Getting paid to do something you love is the ultimate embodiment of non-sarcastically livin’ the dream, but when what you love is driving, there are probably far more driving-jobs that are not the dream than jobs that are. Despite the topshot, I would put pizza-delivery driver very low on my dream-driving-job list.
Likewise, I imagine being a long-haul trucker is no picnic. There’s the romance of the open road and all that, but I think I would find driving a big rig and maintaining the extra-high situational awareness the job demands to be highly taxing. That, and it’s an endless game of beat-the-clock, and I would fold under the stress.
Naturally, the peak driving jobs are the most scarce. At the tippy-top, you’ve got pro race car driver, and test-driver for Ferrari or Porsche or Lamborghini (etc., etc.), which probably has a lot of overlap with pro racing driver. Along with sheer scarcity, the qualifications required – you know, driving really fast, really really well – make it highly unlikely that I’ll be within a million miles of those roles.
A driving job I could definitely get into and do well is long-distance delivery driver, like Farrah Haines. She and her 1,000,000-mile, bull-bar’d Hyundai Elantra have stuck with me ever since 2018 when I read her story. All day, alone, listening to music and podcasts and books in a comfy car with a great stereo (but I don’t think I’d choose an Elantra, I’d probably go Prius) sounds pretty great to me.
UPDATE
Stephen Walter Gossin DM’d me a nice submission for today’s AA, but I missed it. Here it is now!
From ’98-’00 I was a Dominoes delivery driver after class while attending UNC Wilmington. “Dinner Rush” was from 4:30-8:30pm, so that’s when the Ogden, NC (a suburb of Wilmington) needed 5-8 drivers on hand – especially Friday and Saturday nights. That meant 4-5 hour shifts, which were perfect after a long day of classes and writing papers.
Ogden NC has grown exponentially in the past 26yrs, but back then, traffic wasn’t too bad, you got $7/hr plus $.75 for mileage for each run you completed, plus tips. It worked out to about $12.50/hr which was great money back then for a college kid with an ’80 Civic and $300/mo room rent. You always ended up taking home a pizza that the kitchen messed up on also that would otherwise be headed for the trash. Zipping that little manual Honda in and out of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs with some good tunes blaring and a pocket full of tips was so much fun, I sometimes forgot it was “work.” My favorite job outside of writing for this website in my 46 years on this planet.
Well shoot, now delivering pizza sounds fun.
Top graphic image: Stranger Things/Netflix
I drove a Duck (or DUKW) for a now out of business tour company. Fun, good, job.
The Stig.
That is all.
I did some freelance for a site like this almost 20 years ago. It was always fun to get vehicles to drive and get invited to events. Best memory was driving a brand new Camaro when they first came out, and it was around the same time as the first Transformer movie coming out. I got swarmed everywhere I went.
Second best would be a dealer trade driver for a dealership. Get to go somewhere new most days driving all types of stuff and getting paid to do it.
I hope to someday write either an article or a book about it, but working as a Rural Carrier for the USPS in the hollers and hills of Eastern Ohio/West Virginia has been the adventure of my life. There’s adversity, there’s drama, there’s frantically getting your vehicle running again, getting lost with no cell service, stuck, run off the road, chased by dogs, battling mechanical problems, and it’s all just part of delivering mail and packages.
If you run a POV route, you are your own driver, boss, mechanic, first aid, best friend, and worst enemy. It’s you and your own personal vehicle against the world, and the places you go, and things you see way out in nowhere are amazing. I’d highly recommend trying it if you’ve got nothing else going on.
This is my chief justification for getting a Toyota Century if I ever live in the boondocks again. Not worth it to maintain an aging Japanese V12, you say? It’s a business expense.
There are SO many amazing jdm rigs that now make perfect sense for me to buy now. If I go career on the route I think I can get, I can totally get away with using a Stagea.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays a station wagon with AWD, a turbo 6, and giant rally lights above a huge intercooler.
Apollo 15, 16, and 17 Commanders and Lunar Module Pilots. Freakin’ got to drive on the moon.
I worked at a local bank in IT. We dealt with IT issues for employees only, not the customers. We had several branches within a 200 mile radius from where I was located. When an issue couldn’t be fixed over the phone, normally hardware issues, I would hop in the old chevy express 2500 and drive out to the branch to fix the issue on site. This was usually two or three days a week. I LOVED being out of the office and on the road.
