 Okay I'm gonna have to admit something to you. I sneak things into the movie theaters mostly because they have bad food options like very unhealthy food options so I usually bring a really big purse and sneak stuff in. If anybody sees my face at a movie theater please let me bring in the food that I have in my purse. I have been known to do that a few times myself. I'm always afraid the person taking the tickets will smell it. They're like sir why are you carrying a purse number one. I think it will be cool for me to get an insight on what their life looks like and then also for us to just have fun together maybe working out going to lunch together maybe feeding the ducks who knows. I lived on the east coast and I was looking for different opportunities. I lived in Key West Florida. Oh nice. Yes on a tropical island. I know right I was security for a private resort and private island. It was a wonderful opportunity but it's incredibly expensive down there you know and and I wanted to explore a few other things in life you know and I've never been out to the west coast so I figured I started looking at moving here and thinking about a change in career so trucking has always had a special interest for me. Yeah. Does it stem from something else like do you have anybody in your what in the world. Bad drivers. Right. My the earliest memory I have is my best friend growing up his father was a truck driver. Okay. And but from there I've always been around trucks whether it's working in a warehouse or having friends that were drivers or something of that nature. Did you ride along with him. I did. Yeah. Yeah. He had one of those old long nose peats. Big loud all that kind of good stuff but it was great. I loved riding in there. And so in my 20s after the military I started thinking about being a truck driver but life happened so. So you went military and then Key West. How long did you serve. Four years. Nice. Yes. Thank you for your service. What branch. I was in the Navy. Oh nice. Absolutely. Do they have a base down there. Key West or just like down. We do. There is a there is a base in Key West. Oh there is. Okay. Which I never actually served there. I did most of my tours in in Florida up in North Florida. Jacksonville. Yeah. That's an area. But I left the military actually moved out to Denver lived in Estes Park Colorado for a little bit. Had a gorgeous. But I got a cabin up in the mountains. Beautiful. Then Halloween night it snowed and it was more snowed I'd ever seen in my life. Right. We had like eight or nine feet. Yeah. And I was like that's it. I'm done when I saw that I'm going back to Florida. I am a beach bomb. I can't do this now. Yeah. So I moved back down to Florida and I went to Key West and lived down there for years and years. Yeah. And then eventually I ended up moving up to Virginia. With some family. Yeah. Yeah. And is it humid up there. Not too bad. In the summer it's a little bit but not too bad. Considering my life in Florida where it's 100% humidity year round. Yeah. You know the weather. Right. For some reason I thought that you were from Hawaii. I just always linked you to Hawaii because of your tattoo. I don't know. I do. I do like the Hawaiian vibe. Yeah. So I lean more towards that kind of tropical culture than I do the Caribbean culture. Isn't it funny how you can be like in your heart. You probably see yourself as like a tropical like beach bomb type of person. Absolutely. But where you are is not that at all. But like you in your life and in your heart you know that you are this completely other person than what you surround yourself with. Oh, completely. It's kind of interesting. It is. But I like that difference that juxtaposition of being a beach bomb living a life as a desert rat. It's so different. It is. It's completely different. But that's why I moved out here is because I've never experienced anything like this. And I like exploring new things and new opportunities. Yeah. You know. I can see that. I decided to do trucking and got to looking around and Phoenix seemed like the best opportunity for trucking schools and trucking companies. Did you initially have your eye on night? Yes and no. It never really occurred to me to work for night. That being said I'd seen night trucks on the road to me. They're the best looking trucks on the road. You know, they're the prettiest. They're the cleanest. Yeah. You know, in every sense of the word. So I've always kind of been partial to night. Yeah. But honestly, I was actually looking at Swift. Yeah. Mainly. And I came out here. Because of their training program you think? Just a bigger company and I knew the name. Yeah. Really. And other than that, I didn't know too much about them. But I came out here. I went to school and my particular trainer was a night driver. So she was always talking night up. And I said, you know what? I'll give them a try. Wait, so you didn't go to our CDL program? No, I did. You went to a school in the Valley? I did. And then you got hired on through Squire? I did. Yeah. Yeah. Am I did my my Squire training? Yeah. It was good. But Mitch Atkinson was my recruiter. Nuh-uh. Yes, he was. How long ago was this? Oh, a while back. Like four years? Probably. Yeah. And I'll be I called him up and or I put an application he called me up. Yeah. And tell me the dirt on Mitch. You see it? You see a good recruiter? He is a good recruiter. Right? He did. Yeah. I dealt with recruiters and other situations before and Mitch took care of it. Yeah. Recruiters tend to get a bad