Still wet behind the ears here but the honeymoon is long gone. At least I don't dread coming to work. Not yet anyway. There are moments, sometimes even whole days, when I still enjoy the job and remember why I wound up here (besides the wages). I treat the work as a trade and take pride in doing it safely and without losing my sanity haha. No disrespect to the feeder drivers who are happier there than in pkg but I don't look to big rigs as my escape route. I'm more interested in us drivers standing up for ourselves, not cringing before unreasonable production demands, leveraging whatever power we can (it's more than we realize) to make our working conditions better.
Of course, I doubt they'll ever be rosy. For me, the stress of learning routes/making service pales compared to the absurd hours many, maybe most, of us work. There's an odd day every quarter at my building that mgmt 'enforces' 9.5. Different job altogether when you know you won't fight the load until mid-afternoon and will make it home around 7p. I can learn how to play the game/when and how to deal with mgmt, but 50 hr-plus weeks year and in out will take its toll. My wife is a union electrician; she already thinks my schedule is insane. No forced OT in her local. I hear drivers say "that's the industry," but is it? Or is it an old, bad habit of drivers to agree with living to work rather than insisting that we have the reverse option?