Good News, Bad News – Life Gets Real

There are lots of jokes that begin with “Well, I have good news and I have bad news – which do you want first?” That is the way of real life too, which has a way of progressing in this oh, so symmetrical way. Because this blog is not a democracy, I will get to decide on which one I lead with. So, . . . .

Let’s start with the good news. After spending the last several months as “a new guy” at my job, I have finally reached a place where I have gotten a regular route (which the world of trucking calls “a bid”). Up to now, my schedule has been on a week-to-week basis. They have done a good job at keeping me on nights, but “nights” can stretch in one of two directions.

I have preferred “early nights”, which start in late afternoon and finish in the pre-dawn hours, to “late nights” that start in early evenings and run until mid-morning the next day. I have never been one to sleep late, so “late nights” have been a challenge for me in getting as much sleep as I would like.

Now I have a schedule that includes almost everything I want. I now work Sunday through Thursday nights, with Friday and Saturday off each week. I still get the variety I have come to enjoy, with a bid that covers other drivers’ nights off. Sunday night is Cincinnati and Terre Haute. Monday-Tuesday is Lafayette and Fort Wayne, and Wednesday-Thursday is Bloomington and Fort Wayne. The first three nights are “early nights” and the last two shift about two hours later, which is do-able for me.

The other good news is that I can now count on a ton of hours, because each of my five days is between twelve and thirteen work hours, which is just under the Federally mandated fourteen hour maximum work day. This sounds like a lot, but it is probably what I was working before as a lawyer, except that I was never very good at squeezing it all into just five days. And now, all of them are “billable” instead of just some of them in my old life. Still, it is an old farming expression to “make hay while the sun shines”. I am at an age were my sunny, income-earning days are limited, so I figure that now is the time to take full advantage.

But those hours kind of lead me into my bad news – I don’t have a lot of leisure time, especially during the week. This is affecting my blog time and my methods of finding “creative time” to spend at the keyboard. I can now see how many times I would have a flash of inspiration, which would cause me to drop what I was doing and bang out a few hot paragraphs, or maybe jump down one of way-too-many rabbit holes to research some oddball topic of interest. I still have those flashes of inspiration, but they tend to come while I am looking through a windshield and am physically unable to type anything. 

Also, with a publish date/time of Friday morning, this requires most of my writing to happen over my free Friday and Saturday time – something that is a challenge for this long-time practitioner of the art of procrastination. 

In case you were wondering if my bad news was going to involve a cessation of this blog, that is not where I am. At least now now. But I am going to have to work on changing my ways as I move forward, so that I don’t have so many looming deadlines with blank computer screens, and can keep a tolerably high level of quality (at least that is what I think I have been doing, let me know if I am in error).

These are, I will admit, “first world problems”. And even these are swamped by getting to make a good living doing something I enjoy. As I type this, I am within an hour of it being “time to make the donuts” (as the old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial went). Or maybe time to “follow the dog” (as the photo with a view from the driver’s seat demonstrates). So with that, we will consider another blog post in the can to go live as I haul your mail.

29 thoughts on “Good News, Bad News – Life Gets Real”

  1. Jim, this is completely understandable. Your ability to keep the blog going with your new career is impressive. Don’t worry; your quality has not suffered, at least in my opinion.

    You are not alone in having to ignore the sparks of inspiration due to other tasks being at hand. There is another website in which you’ve seen my name…due to life, I have lost many more inspirations than have been utilized these last few years.

    What about the ability to transcribe thoughts onto your phone, all converted into text for use later? Just an odd thought that popped into my head.

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    • Cell phone use while driving is a big no-no at my company. It is all I can do to keep a nav screen up and an audio book going. But maybe one of those little digital recorders would be a good idea.

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  2. I have to say the “set” work schedule seems to be the gold standard today. I worked in the early years for studios where I was literally always on the clock, even tho it was a salaried position. And by on the clock, I mean it could have been between 60 and 70 hours a week, with virtually zero free time. This extended right on into me owning my own business. By the time the handwriting was on the wall for my industry, I took an in house job, and was surprised by the amount of free time I generated by having a “real” job with defined hours, even tho as a salaried senior manager, I very often worked longer than normal.