reputation from time to time. Oh, yeah. And I got to say Mitch actually did a really good job taking care of it. It gave me all the good details. But he didn't like oversell and underdeliver like it was pretty. Absolutely. It was exactly what he said. Right. But it was good. But in the overall process, he called me up, looked up my application and said, Hey, can you be here next week? We can get you in. I said, Yes, sir, I'll be there. Never looked back. Seriously. Yeah, you've held a lot of different positions. I have. Night is known for that. Whether it's driving associates or office personnel, like we switch around like crazy. Absolutely. But I think that's a great idea. In terms of people being able to get into different opportunities, see things from a different point of time. I know I had a certain point of view of the office and of trucking in general, being new to the industry and only being in the truck, and then coming in and dealing with the office and their paperwork and how they interact with drivers and all that. And then just being able to actually interact with more drivers on a regular basis, then it really opened my eyes up. Going back out on the road here again. It's a totally different perspective. Do you feel like okay, what was your when you came into the office? So your first role was DQP instructor or just helping with class. What was the biggest shock? Like what surprised you the most about coming from a driver role to an instructor type of role? I like my solitude in the truck, right? So to come in and take a job where I am put in front of a large group of people and teach them, talk to them, that sort of thing. I'm not exactly a shy person, but it wasn't something that I was really looking forward to. It's not my normal sort of thing. Do you think that's why you want to go back over the road? No. Actually, to be honest, I got into the class and I still remember my first class and the first conversations with with that group and I fell in love with it. Yeah. No, I do love that role. I love supporting our drivers and being available to them. Yeah. But the truth is I look out the window at my desk and I see all the trucks driving by. I talk to the drivers and their stories and I just miss it so much. Really? I love the travel. I love the driving. For me, a personal hobby of mine is to just hop on the road to drive. Yeah. So it's very relaxing. It is. I've always done that like even when I was in high school, when I first got my license, I would just drive around the city and listen to music and try to find, obviously we have a few mountains here in Phoenix, so try to find cool areas where you could like go up an elevation a bit and then see the the lights or see the sunset or see whatever. Oh, absolutely. I feel like being in a truck, you see more. You do. Maybe that's why I'm recognizing all these crazy drivers. A lot of it is that you are physically sitting up higher so it doesn't watch better view. Yeah. But at the same time, I think subconsciously you realize that you're in such a. What does that mean? That is our distance alert where the two bars change lanes in front of us. I didn't see that. Then we were a little too close. Did it push the brakes for you? It did. It did? It did not. I was surprised. I was expecting it to. I have a loner car right now because my car's in the shop and it pushes the brakes for you. Right. And it scares the bejesers out of you. Apparently, I followed too closely. Oh no. If only you knew a good Smith system instructor, right? Probably wouldn't be able to drive a truck if they pulled my MBR. I'm just saying. Uh-oh. Just kidding. I've only totaled the one car. We had to mention earlier that I wanted to get into trucking. Yeah. In my twenties. Yeah. And that was actually why I didn't because I had a robot habit of getting speeding tickets. I love to drive fast. Oh really? And I used to street race and things of that nature. Oh no. Did you have a lot of tickets on your record? I did. I got a ticket about every four months for speeding for several years in a row. And why the trucking company was even willing to talk to me is beyond me. They had fallen off, right? Some of them had. Sure. But I was on my way to the recruiter to sign the paperwork to go to school and got a speeding ticket. Oh my god. So I called him up. I was like, Yes, sir. I am not ready for this. I'll call you in a few years. How long did you wait? I was maybe 25 at the time and I was 35 when I got back into it for some. That's a lot of years to it. It was. I don't think most trucking companies even look back that far. But however, most safety directors would think there's a pattern here. Exactly. That is not good. So I figured I wanted several years between driving on my record so I cleaned it up. Yeah. I wanted to be a driver that truckers would be proud of. I wanted them to see me down the road and go, you know what? I like his driving. He could be one of us. Oh, that's like being accepted. Exactly. And then I became a trucker and realized how bad my driving still was. Really? And how much improvement I could make. Like how, where? Like if I hopped into your seat, what would happen? Like what would be the first thing? I mean granted you don't know my trucking ability or my driving skill set. But what's the first thing that's kind of like red flag? Like you need to work on this. Like I feel like staying between the lane lines would be hard. It can be. Yeah. Especially in construction zones where they twist and turn a lot. But there's a couple of