Legal Lane
LANE
2011 Truck Driving
Legal
By Jim C. Klepper
Transition Into
W
ant to drive a big truck? Do you have a brother, cousin or friend that is thinking of joining the men and women who travel the highways and byways of our great country? Truck driving is usually a good paying career and allows you to travel as little or as much as you like depending upon your job. Driving is one of the last jobs that will trust you with a $100,000 vehicle and sometimes up to a $1,000,000 load of cargo and send you out across county to show up next week for delivery. You can’t take home a 6 carrot diamond from your job at the jewelry store for your wife to wear next week while you go on vacation, the insurance company frowns on that little idea. But the carrier and the insurance company are happy to trust you with the same amount of cargo value over the road. Professional truck drivers are just that, Professional. Something that you may not know or understand is how the states exchange information about your Commercial Drivers License or you Motor Vehicle Record. This
is where the story gets a little scary. Think of all the government workers in all the states as the evil stepsisters of Cinderella. Lets call the evil stepsisters Frustration, Anxiety and Stress and all going about their business without really caring what Cinderella, which is you, does as long as you make no money and have no fun. We also have the evil stepmother, the Federal Government, who likes the evil stepsisters better than she does you so you are often left to carry out the trash from the big party they had. Frustration causes you problems because it seems that everything you do or want to do is delayed by a government employee with zero interest in resolving your problem, which causes your problem to hang around much longer than really necessary. An example could be a judge dismissed your ticket in KS but your home state of GA failed to get that information and put the original ticket on your MVR, thus causing your license to be suspended. You have a certified copy of the judge’s order showing the Dismissal but your home state DMV clerk tells you ‘We