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 work on business voip systems. yesterday i drove 2 hours to press 2 buttons on a phone. took a 2 hour lunch and then drove 2 hours back. that was my whole day.
Medical lab driver for Veterinarians. No passengers, no cash, just me in a little truck driving around town, picking up samples and dropping off supplies. Most of the time there was no people interaction involved, just open the box, grab the samples and drop off whatever they had requested, usually in the 7 to midnight time frame. Loved that job! Tinny AM radio and a Big Gulp in the cupholder!
In the late 70s as a high school senior I had a short gig as the shoe delivery guy for Nordstrom. I’d pick up an old Ford Courier at the downtown Seattle store and load the bags from the shoe department for delivery to the other local stores. My route was from Seattle -> Southcenter -> Bellevue -> Aurora Village -> Northgate -> Seattle. At each store I’d drop bags of shoes for that store and pick up bags of shoes for transfer to other stores. Seattle didn’t have much traffic at the time and it was about a 4 hour gig 3 days a week, Monday Wednesday Friday. No time table, or schedule, just be there around 2 to start the route. Perfect for a highschooler. Side perk was I met of lot cute shoe department girls from all over the city. It all came to an end when I left for college on the other side of the state.
At 17, I had a summer job running cars at an auto body shop. They were the preferred shop for a bunch of local rental car branches so I’d run repaired vehicles out and cars with minor damage back to the shop.
They were also a dealer – they’d buy beat up cars, fix them, and sell them at wholesale/dealer auctions.
This was cool for a few reasons: as a 17 year old gearhead, I learned a lot of Polish phrases, a lot about auto repair, got to go to auctions, and got to drive a lot of different stuff without worrying about them being a customer’s car. The dealer guy was a former almost professional rally driver in Europe and was impatient so riding shotgun with him was interesting, too. Coming home from auction was the first time I’d been in a car over 100 mph on an undisclosed closed course.
That and running supplies for my dad’s janitorial company might have been the best jobs I ever had.
As a TV news photographer in Seattle, sometimes I got assigned to shoot a story across Puget Sound, which involved flying in the station’s helicopter (which I LOVED) or taking a Washington State Ferry (which I also LOVED).
If it was the latter, I got a nice relaxing ride across the sound over and on the way back and usually a couple of hours of overtime.
The actual driving? It was in a 1st Gen Nissan Pathfinder, a Chevy Tahoe or a Ford Econoline van/microwave truck. None exactly particularly exciting to drive.
I work the parts counter at a GM dealership but also do morning and afternoon deliveries/drop-offs/pick-ups. It’s nice to be away from people for 1-5hrs of the day using the dealership’s truck and gas while getting paid. I’ve thought of looking at jobs where I’m just a parts driver all day long but then I probably wouldn’t get commission on top of my crappy hourly pay.
In the late 1990’s I was in the Air Force Reserves at a base that had been realigned from active-duty to reserve and once a month we had to drive a van up to Edwards AFB to pick up medical supplies. Other than the heat, it was always a super chill time, leisurely driving through the desert, and gawking at all the NASA research stuff at the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.
Never thought about it much, but I’ve had several jobs that centered around driving and thought they we’re all pretty cool. In high-school I always got a summer job. The first was delivering eyeglasses from the optician to the eye doctors. The company car was a 1967 Beetle. I learned to drive a stick on the job. Next year, I worked for a land surveyor and we drove all over western NC in an old GMC Travelall. In college I stocked vending machines in the lobby of restaurants, truck stops, bars and anywhere else there was a cigarette machine. The company car was a 64 Galaxy with all the seats removed. For a while, I worked at a Ford dealership prepping new cars and drove a lot of new Mustangs, Torinos and Mavericks. For the last 40 years, I have worked for myself as a real estate appraiser. I get to drive around, measure houses and take photos. I go places I would never have otherwise. Makes me wonder how many miles altogether.
I missed out on an opportunity for the perfect driving job when I first moved to LA: photographer’s assistant for Edmunds. Drive cars around Santa Monica while someone takes pictures of them? Sounds great!
Unfortunately, my cell phone got such crappy reception at the temp job I was working at the time that I kept missing calls from their HR person. After a week of phone tag, they went to the next name on the list, and the temp job became permanent.
That is really sad.
One of the most interesting driving jobs I know of is one I know almost nothing about.
A family friend is a trucker who hauls… things… for the Department of Energy. There are other vehicles escorting him on his trips, and like his truck, they look unremarkable. And that’s all he’ll tell anyone about his job.
