We hear so much about a “labor shortage” — signs of “help wanted” are everywhere — yet it seems employers don’t actually want any help. Oh, they’ll happily take someone who’s already done the same job for 20 years already who’s willing to work for minimum wage, but if you don’t fit that description…good luck /s. I’ve never really done a job, aside from giving dance lessons at home every so often, but I do have a masters’ degree that I earned in accelerated fashion. On paper I really ought to be able to get an entry-level job in the white-collar world.
Yet whenever I apply, all I get the vast majority of the time is silence; once in a while, a job gives me an interview, but afterward I’m either rejected or just “ghosted” altogether. Only where my experience is directly relevant have I ever even gotten an interview: dance instructor, tutor, stuff like that. Never have I actually been hired.
This summer I went to some trouble to become licensed as a substitute teacher in California; it was a job I was basically already qualified for, and I got the permit easily enough from the state government. I even applied to some districts, and about half of them actually offered to onboard me without so much as an interview required! I took two of them up on their offers, and I was signed on as an employee (of the government, no less; I even had to be “sworn in”). Yet to date I’ve gotten no days or hours of work offered to me that I could do, despite it having been a month since school started. Uh oh.
Not that I particularly want to work in a school anyway (I hate schools…), but it seemed like one pathway where my degrees might actually be recognized as qualifying me for something. But it seems I’m not wanted there either. I could become a full-time schoolteacher via the “intern pathway”, which actually pays enough to be worthwhile, but while the law permits competency-based instruction and an almost immediate start, in practice it’s months of weekly in-person classes in drip-drip-drip fashion and the earliest I’d likely start is…August 2027. And that’s assuming I could pass the competitive hiring process, which I apparently always suck at even if I’ve been doing exactly the same job already (like the one dance studio I interviewed with).
I’m not desperately poor; I have enough of a nest egg to survive and the stock market has been merciful to my brokerage account over the years, but I really would like to see my favorite escort again on the slopes of the French Alps, take an Antarctic cruise, and purchase a home I’d genuinely love…none of which I have enough funds to do at the moment. With a job that pays something like an entry-level professional-class salary, I could. So, MBA me thinks “well, apply and get one of these jobs”. Unfortunately, as always, I’m not wanted.
On a whim, however, while taking a getaway to the San Francisco Bay Area (Los Angeles has been exceptionally hot and humid even by local standards, and already even a normal summer is somewhat too muggy for my taste…Bay Area weather remains perfectly comfortable), I sip my icee at a truck stop, and I recalled that trucking companies will hire drivers and pay for their training, even if they lack a commercial drivers’ license (CDL) or any experience, and I wondered…are they desperate for men?
After my usual intensive spree of online research, I’m intrigued, and so I send in an application to one of the mega-carriers who will pay for your training and guarantee you a job at the end of it. The place I’m looking at is a four-week program, at the end of which you get your CDL and you start driving for them, all at no cost to you…if you drive for them for a certain period of time. As soon as you drive you get paid $900 per week, scaling up to $1000 per week once you’re out of the trainee period and you’re driving solo.
Adds up to about as good as you’d get as a schoolteacher, and all without being tethered to having a residence that’s necessarily local to whatever district hires you — my geographic preferences are quite particular, and frankly a representative area that fits my criteria and that I could realistically afford in the near term is California’s Lost Coast, which is spectacular but is nowhere near any kind of employment center (hence why it’s as affordable as it is…). Good-paying schoolteacher jobs can be found as near as California’s Wine Country, but even Healdsburg is a three-hour drive from Shelter Cove…each way. Technically doable but as a daily commute it would be brutal even by my standards.
As a long-haul trucker, on the other hand, typically you’re working weeks at a time, so you only need to get from home to the terminal every couple weeks. Now a three-hour (or longer) drive isn’t very brutal at all. Hmm.
Being away from home for weeks at a time is the main reason people wash out of the occupation, but it’s never bothered me much. Long days of driving on the highway are another commonly cited brutality, but I’m apt to drive cross-country recreationally. Where I’m not averse to sleeping in my car. Long-haul trucker life would be only modestly different from what I’m accustomed to doing anyway. Makes it even more interesting, doesn’t it?
It helps that I’m frankly good at driving, and the way to really succeed and move up in this occupation is to do not only long-haul, but also tanker jobs, including hazardous materials; cross-border from the US into Canada is another way to expand your skill set, and that includes, with experience in winter driving and into remote areas, trucking long-distance liquid hazmat loads deep into the arctic. You could be responsible for a double trailer of fuel and having to navigate a blizzard at -40 Fahrenheit hundreds of miles from the nearest gas station, but I’ve settled myself into a lake-effect blizzard in Michigan and visited the High Arctic for fun. I could certainly do it. And with those credentials (which you can get inside of a couple years with some modest effort; at least that’s my impression), you could be looking at doubling that $1000 per week figure. Hmm.
Actually getting hired is, as always, the whole trick, but so far the results of my little experiment are encouraging. I call up a recruiter, I get an immediate response, I then fill out the application, and when I click submit I’m called back within seconds to go over it live. CDL school starts weekly, so I ask what’s the next open spot? I’m told the very next Monday. Uh…okay. Now, there are a few items in my background that might give the company I’m working with right now pause — my motor vehicle record isn’t entirely spotless, and my previous work history (they said it could be anything, even Uber or Lyft) is limited — but it does seem they genuinely want to take on new people who are willing to work for them and can meet the minimum qualifications. It’s definitely not a competitive hiring process out there.
Take note: that’s what companies act like during a real labor shortage, not a “labor shortage” they just make up for propaganda purposes. If you can perform up to the minimum standard, they’ll offer a living wage and make it as easy as possible for you to get the necessary qualifications, with or without any previous experience. You show up, you learn, and then you work. And that’s that. My grandfather on the streets of New York would have found the rhythm familiar, even if the hoops you jump through to be a trucker in 2026 are very much extra compared to what a kid would be treated to in 1926 (drug testing says hello).
Whether this particular company will take me or not…we’ll see. But reading up, I obviously meet the minimum legal requirements to get a CDL and drive a big rig (pending me learning the actual material to get licensed, of course, which isn’t hard, it just takes practice), so if this outfit doesn’t take me, I’m sure I can find someone who will. If online chatter is any indication, people with less experience and worse backgrounds than me got in, so it ought to be something I could absolutely just go and do if I wanted to.
Which is an extremely refreshing change — when I think about going to work so I can get some more money, I want to just start working and get paid. I don’t want to go to a classroom for a year and spend thousands of dollars and then convince somebody I’m better than a hundred other people who’ve done the same job already and know everybody worth knowing already. Frankly the professional white-collar job world comes off like a scam.
Oh, I’m not enamored of “skilled trades” or the blue-collar world — indeed, socially I find blue-collar and working-class environments aversive…but you don’t do much socializing as a long-haul trucker, do you? The career is famous for being rather lonesome. Which would suit me just fine: come my day off, I count my money, freshen myself up, and check in to my favorite celebrity hair salon in Hollywood. Indeed, I actually actively dislike just about every work environment I could realistically hope to enter, from a social point of view, so as far as making any friends is concerned, I think I’d better think of something else than a career to make it happen.
So, I take off my dance shoes and become…a truck driver? Eh, kid me thought long-haul trucking was cool anyway, it pays enough for me to meaningfully replenish my brokerage account (I’ve spent a lot of my money over the years…), and certainly the time and cost to enter the occupation is minimal compared to anything else I could do. Why not?…