The Job

My darling Mr. R chose not to accept the job out of Daytona Beach. There were several reasons why. First, they were not truthful about home time. As much as we would love to have Mr. R home on a nightly basis, most trucking companies don't offer that. At the very most, it is home every other day, and most companies will have you out for weeks, if not months at a time. We decided as a couple that we could settle for Mr. R being home on weekends. A weekend...to us...is Saturday and Sunday.
Well, this company...to them...a weekend meant 30 hours. That's it. So Mr. R would have driven into the yard at 6am on Saturday morning, driven to our home, probably come home and sleep since he'd been driving all night, and then leave on Sunday afternoon, after church. Still giving us no family time.
Second, they had a policy of slip-seating. Slip-seating is when a driver doesn't have a designated truck, but simply drives whatever truck is available. If Mr. R was a local driver who didn't have to sleep in the truck, he would have been fine with that. But he was not comfortable with sleeping on the mattress of another person...because really, do we know what this other driver was doing on the mattress? You could possibly be sleeping in someone else's DNA. Ewwwww! Not only that, but most truckers are smokers, and Mr. R is not. He is very sensitive to cigarette smoke and likely would have been sick a lot from having to stay overnight in someone else's smoky truck.
These two reasons led Mr. R to reject that job offer.
Now, Mr. R was contacted by another company. This company seems quite a bit more up front. It is over-the-road, but Mr. R would be limited to the southeast. There are very few tolls in the southeast, so we'd be saving lots of money there. He would actually keep his own truck, so no worries about slip-seating. He would still be his own boss. I like this very much, because he can take a week off whenever he feels like it. This company promises two days off per week, with at least one day being a weekend day. For example, he might be home Friday and Saturday, and have to leave Sunday. Or, he might be home Sunday and Monday, and leave on Tuesday. Or, he could be home both Saturday and Sunday. I was fine with this.
This company also pays a heck of a lot more. Right now, Mr. R gets paid about 98 cents per mile. So if he drives 60 miles per hour, he is making $60 an hour, theoretically. However, if you subtract $5 diesel in a vehicle that only gets 6 miles per gallon, you can see how quickly that drops. This new company is offering Mr. R 156 1/2 cents per mile. It's essentially a 50% raise.
We still have some kinks to work out (thinking about opening a business account for Mr. R at the bank and a line of credit so he doesn't have to carry cash out on the road) and it's still not exactly what we were hoping for, but I think he's going to take the second offer.
I was very blunt when he expressed sorrow over not being able to play drums in the church band. I said, "Honey, you have the kind of job where you are not allowed hobbies. You're never home, and you can't make plans. If it is so important to you to play drums and be home every night, then you need to change careers. Period."
I'm not trying to be mean, but it's truthful. I think anyone who knows a trucker, knows that their life is not really their own.