About a year ago I moved to a new area and was trying to find a job. I used to drive trucks cross country but I was looking at doing Hazmat driving as those jobs typically would get me home every night. Found a job doing CO2 delivery and was excited by the sound of it. On paper would be making 25-30$ an hour and home daily. Person over the phone was great to deal with and I decided to go for it.
Queue the weirdest onboarding of my life. They wanted to fly me out to Wichita for orientation to “make sure I got trained in right”. I thought, okay, I’ve never driven hazmat before I’m happy they want to train me sufficiently for this. Figured there would be some good industry vets there, what to do, what not to do. All that.
So I fly out on my birthday around noon and they pick me up at the airport, give me a rental car and put me up in a hotel for the rest of the night. I just sit around for the rest of the evening twiddling my thumbs.
Next day I go to the corporate office in the morning which is this absolutely beautiful modern open concept office with a waterfall and everything. I meet the guy who’s gonna be my dispatcher and he sets me up in a little conference room where I proceed to have zoom meetings all morning and watch HR type videos on an iPad… they flew me out to Wichita for this.
Then the dispatcher takes me out for dinner. Just me and him. Where we proceed to make awkward small talk mostly consisting of “so… do you like sports?” Go back to the hotel and twiddle my thumbs. No, there is nothing going on in Wichita on a random Tuesday night.
Next day I go back and KEEP doing meetings over zoom and iPad stuff and at this point I’m really starting to get annoyed. Feel like my time is being incredibly wasted and annoyed that I missed my birthday for this. Finally, my dispatcher tells me he’s going to bring me out to their yard and do a little equipment overview and I’m like finally! We get out there and he proceeds to walk me around the truck and tells me how to do a pretrip (checking that the lights work, tires are good etc). Mind you, IVE been teaching these exact things to trainees at my last driving job for two years. And the kicker was that the dispatcher never even drove a truck. So still no instruction on how to safely handle CO2 or loading or unloading procedures.
Finally I’m supposed to drive around with their head of safety so he can assess my driving. Which we do in the rental sedan…
Go out to another awkward as hell dinner with my dispatcher (at specific request of his boss) but the whole time I can just tell he wants to get home to his kids. So I tell him we’ll just take it to go so he can go home.
Fly out of there at noon the next day FAR more annoyed and confused about my duties than before I went.
But I told myself that I hadn’t actually experienced the job yet and I should try it out before I threw in the towel. So I start up the next week with another driver who shows me the ropes. He’s a great guy, no complaints with him. But I start to realize that the job (which pays by the mile and stop) actually isn’t quite the 25-30 an hour it seemed on paper, and actually because of all the time we have to consistently wait for their facilities maintenance and other drivers, is actually more like $18 an hour. And they expect you to work 70 hour weeks. And the transportation industry is exempt from requiring overtime pay. And there is no consistency in your schedule. And there’s no other drivers to cover your shift.
Second day out with the other driver I kinda run these things by him and while the first day he was trying to give the company line, by the end of day two with him I got him to admit that he’d appreciate me letting him know if I came across anything better in the area.
So after the second day out I call my dispatcher and let him know that I resign. That it was nothing personal and that my driver mentor was a great guy but this company did not appeal to me. He asks if I wanna stay on at least two weeks to get the $1500 bonus but I was just like no. At this point I’m totally fed up.
So as I’m driving home, the recruiter calls me up and asks me how come I’m leaving and I just laid it all out. That the pay is terrible for what they’re asking, their facilities are shit, their benefits are a joke, and the orientation was “one of the most bizarre wastes of time in my life”. And you know what? He agreed! He sighed and said “I know. I’ve been telling corporate that for months”. Because he was the only other person in that entire office who had ever driven a damn truck. He said “if you stick around, I’d like to work with you to improve the position” but I just had to hard pass and wish him well.