    When I see what the “kids” around me are doing for employment, I don’t know how they can run their lives. Many don’t have two days off in a row per week, or any set work schedules. They could be working one day from noon to whenever, or from seven am to whenever; or half of what they thought they would be working, and then told they’re off the clock for the day. I don’t know how they can accomplish anything, and for the most part, it seems that these types of work schedules are there primarily to keep a person off-kilter enough to keep them from finding other employment! Once again, glad I’m retired and currently, not looking for work. The one advantage to having not made much money and living on the scuffle in a creative field for most of my life, is exactly that, and in retirement I hardly need anything to live.

    Good luck with the new work schedule, as with everything, a few weeks after starting it, the “off times” will become apparent as you get into the rhythm.

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    • I see all of the kids working at (what seem to me to be) dead-end jobs and weird hours and I wonder why more of them don’t go into driving or trades, that will pay them SO much more money. I think those kinds of jobs have developed a stigma among younger people, that only the dumb/low-class guys work jobs like those. I am old enough to remember when some of the smartest guys I knew worked in blue-collar fields. The good news for me is that there are lots of opportunities for trade-offs between long hours and the pay that go with them, and less taxing hours. I may be very read to dial back on hours once I become eligible for social security, but that is still a couple of years off.

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      • I think over the last 40 years or so, the colleges and unis have done a stunning job promoting their idea of how you should live, thereby demonizing other opportunities. Make no mistake that educated blue collar also paid to have their baby-boomer kids get college degrees so that they could have “clean” jobs, at least the autodidactic German blue collar workers certainly did! This has been so successful, that many times the automatic scanning system used for resume acceptance in corporate hr departments “game” themselves based on multiple college degree entries, and a person with a single degree but a massive amount of deep experience can get eliminated from consideration. And people just shrug about this stuff! When I used to talk with my nephews about their futures, I used to tell them that any job done on a computer can be sent anywhere, put you can’t send your house to China to get rewired or replumbed…

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    • You have always done a far better job of building a buffer of publishable posts than I have. I guess I am just a more successful procrastinator. 🙂 Now maybe I need to work to emulate your skill in advance planning.

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  4. Unless you go silent for say, six months, I eagerly await your next post. It’s the ones who inexplicably disappear for months at a time and then suddenly reappear, that are suspect bloggers. I have no doubt you’ll come up with plenty in the weeks and months ahead – whether jazz music, baby-boomer products, or on-the-road-again musings. As for this post, thanks for the photo explanation towards the end. I had to go back up top for a second look, thinking it was a simple latch of some sort!

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    • The thing is, writing these blog posts is one of the more enjoyable things I do, so I would really hate to cut back. I guess the key is to “work smarter”, as they say. Or as they said in the 80’s, anyway.

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  5. I work in software. My premise is software is a made-up, fake job. If one good EMP can wipe out my entire professional career’s output, it’s not a skill with real impact.

    The really important people in society can’t do their jobs from home: Trash collectors, waitresses pouring coffee, guys stocking the shelves at the grocery stores… The real jobs that make a real difference are usually invisible.

    Like guys driving trucks delivering all those things. Dodge artfully on the roads, JP.

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    • That was my mental struggle with insurance litigation law for a long time. I finally made peace with the idea that my contribution to society was to be on the team that cleans up the messes that are made while everyone goes about a productive life. Physically hauling loads of mail from point A to point B is a job that is much easier to take some satisfaction in doing.

      I do see some craziness on the roads. Fortunately, my company is really big on safety and insists that I drive no faster than the speed limit, keeping at least 8-12 seconds of following distance between me and traffic ahead. Pilots love altitude, truckers love (or at least should love) following distance. Those who tailgate other drivers are idiots, or are working for companies that put them at risk.

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      • Yep, following distance is a nice thing to have… but it’s hard to keep when people like to put their rear bumpers under your front one. I’m often astounded at people who seem to want to drive in my trunk — and it’s not like I’m a fan of speed limits.

