- Time away from home. If you choose to be an over-the-road driver, you will almost certainly be away from home 80% of the time, if not more. With some companies, you will be out on the road two, three, or even four weeks at a time. Even after being out this long, your time at home may only be for a few hours, or you may be in for a few days, depending on company policy and the need to cover a load.
Long working hours
If you ask people in most professions how many hours a week they work, they may overestimate the number of hours of honest work they do. For instance, they normally have a certain number of breaks with pay, and they may conveniently forget about the time they spend visiting with coworkers or pursuing personal interests while at work.
This is not to say that there are not many workers in other fields who work long hours- there are. The difference for drivers is that any time spent visiting with another driver over a cup of coffee or any other time that the truck is stopped for personal reasons only delays the completion of the driver's job because no miles are being covered.
When asked how many hours they have worked, especially by a person in a position of authority, a driver may underestimate the amount of actual hours worked.
You can legally log approximately 60 hours a week, and in many cases, you will need to use all of them, but you will almost certainly work more than 60 hours to do this. These 60 hours includes driving, vehicle inspections, fueling, loading, unloading, waiting to load or unload, and any other time spent on duty.
This makes it seem that you can only work 60 hours a week, however, many companies will pressure you to only show the minimums required by the DOT (Department of Transportation) for all non-driving hours as well as requiring you to show the maximum average speed allowed by the DOT to keep the number of logged hours to a minimum, thereby making it possible for you to run more miles or handle more loads in a set period of time.
It is questionable for a company to require this type of logging, but some companies will pressure you into making these creative logbook entries. Nothing official may be said to you, but you will soon enough see how the system works.
These considerations make it highly likely that you will actually work 70-80 hours a week, while claiming to work only 60. Here again, increased law-enforcement is making it harder for both the trucking companies and their drivers to get away with this, so this situation may improve with time as it already has among many of the large carriers. Earning a good wage and running legal should not be mutually exclusive.
No set schedule. It can be an advantage not to have a set schedule if you are the type of person who is capable of and likes to set your own schedule and work under minimum supervision. However, your schedule is also determined by many other factors and people.
There are obviously appointments with shippers and receivers to be kept, but you may also have to change your schedule to allow for rush-hour traffic around major cities, bad weather, road construction, tourist traffic, permit restrictions if hauling an oversize load, and numerous other contingencies.
There will be times when a shipper or receiver will delay you most of the day, but you will still be required to be several hundred miles down the road by the next morning. After they get you loaded, the warehouse people will go have a beer, but your productive work day will have just begun.
