around this problem by paying such a low wage that a guy cannot support his family only working legal hours. They will also write up and eventually get rid of a driver who cannot master the art of making his logs and other paperwork appear legal for the record.
It is real easy for someone to point and say how he hates those dirty, smelly truckers but mister, you just drive a couple miles in our shoes. You try your hand at pulling 80,000 lbs of truck accross the Rocky Mountains. You look up at that steep hill climbing rapidly before you, knowing how hard it is going to be to get over; and building as much speed as you can to make it, and then have some fool in a small car pull out in front of you at the last minute. So what if you have to slam on your brakes and say a hasty prayer to keep from going over the top of him, at least they didn't get stuck behind that slow truck.