After being home for more than a week I go back to work tomorrow. I’m going to Los Angeles to pick up a trailer, bring it back to Vegas and move Mama Mia out of Mandalay Bay and take it back to Yonkers, NY for storage.
While I enjoyed being home, I couldn’t really enjoy it because I’m not working and not making money to stop worrying about the bills. The holidays are over and everyone should be back to work, ordering stuff and shipping stuff, but they’re not. After talking to a couple of other owners, it’s really bad out there. Even though with the new company I get paid between loads, it’s doesn’t make the truck payment. If the economy could have lasted another year, we would have been okay, but it didn’t and we’ll survive.
Tired of hearing about clean red widgets? After the 20th, I’m turning Obscure Mania into a anything but trucking blog and you won’t see another word about clean red widgets (I’m in third). Computers, gadgets, XP, Vista, Linux, Networking, politics and anything else I can come up with. I’m keeping Adventures as strictly trucking and will still be updating about trucking stuff here and Life on the Road. I would really like to get this online stuff to start making more money. It would be great to make the truck and trailer payments, but that’s not happening right now.
I was putting other kinds of posts here, but they just seemed out of place. They’re still here, but if someone finds one in a search engine they are redirected to the same post on Obscure Mania. I haven’t changed the theme yet but it will probably look a little like Adventures.
Trucking is Fantastic!
Maybe another word that starts with F but probably not fantastic. Honestly, trucking is too depressing right now. People I know are filing bankruptcy and losing their trucks. No one has enough work, even those that are working, it’s barely enough to survive and the outlook doesn’t look much better. Even if the economy does magically recover, it will take trucking a while to catch up. So far, all the plans I’ve heard are only going to prolong the inevitable. If Cindy wasn’t working full time right now, I’m not sure what we’d be doing.
Obama and Lincoln?
What’s with Obama and Abraham Lincoln? Doesn’t he know Lincoln was Republican? Once he gets into office he can’t be like FDR coming up with all sorts of plans for the government to help. Europe doesn’t call the Great Depression the Great Depression, because for them it was only a depression. Europe and the rest of the world came out of the depression long before the US did, thanks to the government trying to fix something they should just stay out of.
Things are fantastic for me to – NOT – I just picked up (Tues. night) a 3 stop load from Charlotte NC to Chicago that finals out in Norfolk NE – MONDAY AFTERNOON the 12th! They needed an entire 48 foot trailer – because there are 3 little cardboard boxes, 3 little crates and an HVAC unit the size of the one on the side of your house. The dial on my dash shows that I’m carrying NO weight. You might have read my paycheck last week was $125. This week its $465! Thank goodness I don’t own the truck. I made more money 30 years ago working for my father as a messenger boy.
What in the world are you talking about? Europe and the rest of the world didn’t come out of the Great Depression until the early to mid 1950s, and it was largely US assistance in the form of the Marshall Plan that did it.
And the US stayed in the Depression longer than it should have because it didn’t do enough in the way of stimulus spending. WWII ended up being our stimulus spending though.
People with your thinking really amaze me. Your profession is going to shite, the trucking companies are nickeling and diming their drivers, and ripping off thousands more with these shady lease to own scams, and the thing you fear is government action?
It was the massive deregulation started in the Reagan administration that is largely responsible for the deplorable working conditions in which you now find yourself. In other words, government ‘staying out of it’.
The late 50′s? No, I’ve heard from too many sources that the only Great Depression was in the US. Europe and the rest of the world came out long before the US.
I’m sure AT&T was upset when their monopoly was disbanded too. The problem with trucking TODAY, is the pay per mile and the trucking companies and brokers that need more enforcement of the current laws, not new stupid laws for drivers and idiotic regulations that force the truck makers to send to market crap pollution controls that aren’t ready.
More regulation isn’t needed, but more enforcement is.