Speaker 1: This is on the Job. This season, we're speaking with
Speaker 1: folks who are finding their professional stride in a tumultuous
Speaker 1: job market and learning how to double down on their
Speaker 1: skills and their experience to overcome challenges. We'll bring you
Speaker 1: inspiring stories of people making themselves essential, an important skill
Speaker 1: set in any economy. As Americans shut their doors and
Speaker 1: stay home in the midst of a pandemic, truckers continue
Speaker 1: to keep the country moving and stocked up on food
Speaker 1: as they always have. It's tough, demanding work that can
Speaker 1: keep you on the road for months at a time,
Speaker 1: but there are a few jobs that come with the
Speaker 1: freedom and purpose that the open road has to offer. Hello, Hi,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? Super fantastic? How are you? This
Speaker 1: is Ingrid Brown. We hopped on a zoom call while
Speaker 1: she was at a rest stop. She was calling from
Speaker 1: the cab of her truck. I am actually sitting in
Speaker 1: the driver's cheek and I am in Abingdon, Virginia. I
Speaker 1: just delivered cherries yesterday and they came from Stockton, California.
Speaker 1: She will be here long though. She's headed to Wilkesboro,
Speaker 1: North Carolina to pick up a load of chickens to
Speaker 1: haul those all the way to Arkansas at least in
Speaker 1: eleven hour drive. The truck you're driving right now, does
Speaker 1: it have a name? Peach, A peach of mind? Peach? Ohman,
Speaker 1: this truck is like this one of a cut. She's
Speaker 1: a piece of mind, but I said, will be a
Speaker 1: piece of mind. Peach white teeth. Her color. She sends
Speaker 1: me a picture. It's this amazing peach color with teal
Speaker 1: and white stripes along the sides. It is a very
Speaker 1: attractive truck. Yeah. And just like most big rigs have
Speaker 1: a name, the drivers also have nicknames that they're known
Speaker 1: by over the radio. Do you have a call name
Speaker 1: on the radio? I used to go be half pint. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm five too, and I used to be skinny and young.
Speaker 1: But know what I you know? Ingrid, I'm Ingrid, but
Speaker 1: I'm a truck driver, That's what I do. Ingrid is
Speaker 1: from Zionville, North Carolina, right near Boone on the Tennessee border.
Speaker 1: She's fifty eight and she's been trucking for over four
Speaker 1: decades years. In December, I love what I do. I
Speaker 1: run for State O, my own independence whole owned company,
Speaker 1: Rolling B, and I also drive as a company driver
Speaker 1: for Flaner Brothers out of Carthage, Missouri. Ingrid is one
Speaker 1: of three point five million truckers on the American Highway.
Speaker 1: About two thousand of those are women. In the last decade,
Speaker 1: the amount of women in trucking has increased by six
Speaker 1: and Ingrid is a huge proponent of keeping that number growing.
Speaker 1: Here's my thing. My steering will doesn't know the gender
Speaker 1: that holds it, and it really doesn't care as long
Speaker 1: as it gets safely from point A to point B.
Speaker 1: There are all kinds of different ways you can go
Speaker 1: about trucking. Some drivers prefer to specialize in hauling one
Speaker 1: kind of load, whether it's veggies or lumber, but a
Speaker 1: lot of truckers, like Ingrid, become a jack of all
Speaker 1: trades and know how to haul pretty much anything. So
Speaker 1: you may see me under a conostogo, which is a
Speaker 1: curtain sided flat bed and hollow machinery and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Sometimes you might be driving a refrigerated trailer
Speaker 1: used for transporting anything that needs to keep cool. These
Speaker 1: trailers are known in trucker lingo as reefers. No, I'm
Speaker 1: not hauling reefer, I am pulling a refrigerated trailer. And
Speaker 1: each individual load she picks up comes with its own
Speaker 1: completely unique set of tasks exactly exactly, and and my
Speaker 1: biggest one, honestly is when I load, I have to
Speaker 1: make sure that it's loaded properly and it's loaded to
Speaker 1: where it's going to ride across the country. Any product
Speaker 1: draft right toilet paper, produce cows at the load, something
Speaker 1: like peaches. She'll make sure that her route avoids any
Speaker 1: rough roads so the fruit doesn't get bruised before it
Speaker 1: gets to the market. And a lot of care goes
Speaker 1: into hauling her favorite load, cattle, which she constantly checks
Speaker 1: on make sure that they're hydrated, and takes corners real
Speaker 1: slow to make sure that they're okay. And I've not
Speaker 1: met many of that halk cows that don't do that
Speaker 1: because you have kids on board. Yeah, you've got the
Speaker 1: babies on board. Do you care about them? You take
Speaker 1: care of them. And even though she takes extra care
Speaker 1: of the cows that she hauls, it's pretty clear that
Speaker 1: she treats all of her loads as precious cargo. Exactly.
Speaker 1: You don't just shut the doors and drive down the road.
Speaker 1: Trucking has definitely become its own subculture in the last
Speaker 1: century It's got its own language, its own conventions, even
Speaker 1: its own music. Today some people call truckers the last
Speaker 1: of the cowboys, lone rangers roaming the American landscape. It's
Speaker 1: a job that attracts a certain kind of person, independent, curious.
