Professor spent six months as a trucker
Steve Viscelli gets it.
The University of Pennsylvania professor was fascinated by trucks and truckers growing up in Rome, N.Y. His father ran the scale at Revere Copper & Brass, where young Steve saw lots of trucks, heard lots of driver stories, and always wondered about life on the road.
While working on his Ph.D. dissertation about trucking, Viscelli got his chance. He spent six months driving for a major truckload carrier, one of the biggest he said, although to keep his agreement he won’t name it. He drove solo mostly in the eastern half of the country and learned the hard way, firsthand, just how stressful the job can be. It comes across in the introduction to his book, “The Big Rig, Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream,” where Viscelli shared notes recorded in his audio journal on one particular day.
“I am stuck at a railroad yard in New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. I got here around 6:30 (p.m.) after fighting rush-hour traffic all the way from Long Island through New York City.”
Viscelli was forced to wait for a load to Connecticut with only one hour of legal driving time left.
“Once again,” he noted, “the only guy not getting paid is me. My company’s dispatchers are getting paid. The guy in the guard shack is getting paid.”
At 10 p.m., still without a load, Viscelli decided he would try to sleep overnight in the yard despite a rule against it. “I’m hoping the security guards won’t give me any trouble.”
At that point, Viscelli had been working since 6 a.m., driving in traffic, picking up, delivering, and waiting. But he had covered only 215 miles and so earned only $56 ($3.50 per hour) for the entire day.
Since parking on nearby streets would be like hanging out a “please hijack this truck” sign, he didn’t leave the yard. The security guards didn’t bother him, so Viscelli spent the night there without food or access to a bathroom. (The next morning he had to drive the Cross Bronx Expressway during the morning rush – every trucker’s nightmare.)
Sound familiar?
Of course, that was only one bad day. There were others. Taken together, they appear to have made Professor Steve Viscelli not just another researcher and not an honorary trucker, but the real thing. LL