I like cars, and I like driving.
But I don’t want to do it as a job.
Nowadays, if it makes sense, I will turn down renting a car when travelling and take a taxi/uber/train instead. I don’t want to park it, most rental cars are not desirable, I don’t want to hunt for a poorly labelled address, I dislike hunting for fuel stations away from home, and I don’t want to deal with traffic.
My day job is testing and calibrating ABS systems. Nearly all of the testing is at some limit of the vehicle dynamics. It’s pretty good
While in college I worked at the local family-owned BMW dealership in town, and over the course of my employment had a couple of driving jobs (putting aside there is almost no job at a dealership that doesn’t involve some driving), one OK, the other great.
First, delivery driver for the parts department. Spending all day driving all over town in a tired mid-90s S-10 with a 2.2L and 5-speed wasn’t the best experience in the world, but it wasn’t worst either. Tunes, A/C, it was fine.
Second, porter, or lot tech as we called them, the superior job. Washing/detailing and organizing the showroom and outside lot involved driving a lot of BMWs (and Mercs, Audis, Porsches, and anything else that got traded in – even a diesel/manual F-350). But the driving was usually short distances. The highlight of the job was when a friend of the family needed service or wanted to buy a new car. This usually required shuttling cars to and from the customer’s house, and many times these well-to-do customers lived in quite nice areas in the foothills west of Denver (or further). A 20-year-old being told to drive to Morrison, Vail, or Avon to pick up a customer’s E46 M3 convertible, E34 540i 6-speed, or Z8 (once) on a perfect summer day was a real sacrifice. Basically I was spending the day driving on twisty mountain roads in a desirable car, and being paid to do it. I probably haven’t enjoyed a job since…
Also worked as a porter for a BMW dealer. A very young me was handed the keys to deliver an m550i and return a 7 series from the dealership owner about 40 minutes away. That was a fun day.
I delivered pizzas also, but we were also expected to do closing work, which included cleaning grease traps. Ugh. I don’t miss that. Or houses with pitbulls.
I’ve had two driving jobs that I enjoyed. First, in my “gap year” that I took between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked for a bank courier service that also ran armored cars. I mostly drove the courier routes picking up checks from banks to be processed up and down the Maine coast, and I also had a Friday late night route from Maine down to the Fed Reserve Bank in Boston with interstate checks. And occasionally filled in as an armored car driver. Good times for a 19yo.
Then, as I have posted about before, in law school I drove busses for Northern Illinois University. Mostly coaches, but I filled in on the campus transit routes too. LOVED that, and I think if I ever had to find a job again I might just try to get into driving coaches again.
I don’t know if the best but often fairly well payed and you get to drive a pickup all over without a lot of people looking over your shoulder. The hotshotter drivers mainly for oil and gas stuff.
I see a lot of absolutely filthy oil field services expeditions driving around basically middle management checking on everything. Maybe they pickup coffee and some kind of food for the guys working when checking on them. The guys I’ve talked to seem to like doing it.
Engineer on a firetruck is up there. You get to drive a big truck fast make lots of noise then play with the engines and make sure you everything is working and pumping while on the scene.
I’d be the best ambulance diver in the world. no one would die on my shift. Lights and siren blasting, traffic lights changing for me. cars moving out of the way for me. I’d get the the hospital in record time!
diving would be a dream!
now only if I could do this in my regular car…..
Good news… you can!
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Just not legally. Like, not even remotely legally.