Speaker 1: So in lot of ways, Ingrid was born to do this.
Speaker 1: I had the greatest childhood. I was adventurous. Imagine that
Speaker 1: my dad owned a construction company, and that's how I
Speaker 1: got into trucks because I started learning equipment. And I
Speaker 1: always said, I'm kind of the other boy that he
Speaker 1: never had. She's got an older brother, but ever since
Speaker 1: she was young, when her mother hoped that she would
Speaker 1: have stayed in frills and dresses, she was much happier
Speaker 1: playing in the dirt and riding along with her dad
Speaker 1: on the job. The philosophy he instilled in her as
Speaker 1: a kid is something that she still lives by today.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, there is nothing that you can't
Speaker 1: do if you want to do it. She wanted to
Speaker 1: drive big trucks, so at sixteen, in high school, she
Speaker 1: got her permit and started driving dump trucks with her
Speaker 1: dad's company. At eighteen, she moved on to bigger rigs
Speaker 1: and was hauling asphalt. I get out of high school
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, oh yeah, I'm eighteen. I'm going to work.
Speaker 1: I'm going to road. He's like, you get an education
Speaker 1: and then we'll talk. If you want to trump, you
Speaker 1: get to school. School was not Ingrid's thing, so she
Speaker 1: reluctantly went to college and got her degree in engineering,
Speaker 1: and she eventually got hired to do just that. I
Speaker 1: was going to build roads. I was gonna have a
Speaker 1: sicker career. They put me on five in North Carolina,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm I'm doing construction engineer and inspection
Speaker 1: and bridges and all this stuff. And I kept watching
Speaker 1: trucks go up throad and down the road. What were
Speaker 1: you thinking when you saw those trucks driving by? What
Speaker 1: am I doing? So Ingrid went trucking. Her first big
Speaker 1: hall was from North Carolina all the way to California.
Speaker 1: That first feeling, it almost is so much adrenaline. I
Speaker 1: was scared to dance and then you don't want to quit.
Speaker 1: Her love for dirt as a kid translated directly to trucking.
Speaker 1: She took lots of jobs where she'd be hauling it
Speaker 1: all of the place. They call me mud puppy. No,
Speaker 1: give me asphalt, Give me dirt. There's so much can
Speaker 1: be done with it, and there's there's things that bridges
Speaker 1: and and roads. There's a way to get that done
Speaker 1: and get that to happen. Her love for dirt may
Speaker 1: seem extreme, but she gets pretty romantic when talking about
Speaker 1: anything that she's hauling. I do, I do. I have
Speaker 1: this passion because you know what, they mean something to me,
Speaker 1: because they mean something to people. This is the greatest
Speaker 1: thing I've ever dreamed I could ever do. If you
Speaker 1: don't have dirt, what are you going to build upon?
Speaker 1: Everything has a purpose and you get to bring that
Speaker 1: to people. I try more in a good story after
Speaker 1: the break. A strong work ethic, takes pride in a
Speaker 1: job well done, sweats over the details. This is the
Speaker 1: kind of person you need. Express Employment professionals can help.
Speaker 1: Finding the best people requires more than sorting through applications.
Speaker 1: You need to conduct a thorough surge. Express understands what
Speaker 1: it takes to hire the right person. It takes real people,
Speaker 1: real interviews, discovering the talents you need. We find good
Speaker 1: people matching their skills with the right jobs. At Express,
Speaker 1: we find people for jobs and companies of all sizes
Speaker 1: and industries, from the production floor to the front office.
Speaker 1: Sometimes finding the best new employee really is about who
Speaker 1: you know. Express knows jobs. Get to know Express. Go
Speaker 1: to Express pros dot com to find a location near you.
Speaker 1: Trucking is a way of life as much as it's
Speaker 1: a job. Just like a long haul from the East
Speaker 1: to West coast, being a professional driver as a career
Speaker 1: takes stamina. How many miles Hi fourties plus years? I
Speaker 1: have four point one million, four point one million miles.
Speaker 1: I mean I have gentlemen and ladies that I've seen
Speaker 1: up in the sixes. To put that in perspective, Ingrid
Speaker 1: has driven enough to circle the globe about one sixty
Speaker 1: four times. I asked her if she had a goal
Speaker 1: she was trying to hit, maybe get the six million,
Speaker 1: But she said no, because you know what, three years
Speaker 1: ago I was diagnosed with melano with cancer. So I've
Speaker 1: had a third of my throat out, I've had several surgeries.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing. Today, All that matters is today.
Speaker 1: That's it. Besides doing this job because she loves it.
Speaker 1: Her philosophy is it's something that has to be done,
Speaker 1: and she says a lot of drivers feel the same way.
Speaker 1: Some do it for the freedom, some do it because
Speaker 1: it can be great money. But she says, the ones
Speaker 1: that succeed and enjoy their work are the ones that
Speaker 1: recognize the importance of their job. People need you, people
Speaker 1: need us, but we need them as well. I asked
Speaker 1: how it felt to be an essential worker in a
Speaker 1: time where the country especially needs her to keep driving,
Speaker 1: even when she's realistically putting herself at risk by doing it.
