There's definitely an element of unrealistic expectations that plays into a lot of the OTR folks' attitudes. I agree 100% there. I think that the downside might not be as nearly as bad as you suggest though. Maybe it was that way at some point in time, but with all of the GPS data and everything else these days, nobody has ever tried to push me to do anything illegal (going on 4 years now). If I say I need ten hours to sleep, then I take ten hours to sleep.
The money has been about what I expected. This year started off like absolute garbage for about three months and it still will be in the neighborhood of $55,000. When you add in that I don't pay income tax on $12-15,000 of it in a given year, the pay is a little better than a lot of people think. When you combine this with the fact that I can take a few weeks off any time I feel like it, for no reason other than that I feel like it, the job works pretty well for a guy like me. For guys with a family it's a whole other ballgame. Unless you just hate being around the wife and kids, I'm not sure that this would be any way to earn a living.
I know that you and I have talked about some of this pay stuff before and after watching your boss' latest video on the web portal there, holy moly. The bitterness about lost wages and such would certainly seem warranted. Seems like a snake oil salesman to me. That whole two-quarter 95% deal is costing me money too, for what it's worth. The fact that the second quarter hit 96% (excluding the charge) reminds of the Michael Keaton movie where they almost made 1,000 cars but came up a little short, so they got nothing from their Japanese bosses.
What I run into out here isn't really bitterness about anything real. It's more a matter of people getting treated rudely by a shipper or a dispatcher and then spending the next day and a half *****ing about it and lying about everything to make the point more dramatic. Those rumors mentioned earlier and the 100's of others that fly around would be a pretty good example. If I need someone to treat me with respect and stroke my ego, I'll hire a shrink. As long as they put the freight in my trailer and hand me a seal, I can take care of the rest. I think that people would have a lot more respect for the way people do this job if so many of my colleagues didn't feel inclined to embellish every story. Maybe not. I don't know.
Anyhow, get out there and ask for one more shipment. I could handle getting my extra retirement contributions back.
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