        I often joke, when having a bad day, I should go get a job digging ditches. Then I’m like, “I’ve been working software for 20 years, I’m not qualified to dig ditches”. I definitely don’t hold my view to be anything other than personal; I merely shared them as an introduction to why I hold the “real workers” with the esteem I do.

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      • The driving system we are taught (The Smith System) holds that the only way to maintain a safe following distance is to drive slower than the flow of traffic. People still cut in, but then they pull away from you because they are going faster. Also, Indiana’s speed limit for trucks is 5 mph below the 70 mph limit for cars, so this helps too.

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      • I often (not always) employ this same approach in my car. I’ll peg the speedo at 70 and let everyone go around. I call it “the 70 mph trick”.

        I’m no saint: I have my moments where I just want to go (Normally sparked by other people refusing to do so).

        But I’ve found this works really well here in CO. Interesting to find it has an actual name.

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  6. It can be difficult to maintain a blog when life is going on but I hope you will continue, even if you have to modify the schedule of it some. I know you don’t have any plans of it now but, just in case…
    It makes me happy to think about how you have taken this plunge and are enjoying it. It will all sift through after a while and everything will fall into place.

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    • Some of the first (and best) advice I took from an experienced blogger was to keep to a schedule. It has been the kind of discipline I have needed, or else I might have quit long ago.

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  8. Don’t stop! After finding Curbside Classics and then your blog it’s so refreshing to see and read commentaries about real people and lives like our own. My son’s parallel path from stressful job to trucker comes to mind. I retired from public utilities and now I’m my church’s facility manager, unpaid, quite busy and interesting in its variety.
    One of my boys drove a truck in the early 90s and was supposed to log his mileage when crossing state lines. He wasn’t very good at it. I gave him a voice activated recorder so that he could just pick it up and speak the miles. It worked, along with some salty language about other drivers. I recommend using a voice activated recorder to capture your thoughts for later. It works surprisingly well.

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    • Glad to count you among the readers here!

      The digital recorder idea is a good one. My phone is off limits for this purpose per company safety rules, but a recorder that can be operated by feel without looking at it might work well.

      A post-career job has a lot to recommend it!

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    • Thanks, Neil. Yes, after 38 years, I had reached a point of being completely burned out in my insurance-centric law career.

      Yes, the long hours leave me physically tired by the end of the week, but this beats the way I was mentally and emotionally tired most of the time before.

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    • Haha, thanks for providing the compliment for which I was so ardently fishing. And actually, I wish I could keep up with the cleverness of your stellar output.

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  11. As far as “bad news” goes, this could be a lot worse. The good news of having an interesting job that you’re not burned-out with far outweighs the bad here, though I’m sure that diminished time to write must be mighty frustrating. I know that my own time management has gotten worse in the past few years, and I have a largely regular work schedule. Whatever you can manage to write, I’ll be eager to read it.

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  12. That’s interesting that you don’t have the same route daily JP. I guess I thought that was how it worked and I have wondered if you had more mail to haul as it is the height of the Christmas card and package season. In fact, today on the news listeners were warned it was the absolute last day to ship packages by postal mail. I remember you once commented to me you had stored up a few posts to just polish up and finalize, but I guess that supply has dwindled. Why not get a dictaphone to carry with you and when you have a few spare minutes or can grab the dictaphone when an idea emerges on a break or if you arrive early at your destination and just dictate the gist of a post for later? Well we readers understand and will forgive you for less postings – after all you gifted us with double postings when you posted your car history. 🙂

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    • Thanks Linda – you and some others have mentioned the recorder idea and it’s a good one.

      I have discovered that the Christmas rush shows up mostly in traffic bottlenecks at large postal terminals, where I have waited up to two hours after arriving for an available dock to back up to. My company has to assign guys to take my trailer during an extended wait so I can start on my second trip. That should be over after another week.

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      • I hope that works for you JP. Inspiration comes in a flash and I often think of a fun headline when I am out walking and figure I’ll write it down when I get home, but then I can’t remember it. One more week of postal delivery mayhem for all involved. My carrier has an 11-mile-route and he’s still delivering packages (not regular mail) when I return from walking at 10:00 a.m.

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