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Port Orange FL is an anti-truck city. It is rare to see a truck parked anywhere in town overnight because the regs are enforced. It sometimes happens that a bobtail or straight truck will park in our lot for a few hours during the day without a problem but I would not recommend parking...

Anytime Fitness was Diane's and my choice when we lived and worked on the road as expediters. The reasons were: (1) Anytime Fitness has more locations than any other gym brand. (2) They had PRIVATE showers, (3) They were available 24 hours a day with our key, and (4) straight-truck parking was...

It's been known to happen. We see it fairly regularly in our gym that a unhealthy people work out a few times a week and change their eating and drinking habits. They come in beaming and eager to share the news that their doctor took them off one or more meds because their health has improved to...

One thing we did when in the business was keep a spreadsheet that listed every run, including the pick-up location zip codes. Over time that gave us a good idea of where the freight was for the kind of runs we said yes to. You can plot the zip codes or city name on a map to provide a visual...

From the weekly newsletter I write for our gym members: Make a SMART New Year’s Resolution Most people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them. That makes perfect sense. The barriers to change that exist on Jan 1 probably existed in the months or years leading up to New Year’s...

That's the key. Don't think about an IRS audit as something that will be your worst nightmare if it happens. Think of it as something that will happen sooner or later and prepare now for it. With such preparations made, the nightmare goes away. TeamCaffee's approach is spot-on. Know the...

That may be a good approach, but in the case of a sensor that sometimes works and sometimes fails, testing it may not indicate a problem. You may be testing it when the occasionally-defective sensor is working perfectly.

We had a guy using our gym for a few months last year who was visiting America from France. In his 70's now, he was a world-class body builder decades ago, placing third in the Mr. Universe contest and first as Mr. France two years in a row. He was the picture of health and flexibility for a...

Staying away from home for months at a time can create a storage nightmare only if you insist on taking more with you than you actually need. The best advice I ever hard regarding "stuff" came from an expediter whose name I do not recall. He said, "Lay out at home everything you think you will...

Our truck had a Meritor transmission that would go into SM most times it rained, and sometimes when it was cold. The truck and transmission worked fine in that SM state. We could manually shift through the gears, but the automatic transmission function went away. When these failures occurred, a...

Every few months, Diane and I would go to Camping World to browse the store and see if there was anything new that we could not live without. Expediters and RV people have much in common. Indeed, we spent many a layover weekend in our truck at RV parks. The kitchen and bathroom/shower we had in...

It seems to me that the quality of the trucks in the FedEx Custom Critical fleet declined as the pay declined. All big corporations are rightfully sensitive about their brand. Is it correct to say that as the pay declined, and as the quality of the trucks in the fleet declined, the...

Check out these resistance bands. They are inexpensive and compact. A wide variety of exercises can be done with them and instructions can be easily found online. With a little ingenuity, many resistance-band exercises can be done right in your sleeper. Diane and I used to carry exercise...

Steel here!

Just curious. As your health numbers have improved, what differences have you seen, if any, in your mobility, alertness behind the wheel, quality of sleep, ability to handle freight, etc.?

Great to hear! Bravo!

Arriving three hours early unannounced is not a best practice. While an early pickup may be desirable for a driver who is available to pick up early, an unexpected arrival may be an irritant or bigger problem for the shipper who arranged a 5:00 PM pickup. The driver may hear nothing about it but...

After our first 10 loads, Diane and I would go out of service for three days to review all materials from orientation and think deeply about how to better organize our truck and practices. I believe you have the ability to benefit from this deep thinking because of the careful preparations you...

The false assumption in the blog post that started this thread is that you somehow matter to the people making the calls or that you can somehow affect their behavior by engaging them. These telemarketers are paid professionals who begin their day with a list of hundreds of numbers to call. The...

As with the regulation question you asked, the competition question is too general to answer. With competition, you can't get far even in general terms. In golf there is the handicap. In school there is grading on the curve. In sports, there are leagues and weight classes. These are attempts to...