tricks to that as far as staying to the left or to the right. But for me, my biggest issue was following the distance. My thought was, hey, there's a car up there. We've got plenty of distance. I need to speed up and get close. Right? Yeah. And or changing lanes. It never occurred to me that if I want to move in front of another vehicle that I need a greater amount of space. Or like think about how fast they're going. Exactly. A lot of that did not occur to me. So getting into trucking school and then being in a truck, it changed my perspective of that. So now I'm much more open to leaving the space between the LVM. I notice that there's a lot of space always when you're driving, which is very good, especially somebody who has rear-ended someone. I am always open to the suggestion that the vehicle in the lane on either side of me will make an emergency lane change. Yeah. And as soon as they get in front of me they'll hit their brakes. So that's always my thought behind it. Right? So you just like constantly stay further. Exactly. And even like here in the tunnel we have a curve coming up, right? And let's assume that there is no traffic here. I can't see what's on the other side of that curve. Why would I drive very quickly into it if I can't stop, right? Have you ever driven port? I'm not that poor. I think it would be cool to get home more often. I do like the dedicated. I like the big home on the weekends. I love that we have so much dedicated option now. Absolutely. It's really cool. I just read an internal email, did you see it this morning, about just kind of the freight market going into 2019 and how we're getting even more creative with just making more route options. Right. For what our drivers want. Absolutely. Like obviously that needs to be done, right? Of course. But I think a lot of trucking companies forget like how important it is to just follow suit with supply and demand. Like if somebody wants that route and wants to be home more often, make it happen bro. Absolutely. Come on now. The drivers have so many different needs and desires these days and we can't just say here's one option take it over. You need to be out a month at a time. You can't be, oh sorry no. We don't live in that world anyway. When you drove before you went into the office, what did you like to do for fun and did that change when you started working in the office? For me one of my biggest hobbies is photography. Oh I know that. You take amazing photos. Thank you very much. And I've gotten into drone photography as well. With that. Flying drones around. So I can get those good aerial shots and wide landscape shots. Do you have to have a different like drone for drone photography versus drone video footage? Same drones. You're just taking like a still of the video? Correct. Yeah. So I've got 4k cameras on my drones and they can do video or still. Did you do that a lot when you're over the road? I did. Quite a bit. I don't feel like I saw those pictures. I had a smaller cheaper drone at the time so I'm still trying to learn. So a lot of it didn't come out as well as I wanted. Taking a still of a video isn't always high res right? Unless it's like a really high res video. Usually it is. Most cameras will come out with the same quality picture. But I'm a big believer that I love driving but just as much as I want to be in the truck you need to get out of the truck to clear your head. What's your favorite hobby while you're over the road? Leave it in the comment section below. So photography what else do you do outside of the truck when you're driving? I'm a big movie buff. I love catching the latest movies. Yeah. What do you use? Just like Netflix or? I do Netflix and Amazon. If it's illegal don't tell me. No I don't. I support the film industry so I don't see his illegal sites. Bleep that up. Exactly. And I believe in supporting the local theater. Totally. So it's as crazy as concession stand prices are. I know. I will still go buy my ticket. My $10 popcorn and $10 Coke. Okay I'm gonna have to admit something to you. Uh-huh. I seek things into the movie theaters mostly because they have bad food options like very unhealthy food options. That's true. So I usually bring a really big purse and sneak stuff in. If anybody sees my face at a movie theater please let me bring in the food that I have at my purse. I have been known to do that a few times myself. I'm always afraid the person taking the tickets will smell it. They're like sir why are you carrying a purse number one? Does it get boring though when you're on like I imagine going to Tucson for example. There's not a lot to look at. There's not. However you always have like the entertainment of the what you call them personal vehicles. Is that how you would? I like that. Personal vehicles? Yes. Four-wheelers. Oh four-wheelers. The truck is playing. It does have its boring moments of course. Yeah. But in addition to photography I love music. I have a very deep passion for that. It's almost religious for me. So I can always find some good music to listen to. But just driving in general there's so much to observe and pay attention to to make sure that I'm a safe driver. Yeah. That I find I'm working too much to be bored. Yeah. With it. Like if you're bored that's probably not a good thing because you're probably not doing what you should be doing. Exactly. That's what that's when you know it's time to get out of the truck for a few minutes. Yeah. If you've liked this episode please subscribe to our channel and turn on post notifications.