Keep on Trucking//Job for a Day
I feel like it would be interesting to work as a long-haul truck driver. I certainly don’t think I could do truck driving for a long period of time, because the monotony of driving on the interstate would drive me insane, but I do think it would be interesting to experience the dimension of logistics that transports goods from one location to the next in a massive vehicle that towers over other cars on the road.
I also interact with truck drivers and trucking companies on a daily basis, so I feel like being a truck driver for a day would be nice to have their perspective on shipping, since as an end recipient of goods I feel it’s easy to forget the difficulty of maneuvering an 18-wheel monstrosity through urban landscapes to ensure the wheels of the economy keep spinning efficiently.
Obviously, it’s not really one of those jobs that you can really do for just one day, since it takes quite a while to learn. At least in the States, it’s required to have a CDL license. Plus, from what I’ve read about the trucking industry, there also seems to be other barriers of entry, such as leasing the truck from various logistics companies, dealing with outdated regulations on how much/long a driver can drive before having to take a break that often times don’t depend on common sense or any sound reasoning, among other numerous issues that I’m not aware of.
I also feel as if being a long-haul truck driver would be incredibly lonely. I know some couples do it, and even some truckers bring their pets along with them. But my wife gets horrible motion sickness when we drive in the city for more than 30 minutes, so I’m certain that eliminates any possibility of us having an on-the-road-trucking-sort of marriage. And, like I mentioned previously, I feel like to drive for hundreds of miles would get repetitive and boring after a while. Especially since the States are so sprawling, and most cities kinda look the same. Same brands, same types of people, same billboards. Sure, there are small regional differences here and there, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I feel like traveling through most cities in the States wouldn’t be absolutely boring after the first couple of weeks. I’m not really an open-road sort of person.
The other issue I would probably have with being a truck driver would be the wait times of loading and unloading that aren’t paid. From my understanding, and I admit I could definitely be wrong about this, but most truck drivers are paid by the mile, so when they’re waiting for their chassis to be loaded at the port or unloaded at its destination, they’re not getting paid. It’s bad enough having a salaried job in which I’m paid the same amount whether I work 40 hours or if I work 60 hours, but the sheer amount of time that truckers spend in limbo between jobs of not being paid would suck.
Another job I would find interesting to do for a day would be an engineer, but mostly because the definition of an engineer is so broad that I could do almost anything and technically be referred to as an ‘engineer’. Kinda like entrepreneur, it seems like an engineer is a catchall job title that would provide me the liberty to do anything at all and have the title.
Though, in terms of jobs I wish I was qualified to do for more than just one day, I would have to say astrophysicist. I think that would be a really interesting field to be in, since technology is constantly changing and new parts of the universe are being discovered at breakneck speed. But alas, I did not study physics in college. Hell, I didn’t even study any sciences at college, other than a really basic core science class that seemed to be modeled after a 9th grade biology class in elementary the information was, which made sense considering that it was a science class for a bunch of liberal arts students that studied soft majors, like theatre, literature, and music.
This discussion reminds me that I was definitely not qualified at 18 to make any decisions about what my career path would look like, nor the types of things I would study. When I got to college, I was basically told to study something that I enjoyed, and at the time the thing I enjoyed the most was reading, which is still true, but the types of things and topics I enjoy reading has expanded over time. And reading about physics and biology, especially octopuses, are the types of topics that I find myself reading about most of the time. I still read fiction and poetry, and such, but in terms of career choices, if I had a conversation with my younger teenage self, I would try to convince me that going into the sciences would have been the better long-term bet.
Fred Aiken Writing 