LIFE BEHIND THE WHEEL : GOODBYE CORPORATE, HELLO CABIN

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Today I would like to invite you to another part of my Life Behind the Wheel series. This time I want to share the story of how it all started. How after 13 years of working in a corporate environment ( I was a team manager responsible for 40 employees), with what many people would consider a really good and stable job, I decided to change my life completely and sit behind the wheel of a 40-ton truck.

As you already know my first step into trucking was distribution work. And I will be honest — it was really very hard. I stayed there for a short time, but I quickly realized that this kind of work was not really what I was looking for. There was a lot of heavy physical work and surprisingly little actual driving. Pallets had to be handled manually, goods were often badly packed and sticking out from the pallets, which meant you needed quite a lot of strength to unload everything. And I did not become a driver to spend most of my time doing warehouse work. I wanted to drive.

So I started looking for something else and eventually I found a job in distribution for Tesco. It was still distribution work, but the conditions were already much better. The trailer was loaded before I started my shift and the routes were usually longer. My main task was unloading the goods at the store. But the pallets were packed much better than before. The products were properly arranged and did not stick out beyond the pallets, which meant unloading them required much less physical strength.

Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately, depending on how I look at it today — Tesco was slowly disappearing from the market and being replaced by Netto. The situation started changing and my boss eventually decided that it was no longer profitable for him to continue working under the new conditions. He made the decision to close the company. In the end I managed to complete only three trips before the job simply ended. Around the same time my private life also became quite complicated. I will not go into details here, but everything together caused a break in my driving career. For about a year I stopped driving trucks completely.

But the truth is that the road was still calling me. After that year I decided to find some additional driving work and this is how I ended up doing what we call a shuttle route. The job was based on 12-hour shifts and short routes between warehouses. I was transporting car windshields from the production facility to a storage warehouse, from where they were later sent further. The distances were not long, but the work itself was much lighter. During a 12-hour shift it was usually possible to complete two short trips, around 100 kilometers in total. The main task was driving and backing up to the loading docks several times a day. And this part actually turned out to be very valuable. Reversing a truck to a ramp is one of the most important and often the most stressful parts of the job. Because I was doing it several times every day, I gained a lot of practice. Later, when I decided to start driving internationally, that experience helped me a lot.

At the beginning I worked there mostly on weekends. But the company constantly had problems with driver shortages. The work was relatively easy and predictable, so I offered my boss that if he had staffing problems during the week, I could sometimes come for night shifts as well. This led to a rather unusual routine. From 7:00 in the morning until 15:00 I was working from home at my corporate job. Then at 17:00 I would go to the warehouse and start my driving shift, which sometimes lasted until two, three, four or even five in the morning. Then I would return home and at 7:00 I was already sitting again in front of my computer starting another office day. At first it happened occasionally, but the lack of drivers became more frequent and there were weeks when I lived like this two or even three times.

At the same time I started feeling more and more burned out in my office job. I desperately needed a change. On top of that there were also situations that could be described as workplace bullying. The atmosphere became more and more difficult and I felt that mentally it was starting to drain me. At some point I realized that physically and mentally I simply could not continue working two jobs at the same time. I had to pull the blanket in one direction and make a decision.

So I decided to take a break from corporate life. And if I was going to become a full-time driver anyway, I thought I might as well jump straight into the deep water and start driving internationally. At least I would be able to see more of Europe, clear my head a little and maybe find some balance again. At the beginning the plan was simple. I thought I would probably drive for one year, gain some new experiences and then maybe return to office work with a fresh mind.

But life had other plans. I caught the trucking bug very quickly. What was supposed to be a one-year break slowly turned into something much bigger. Today it has already been three years since I started driving trucks full time and honestly, at this moment I would not trade this job for any other. I found my place in it completely. This work gives me a lot of satisfaction. Strangely enough, I also find a kind of mental rest in it. Of course it is not a stress-free job. There is always pressure, deadlines and responsibility. But it is a completely different kind of stress than the one I experienced in the office. And for me, this difference changed everything.