I delivered flowers in college. This was pre-GPS, Google maps, etc. This was pure Thomas Guide – I had to figure out the most efficient route myself. I drove a white Caravan with a big flower and the name of the florist emblazoned on the sides. I worked Saturdays and delivered flowers for weddings, for church services the next day, and to funeral homes. I’d knock on doors and delivered flowers to new grads, mourning spouses, new girlfriends and for countless other reasons. Got to see a broad spectrum of life events. At end of day Saturday, I got all the flowers I wanted because they’d be thrown out with new flowers coming in on Sunday. Every Saturday night I would show up to my girlfriend’s dorm suite with flowers. Her roommates were jealous. Their boyfriends were nonplussed. One of them pulled me aside and said, I was f*cking up the curve for the other boyfriends. I told him I worked as a florist and if I didn’t show up with flowers now and then, well then it I was going to be the one in hot water. The florist was a a three-generation business and the elderly father (second gen) stepped away from day-to-day business to be the “rose whisperer.” The middle-aged son left a management track position with a national department store to run the family business. All the flower arrangers were women and it was fascinating to listen to them chat as I did homework between deliveries. The boss once let me use the company van to move my girlfriend’s stuff from the dorm to an apartment. He said, “If you crash the van, don’t come back to work.” Fair enough. I didn’t crash the van. He was a kind man and dutiful son. It was obvious his heart wasn’t into running the business and maybe he saw that the flower sections in the grocery stores seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. About 20 local florists had a “hub,” where each of us would drop off flowers in a central location at around noon and divvy up the flowers based on delivery location. This time, all the drivers were men and hanging out at the hub and listening to their conversations was just as interesting as with the flower arrangers. Many years later, as an adult, I walked into the florist. It had been sold. The new owner was pleasant but didn’t know that much about the history of the shop. I made a purchase and that was the last time I thought about it until looking it up decades later – the shop had closed. Predictable but still sad. It was probably the most enjoyable job I ever had.
International 4700 with the 10 speed (5 and a split) manual, overloaded with a soil boring rig. Early in my career I was in charge of that rig, got my CDL because I had an excuse – gotta help drive, of course. That was back when the CDL test was a spin around the block, back it up to a cone, and they said ‘He’ll be OK.’ Horsed that thing all over the state.
Nothing beats the feeling of shifting that beast without the clutch, even on the 5-6 split. Well, maybe the grim satisfaction of growling that beast into some muddy woods in low-low. Best offroader is the truck you don’t own…
Ring Taxi driver, obviously.
My senior year of high school I worked as an interoffice courier for a real estate company. I delivered mail and documents between three regional offices. I put about fifty miles a night on my parents’ car. I don’t remember how much I got paid, but it was enough to cover gas. After hours, no small talk, just blasting up and down the freeway for two hours listening to Tea Party and the Crow soundtrack. Bliss.
Being a pro drag racer sounds like fun. Same with Indycar, they seem like a good bunch of guys. NASCAR drivers have to deal with too much chaos from each other and the organization, and F1 just seems miserable, with your race engineer constantly telling you what to do. And your manager telling you what to do. And your team principal. F1 is micromanage-a-rama.
Auto auction car driver. It’s alllllllll retired dudes who shuttle the cars dealers buy to the dealership and then wait to be picked up by the auction bus driver.
I did this, too. For a small dealer, so there was no big $ involved. I did get to drive a replica Model T!
I’m told that being a repo man is not nearly as cool as the Alex Cox movie makes it seem. Besides, they usually just use a tow truck I think.
Surprised nobody has mentioned traffic cop. Sit around half the day munchin on doughnuts and slurping coffee and then every once in a awhile, test out the 0-60 on a police interceptor Explorer. Of course, instead of harassing minorities, I’d be going after the coal rollers with Trump flags.
Did this for a bit in the early 90s. It is not fun. You get to meet some real entitled assholes that feel they can do whatever they want. Sitting here typing and could probably write a couple of pages… Suffice it to say it takes a certain personality to do the job deal with all the crap. That’s probably why many aren’t the type of person you want to hang around with.
I will say, though that the 2 AM pursuits were fun, as long as no one got hurt.
Maybe that’s why I typically get off with a verbal warning. I try to be respectful and just answer the officer’s questions.
Usually the way to go. Some want to write a ticket no matter what though.
There is absolutely zero upside to being a dick to a cop, and I just don’t understand at all the people who act that way. Even if you feel you are wrong, there is a time and a place to protest your innocence, and the side of the road is not that time, and not that place.
I’ve seen people pick a fight with immigration/customs officers.
It reminds me that there are far worse decisions that can be made than choosing 96month financing on a Stellantis vehicle.
Good lord. They can literally do almost ANYTHING to you with very little due process – until you have entered the US, the Constitution largely doesn’t really apply! Landed but not entered is kind of a weird legal limbo. If you are a citizen, they HAVE to let you in eventually, but they can make your life hell in the meantime.
I agree with you, but for many people the punishment IS the having to go to court to deal with the ticket. Like in my state, NC, you have to go to court and haggle down your ticket, otherwise you’ll find yourself paying at least 30% more on your insurance for 5 years (raised this year from 3!) Or pay a lawyer to do it for you, but that costs more in cash (not time) than doing it yourself, and they frequently get a better deal.