Speaker 1: I would want to do that, whether it's a pandemic,
Speaker 1: whether the country is closed down because people have to
Speaker 1: eat every day. That's not going to change. That didn't
Speaker 1: change before, It hasn't changed afterwards. Talking to Ingrid, you
Speaker 1: might get kind of jealous. There's a sense of purpose
Speaker 1: in everything she says about a job she's been doing
Speaker 1: for forty years. And if you've ever been on a
Speaker 1: long drive with nothing but the road ahead, that sense
Speaker 1: of freedom. She does that for a living. She says,
Speaker 1: she remembers the first time she really felt it. I'll
Speaker 1: never forget it. I was coming down the road and
Speaker 1: I was actually coming eastbound. It was the early nineties.
Speaker 1: She was just outside Fort Worth, Texas on a long haul.
Speaker 1: It was barely breaking daylight, barely barely enough that I
Speaker 1: could see the white lines to my left. But in
Speaker 1: my mirror I could watch him go by, and it
Speaker 1: was almost like the whole world wasn't he didn't even exist.
Speaker 1: The sun was in front of me, it was was
Speaker 1: coming up, but behind me was just that little bit
Speaker 1: of haze. If it was the most peaceful time in
Speaker 1: my whole career, the whole world of stops. Nothing ad exists,
Speaker 1: nobody has problems, nothing bad in this whole wide world exists.
Speaker 1: You're just in that spot. You're succeeding, and you know it.
Speaker 1: You're just you're you know you're you're accomplishing. That's what
Speaker 1: it feels like. Yeah, in my own experience, I've been
Speaker 1: chasing this feeling for a while. I felt it years
Speaker 1: ago and I got hooked. So I've tried to make
Speaker 1: a career where I can work and constantly be moving, exploring,
Speaker 1: And for the most part, I got there before COVID hit.
Speaker 1: I was traveling the country for months doing radio work
Speaker 1: in a new place whenever I wanted to be. It
Speaker 1: was about as liberated as I've ever felt. That feeling
Speaker 1: is the reason a lot of people get into trucking too.
Speaker 1: You're autonomous, you're free hand out the window with the
Speaker 1: open road ahead. A cowboy. It's a romantic way to live,
Speaker 1: but I've learned that that does not come without a price.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of time where I really especially if
Speaker 1: I've been on the road for months, I really crave roots,
Speaker 1: stability home. I guess the grass is always greener kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Do you feel that? Yeah? Sorry, I mean
Speaker 1: this is life. This is life. I haven't seen my
Speaker 1: grand babies, uh since before Christmas, and uh I was
Speaker 1: pointing on seeing them at the time that the COVID
Speaker 1: stuff happened. Um. Sorry, it's um, they're my world. We
Speaker 1: face time all the time. Um, it's still not the same.
Speaker 1: You such your priorities and uh sometimes you missed some
Speaker 1: of those. But you make sure that they're in this
Speaker 1: industry with you enough to understand Ingrid also has an
Speaker 1: eighty eight year old mother, just two daughters of her own.
Speaker 1: She knows she has to keep doing her job, but
Speaker 1: she also knows in doing so, she won't risk carrying
Speaker 1: COVID back to her family. Recently, she was at a
Speaker 1: truck stop and called her grandkids to check in. My
Speaker 1: grandson was standing there on FaceTime and said, Grammy, what
Speaker 1: are you coming to see? Uh, Grammy, it's been too long.
Speaker 1: And my granddaughter, my four year old granddaughter, literally turned
Speaker 1: around and looked at him and said, Layton, Grammy livering
Speaker 1: food to other people? Wow? How does that feel for
Speaker 1: you to hear they get it? You know? A mr birthday?
Speaker 1: I missed his birthday, and it is it is what
Speaker 1: it is for the fact of the situation in the country.
Speaker 1: But we make the best of it, just like everybody
Speaker 1: else is doing the same thing. We all want a
Speaker 1: job that puts food on the table. We want a
Speaker 1: job that we can be good at. But maybe more
Speaker 1: than anything, deep down, we want work that makes us
Speaker 1: happy and gives us purpose being the person that does
Speaker 1: what needs to be done. People will always have to eat,
Speaker 1: and whether or not it's a time of crisis, if
Speaker 1: you're the person making that happen, like Ingrid, at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, you can be sure that you
Speaker 1: are essential. And when a four year old says taking
Speaker 1: food to other people, that's pretty strong. That must keep
Speaker 1: you going every day from the job a motus Gray,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to on the job brought to you
Speaker 1: by Express Employment Professionals. To see pictures of Ingrid's truck
Speaker 1: Peach of Mind, go to Express Bros dot com slash podcast.
Speaker 1: This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation
Speaker 1: and Red Seat Ventures. The episodes were written and produced
Speaker 1: by Metus Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. The
Speaker 1: show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at
Speaker 1: the Loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot
Speaker 1: Sessions and mont Plus. Here find us an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard,
Speaker 1: please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For
Speaker 1: more inspiring stories about making your self essential as you
Speaker 1: discover your life's work, Audiation