any truckers on here?

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My job counselor thinks that being a truck driver would be a good job for me. Is anyone on here a truck driver and if so... is it a good job for an aspie?

After I discovered AS, I soon quit my sales type job, and took a year off to paint.
Then I learned to drive a truck and I have been doing it for 2 years now. It is a decent way to earn a living while keeping social interaction to a minimum. The job security is great, and one of the reasons I chose to do this is that I can move just about anywhere and find a job easily.
Sometimes I think that being gone so much has caused me to become more isolated, but I needed a change and I needed a break from office politics and all of that stuff.

I may eventually get a local job, and do that while finishing school.
Driving over the road is fun at times, especially if you haven't seen much of the country, but it can be frustrating, being away from home, and not sure where you are going next, or if you will get home when you want to.

I only work every other week, so I have a lot of time off to do things that are important to me.
I also listen to a lot of audio that I download from the internet, so even when I am driving I can learn about things that interest me.

Probably the most important thing, is to get a job with a good company, and not one that is going to take advantage of you and treat you like you are disposable. There is a lot of turnover in this business for a variety of reasons.

If you could find a local job that pays well, it may very well be a perfect fit for you.

I have a friend who's a truck driver. He really likes it because he doesn't have to interact with people and he gets a lot of time to think. Before he became a truck driver, he had trouble with jobs. He doesn't get along with most people, is very out-spoken, and likes to be alone. I don't know if he's an NT or Aspie, but I think he likes truck driving for reasons that an Aspie might relate to.

I was a tanker truck driver for about a year, driving for one of the big over-the-road trucking companies. I got into it because I liked driving and traveling all over the country, and chose tankers because they looked more challenging than vans and not as much hassle as flatbeds.

Trouble is, when you first start out they team you with another, *more experienced* (not necessarily better) driver, and you are with them 24 hr a day -- I didn't even spend that much time with my wife when I was married! My first partner loved to speed (80-90 mph down a mountain one time); second partner didn't like to take the truck in for maintenance, since he thought he could fix anything himself with a paperclip, a rubberband and some chewing gum. Third partner was better, although one night out in the boonies in a driving rain, he informed me when I woke up to take my shift that he'd had a bad radial keratotomy on his eyes and hadn't been able to see a thing for the last few hours of driving; I tested him by asking to read the next sign we saw, and he couldn't read it until we were right on top of it!

The biggest trouble I had was that I just could not sleep in the truck, which ran 24 hr/day. Besides worrying if the idiot partners were going to kill me, the noisy, uncomfortable environment kept me from getting much rest. After three weeks on the road, I'd come home a zombie, and wouldn't fully recover for about three days, just when it was time to hit the road again.

They finally gave me a job driving solo on regional runs, which I liked much better, but that went sour when for safety reasons I refused to do an overnight run after being awake all day waiting for a dispatch. Then they put me on graveyard shift running locally, shuffling trailers all over town from 5pm to 3am; at that point, I'd had enough of trucking and got a job as a bookmobile driver/assistant (but that's another story).

Sure, at first it was fun seeing the country (I covered 42 states in the 1st six weeks of driving), but half the time it was at night so you couldn't see much. And even though driving the open open road was pretty nice, the traffic and stupid four-wheelers in the cities were stressful and nerve-wracking for me.

I do not consider trucking an honest profession; I chose what I thought was the best, most honest company there was, only to have instructors teaching us how to cheat on our logbooks. As an Aspie, of course, I stuck out from the crowd and came in for a fair share of bullying, too.

Just my $0.02, YMMV ...

The training was not fun, but it was over relatively quickly for me. 20 days total
The trainers were ok, I never really drove while they slept, we just took turns during the day.
I did a lot of research looking for a good company, and I wouldn't be doing this if I had to be gone for three weeks at a time. I think that they probably have some of the best trainers as well.
This company is also strictly legal too, so that is not an issue for me.
As far as bullying, I just don't really ever talk or interact with anyone, so other than the trainers, it isn't an issue for me.
I think the industry has all sorts of problems, but I have a decent deal for now.
Not something I will be doing for the rest of my life probably.

I have a CDL. I went through the training, and finished it. But I didn't like it because the fleet managers were mean to me. I also didn't like the sleeping situation. The company also stationed me in LA, and I cannot stand SOuthern California, even less the LA area. I did like the job security, the travel, and theindependence.

I use my CDL to drive locally now, a bus, and it isn't so bad. But I need more income than a flimsy local driving job. I have three college degrees and 2 years of grad school to boot.