The trucker’s lifestyle issomething of a time and motion study – where your time is going, where you are going.
There are more than 3 million of you delivering America’s needs. The public guesses who you are, regularly building wildly inaccurate images from sources as diverse as urban myth and Hollywood sensationalism. But what does the pubic really know about who you are and how you live your life? What do you know?
“Truckers must have the ability to work in isolation, to exercise self-restraint, to be self-motivating and to maintain self confidence while enduring stressful highway conditions, boredom, loneliness and fatigue,” says researcher and professor of industrial/organizational psychology Sheryl Youngblood of Marywood University.
Being away from home for long periods, sitting in the seat of a tractor through long, stressful working hours and sleeping in the bunk of a sleeper shift after shift – not to mention eating foods that aren’t always lovingly home-prepared or made with a minimum of bad stuff and a maximum of good stuff – take their toll.
But research shows that for all the hurdles they face, America’s truck drivers are a well-adjusted, professional, safe and hard-working group of people from all backgrounds who have built good, productive lives and satisfying long-distance relationships through dedication and responsibility.
Different drivers handle the challenge of an on-the-road/off-the-road life in different ways. For many, family life is a decompression chamber, a place to recharge batteries. Others have their own, quirky ways to shake off the road. Veteran CRST Flatbed driver Roque Courvillion pushes his red ’97 W900L hard all over the country for almost all of the year. But every fall, he says, “I go off by myself for two weeks, and I usually don’t see anyone at all. The driving life is hard, and it loads you up with all sorts of stresses. I go out alone and live in the woods and find myself; I feel like the real me again and not someone who has been changed by the pressures of the road. I feel good and I can start clean again.”
Who you are
About 80 percent of owner-operators are married, and more than a third have children living at home, according to a new survey by Overdrive magazine. Truckers News found that 47 percent of all drivers have a high school degree, 38 percent have a technical or associate degree or some college in their background and 6 percent have bachelor’s degrees.