Doesn’t matter. Arguing with a cop has no upside. If you are nice, polite, have your shit together in terms of registration, insurance, and inspection, you might not even get that ticket to start with. Piss him off, and you are getting the ticket for whatever he stopped you for, and maybe a few more, up to and including getting cuffed and stuffed for resisting, or worse.
You take it politely and deal with it later.
“ You take it politely and deal with it later.”
Exactly. Hell, there are even apps for that.
Age and exasperation have mellowed me out and taken some of the edge off of traffic stops. If I get lit up I signal and promptly pull over, drop the windows, get my license, papers, & keys in one hand while keeping the other visible, and just answer questions as needed. I have not been cited since I learned trying to talk your way out of a ticket rarely helps.
Cops are people too. The nature of the job does mean that they are the kind of people who are okay with routinely exercising authority over others and thus many are dicks. I’ve had a few run-in with dick cops and just let them dig their own holes… those situations resolved themselves.
Being professional about traffic stops benefits everyone involved. The driver has a legitimate fear of circumstances including violent death, but the cop faces that fear every single time they walk up to a car. Why make that situation any more complicated than absolutely necessary?
Right on. I have never had a bad interaction with a cop – and when I was younger and dumber I had a LOT of them due to a, shall we say, overenthusiastic driving style. And I’m a not white guy who grew up in the whitest state in the nation even. But I am unfailingly polite. But there is no reason to go out of your way to provide information either. Polite, professional, and deal with the results later. I have only gotten one ticket this century, well deserved for 88 in a 70 (in the middle of nowhere Montana) – and the lady state trooper cut me a break by letting me mail in the money – they are supposed to take it in cash (I didn’t have any on me) or take you to a judge right then. But the judge was an hour or two away and she said “you seem like a nice young man I can trust to mail the $40(!)”. What’s that old saying about honey vs. vinegar?
I have a bunch of cousins who are local police and county sheriffs in Maine. I have done ride-alongs with them, and also with the Chicago PD when I was in law school in IL. There is no way in Hell I could do that job. You are just dealing with the dregs of humanity far too often. I have the utmost respect for law enforcement. It’s a pretty thankless job, and I totally get why that certain personality type is either drawn to it, or at least lets them put up with it. And I think in many cases, even if you are a nice guy to start with, the job will pound that out of you.
It will. Took me a while to realize it was a job I wasn’t able to continue while maintaining some sort of sanity. I honestly believe every person you meet in that job is potentially having if not the worst, then one of the worst days of their life. Either because they had to call you or someone called you because of them. I got in to the job because I wanted to help people. It didn’t always work out that way. I know some really good people that have retired from the job but only because they were able to make it up to management positions. The ones that are unable or refuse to promote seem to get very jaded with society and life in general.
Well said. My cousins are lucky to work in small town Maine, so it’s not SOO bad for them, but I really feel for the city guys.
And on top of all of this, there is the constant media-generated meme that all cops are bad based on the actions of an incredibly tiny number. Which simply is not the case. I feel like we hold cops (and healthcare professionals) to completely unrealistic standards. The standards should certainly be very high, but it should be recognized that they are only human too, and mistakes will be made.
I had a buddy that would watch Netflix and let off underage DUI drivers because it was the end of their shift and they didn’t want to deal with it.
Years ago, I once had a job delivering flowers in an old Dodge Caravan that had a musty smell because water from the vases would slosh all over the back. But it was great because I was delivering happiness and getting tips.
This is a tough one. Mid- to low-level pro racers have it pretty tough, and the upper levels look fun, although I don’t know if I could live with myself having to be nice to and promote sponsors that sound like obvious grifts and scams. Every F1 car seems to have some butt-turrible crypto or AI nonsense on it nowadays.
Maybe one of Porsche’s test drivers, then? I don’t really necessarily need the limelight, but I need to drive good parsh really, really fast. You could still do some racing on the side for fun (not for shady Rich Energy Crypto AI guys backing a ruinously expensive car, but like, in an old parsh or something).
Probably a test driver for a race team.
First job out of the Navy in 91 was a dealership and they had me running people to work and picking them up. But I had just moved to New Orleans. No GPS, no Google directions. I figured things out quick but it was a bit embarrassing to be pulling out of the lot going “ok, left or right?”
At 58 I’m thinking maybe someday I’ll either run parts for an auto parts store, or do the shuttle bus at a big factory (if any are left in 5-10 years).