This ‘un ain’t for me, broke as a joke though I am and shall almost certainly remain, but for my brother Jeff. To wit:
Jeff’s Flatbed Fund!
The photo is of my brother Jeff Hendrix. I’m writing this and putting this fundraiser together for him because he’s not the most web-savvy guy in the world, while I’ve been designing, building, and adminning websites for many years, in addition to driving trucks between web-design jobs.The truck-driving gig is something Jeff and I have had in common for a long, long time—going all the way back to 1981, in fact, when I got my first freight-hauling job with Emery Air Freight, the pioneering air-freight pickup and delivery/logistics/freight forwarding company started by US Navy veteran John C Emery, Sr right after the end of WW2, in 1946. Two years after I was hired there, I put a word in with my boss and helped Jeff get on with Emery, driving cargo vans and straight-trucks like I’d been doing.
From there, both Jeff and myself went on to long stints at Emery competitor Airborne Express, working for two different sub-drayage contractors. Next, it was a stretch at Bax Global, where Jeff trained for and got his Class-A license and moved on up to the big leagues: eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rigs pulling 53-foot enclosed trailers, the final step in the truck-driver’s evolution.
After Bax went the way of the dodo, Jeff took his hard won rig jockey skills to Phoenix Metals, hauling a flatbed trailer loaded with sheet steel. He worked for Phoenix for 7 years, then decided to take the owner-operator plunge and buy his own tractor—a used 2000 Freightliner Classic XL in well-above-average condition—to haul containers from the Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA seaports as an independent B-drayage contractor for Horizon Freight.
After eight years at Horizon pulling in the most money he’d ever earned in his trucking career, the utter economic disaster that IS the Biden economy has put paid to all that, as the container-hauling business came to a screeching, smoking halt in January 2021. Jeff says that the collapse was almost immediate and quite noticeable, much like a Semi crashing into a brick wall. HIGHLY EXPERIENCED drivers who had worked the container runs for twenty, even thirty years, found themselves desperately looking for other trucking work. To hear him talk about it with his fellow Horizon drivers (which I have, several times), “disaster” is too mild a word for it; “apocalyptic” might be more apt.
Which, as we all know only too well, is in no way an overstatement. You can read the rest over at the fundraiser page linked above. In the event that any of y’all fellow Biden Economic MIRACLE!© victims have a spare nickle or three, please do consider throwing it his way so’s he can get on back to work again. I have a YUUUGE vested interest in the success of this hail-Mary venture myself, seeing as how I rent my living space from him and have no more desire to find a nice bridge to sleep under than he does. Thanks in advance either way for your kindly attention. This post will remain stuck to the top of this page; new CF ravings will appear below.
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Tough situation. Trucking is probably the canary in the mine. My best wishes to your brother, donation made.
I’m in. Best of luck!
I have had a CDL for years and not used it. Six years ago I bought a 35′ gooseneck and did the Hot Shot hauling. I was getting good paying loads working the Atlanta/Savannah/Greenville triangle where I was home almost every night. When Biden took office a fuel prices went up the rates stayed constant so the profit ratio went down. Two years ago the rates went down to a level I couldn’t turn a profit. I sold the gooseneck 4 months ago and fully retired.
Trucking is hard work. Good luck.