Driver Lifestyles

Five Challenges of Expediting

When we started expediting, my wife Diane and I had no trucking experience whatsoever. That gave us some challenges to overcome. I'm writing about those challenges today to help non-truckers know what they'll face if they jump in.

We've now been at it almost a year, in a fleet owner's truck. Our first month was more difficult than expected. Once we caught on, expediting turned out to be better than we dared hope. We love it and aren't looking back.

Challenge 1: Sleep Management

Expediters work all hours of the day or night. Teams may drive non-stop in shifts for days at a time on a cross-country run. That means sleeping in a moving truck. Or, you may have several runs back-to-back that interrupt normal sleep patterns.

Life got easier when we made sleep our number one priority. Whenever we feel even a little tired, we lie down to sleep. That keeps us fully alert when we're awake. The groggy feeling some truckers warned us about does not exist in our lives.

We make sure that at all times, at least one of us has had enough sleep to safely drive for five hours. The other can then sleep while the truck is rolling and be ready to drive in turn. If we're both tired, we take ourselves out of service and go to sleep.

Sometimes life improves not because you change your circumstances, but because you change your mind. Expediting got easier for us when we abandoned forever the notion that you work days and sleep nights. In expediting you work when there's freight to haul.

Challenge 2: Co-driver Relations

We thought we had a good relationship when we started expediting. Today we still do. But we hope to never again go through the relationship stresses of our first thirty days in a truck. Uf-dah!

Wannabee couples should know that if you become expediters, your relationship will be tested in ways you cannot now predict. The good news is many couples pass the test. Some of the most in-love couples on earth are criss-crossing the nation in trucks.

Challenge 3: Navigation

In my home area, freeway exits have two exit ramps, one on each side of a bridge. In some states only one ramp exits the freeway that will later split in two directions. I drove past a few of those before catching on.

Some states have truck-only speed limits, others don't. When you wake up in a new state and it's your turn to drive, can you turn right on red or not?

Some roads have "jug handles" for making left turns from the right lane. In New York City the parkways are inviting but trucks are prohibited. You'll receive local directions like, "Go East on South" meaning South Street, or, "Take Exit 6" when it was renamed Exit 214 years ago.

In New Jersey, the line, "Go six miles past Northwest" makes perfect sense if you understand Northwest is a city name. If you don't know that, it will drive you nuts. In Washington D.C., some one-way streets change directions twice a day!

Going to strange addresses in strange cities is a daily expediter event. Having been at it a while and now using a GPS program, our navigation stress has all but disappeared. Now it's fun to go someplace new and add that area to the places we know.

We still get lost every now and then but it's not the stressful event it used to be. We've learned how to quickly recognize (admit) we're lost and get back on track.

Challenge 4: Going To The Bathroom

It's late evening as I write this. We're parked at a loading dock in Boston where we'll deliver at 8:00 AM tomorrow. The building is closed. No restroom is near.

Before parking here, we stopped at a 24-hour grocery store, ate a deli-food supper (fresh produce...yum!), and sat in the lot 'til bed time. We used the grocery store rest rooms before leaving for the loading dock. That will hold us 'til morning.

I refuse to pee in the streets or a bottle like some truckers do. My female co-driver is not even equipped for such acts. Public restrooms are often available but not always. They're usually clean enough. If not, we pass them by.

Expediters must think ahead to manage the basic tasks that are taken for granted at home. Where will you sleep? Where will you eat? Where will you pee? The answers to these questions change hour by hour. Showers are a challenge too, but not among our top 5.

Challenge 5: The Daily Details

While load offers are routine events today, they were anything but when we first began. Most everything expediters need to know comes into play with every load.

Required tasks include: operate your Qualcomm unit and understand its codes, utilize load bars and ratchet straps, complete a pre-trip inspection, back up to a loading dock, complete log books, complete a bill of lading, and much more.

If you enter the trade with no trucking experience, everything will be new. It will hit you all at once with your very first load. There's no way to ease into it.

As newbies, we recognized our ignorance and selected fleet owners with strong coaching skills. In the beginning we called them several times a day, each time we encountered something new, no matter how trivial it was. They were great. They happily took our calls at all hours of the day and night. We mastered the tasks in less than a month.

Many of today's successful expediters started years ago with no previous truck driving experience. If expediting has captured your interest but you've never driven a truck before, it's possible to jump in and succeed just the same. If you arrange for good coaching before you start, you'll be ahead of the game with your very first load.

Phil Madsen can be reached at [email protected]