It's a Team's Life

Forks in the Road

As I am aging, I can look back in time and clearly see a fork in the road, and sometimes I made a right decision, sometimes a bad choice, and other times I meandered around until I found myself.

One path that to me is pretty clear is attending truck shows, safety meetings, or business seminars.  Trucking is a complicated business, and we can bury our heads in the sand and go about doing what we have always done and have no clue if it is right or wrong or we can work diligently to learn all we can. 

Choosing to haul that next load might seem like a right decision but is it really?  We have a lot of safety events that are sponsored by the company we are leased on with.  Each time we choose to attend a safety meeting we learn a little more about how to protect ourselves and to ensure we continue to run a safe and compliant profitable business. 

At our last truck show, we attended two safety meetings sponsored by the company we are leased on with.  Each day we learned more about the complications of using personal conveyance and saw a couple of videos were a dash cam saved drivers careers.  Events that we would never have thought of happening out here is discussed and we can protect ourselves. Will they ever happen to us?  Who knows but we will have our dash cam in place and running.  We also know better how to use and not use personal conveyance to not get logging violations. 

Can we learn from Social Media? Yes, and we do learn all of the time, but there is a caveat.

Some information gained from social media or speaking directly to another driver needs to be taken with a grain of salt or filtered to decide what is fact and what is the agenda of the person talking.  When we listen to the radio hosts, and their speakers are they selling something or is what they are speaking about a sponsored product on their show?  If they are talking about how we should drive the truck, eat each day, or workout each day, have they even driven a truck or understand that sometimes it just doesn’t work out to go to the gym every day?

When leased on to a company we have found there are FMCSA trucking regulations, and there are company regulations, and it is to our best interest to know both.  Attending truck shows and meeting with the representatives from our company helps us to understand our companies’ rules better and to comply with them.

Truck Shows and company sponsored safety events are a win-win for everyone that attends.  Choosing the right fork in the road will keep our career on the right path.

Bob & Linda Caffee

TeamCaffee

Saint Louis MO

Expediters since January 2005

[email protected]

Expediting isn't just trucking, it's a lifestyle;

Expediting isn't just a lifestyle, it's an adventure;

Expediting isn't just an adventure, it's a job;

Expediting isn't just a job, it's a business.