What an entertaining read The Long Haul: a Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road by Finn Murphy is. Finn is supposed to do the whole college, then white collar job, then house with a picket fence thing but like a lot of guys what he wants to do is very different. Smart but essentially bored he fondly remembers his high school jobs where he did manual labor at a gas station and then at a moving company and how great it was to be physically exhausted at the end of the day, with money in pocket and satisfied at a job well done. Much to his parents’ horror, he quits college and goes to work doing long distance moving. First he just works for one of the big moving companies moving “regular folk” but then he moves up in the world and starts moving executives, top military brass and other rich people. These are the type of moves where he and his workers come in and lay down floor and wall protectors and pack everything up themselves, load the semi trailer, drive to the destination and then unpack everything and set it up where it goes. The customer does nothing but sign paperwork and pay the bill. These are multi-million dollar loads going from this mansion to that castle. The author makes around $250,000 a year doing this work. I could go on and on about this book but in short, my eyes were opened to various things like the “hierarchy” that exists in the trucking world amongst drivers (who knew?) and that I would never want to be involved in moving a retiree to a high rise condo in Florida (too many restrictions on who, how many, between what hours it can happen, etc makes it seem impossible to accomplish). Things I already knew but movers know even better. First, people have too much stuff and all of it is basically the same (in the middle class at least) and many times people didn’t even really want Finn’s load on arrival because they’ve already bought a bunch of brand new stuff. Secondly, there are jerks and there are really nice people in all economic levels and a mover gets to see them all. Lots of interesting stories here.
Stacy W.