Delivering pizza was a great college job before the apps took over. You worked for the pizza shop, you had set hours, you got paid even if there was no rush, and you made cash tips on a full hourly rather than a tip rate. In my college town I made about $20 a hour delivering on busy nights. Tips were good and the area was small. We got a set pay per delivery and tips were cash most of the time. I would do it in the good weather on a scooter because it was more fun and often faster. Plus all night at work on $2 in fuel.
Our pizza place was also mostly people in college working and it ran smooth most of the time.
For almost 10 years I worked for a non-profit hospice delivering oxygen, specialty drugs and home medical equipment all over Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Got a nice new Ford E250 van every few years, saw lots of scenery, listened to tons of music and the patients and their families were the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life.
But the pay was horrible so I became a diesel mechanic and went to work for a large construction equipment dealer chain. Got a brand new Kenworth service truck with an Eaton 10 speed manual and they paid me to learn how to drive it and get my CDL. Did that for several more years and mostly enjoyed it until I was absolutely sick of driving and moved into the shop where I currently work.
Now I drive on public roads only when necessary but absolutely love operating and fixing construction equipment. Additionally I have a seasonal gig running a Zamboni which is also extremely satisfying.
Similar to SWG’s story, I had a job in the late 90s at Penn State as a KFC delivery driver. I know we didn’t get $7/hr, but it was a reasonable rate, plus a per trip fee and then cash tips. All this was before GPS, so you had to review the large map in the restaurant and memorize the route. I enjoyed it, it was pretty low stress and a pocketful of cash at the end of the night was great.
So were you able to meet “Herbsann Spices Sanders”? Ha ha
In college my on campus job was “transporter”. I worked 10 hours a week, had a golf cart and walkie talkie. My job was supposed to be picking up injured kids and driving them to class. In reality, it was just taking my friends to class and mobbing the golf cart all around campus, even places it really shouldn’t be. It was the dream. I felt like Van Wilder. Except I only had the job for 3 years.
I used to have a work-study job at Cal Poly Pomona where we delivered projector carts to buildings all over campus. Because the campus is obviously closed to cars, and has bollards set up all over with 4′ on center, we used a small fleet of kei vans to do this. We had an ancient HiJet box truck, and a couple of Kia Towners rebadged as Metro some thing or another. All were stick, RWD, and could fit between ballards on campus quads.
As you can imagine, we were flying down the roads with these things. Occasionally instead of projector carts we had friends in the back. This didn’t happen on my watch but I heard once or twice a rookie new-hire has laid the van on its side by taking a turn too fast. Or slipped the foot off the clutch too soon and drove it right through the boom at a checkpoint. On a singular long stretch of road by the horse stables, if you got t the shift points right you could reach 60mph, which felt like you were on a kamikaze mission. It was hilarity and madness. All the while feeling like Initial D because the practical purpose of this job was to deliver things, often to the Kellog House which was at the end of a serpentine road, on top of a hill 😉
The campus knew that there was little they could do to prevent students from being students. So their approach was quite clever. Upon delivery of a van, the campus mechanic opened up the transmission and somehow removed or disabled the top two gears, So it effectively became a 3 speed. But eventually these gearboxes got so worn down that they had to be replaced, and those units were left as 5 speeds.
Ain’t no rest for the wicked.
I like independence and being on the move, so long distance courier could work for me. But a million miles behind the wheel also sounds like a great way to develop health problems. Your body was not designed to be sedentary and immobile for such duration and frequency. And finding a car model provided the right mixture of economy, durability, and seat comfort could be a challenge.
Did the pizza delivery thing in HS and college. Great job, it paid decently and suited my personality far better than dealing with the arrogance and entitlement of customers in the more customer-facing sides of food service.
My FIL loved driving and knew every side street and shortcut wherever he lived. At around the age of 80-something he got what he considered the best job ever. He was a driver for one of the car rental agencies. Folks would drop off cars are locations where they needed to be picked up and driven back to the central location or to a different location. Basically get in a company van and be dropped off to drive a vehicle somewhere. Rinse and repeat. Since the company reanted out some higher end powerful cars with a manual transmissions, and none of the youngn’s could drive manuals, my FIL got those assignments. He loved that job.
Once in a menial car dealership job 21 year old me was tasked with taking a Jag S-Type R from Perth to a customer in Aberdeen.
Which I did.
Via Aviemore
Zamboni driving seems like it would be fun
I unexpectedly fell into a seasonal gig running a Zamboni at an outdoor rink near my home. It’s incredibly awesome and fun, but surprisingly difficult to master on a machine with full manual controls on outdoor ice that’s constantly changing with the weather. I just wrapped up my 2nd season and towards the end I finally got good enough to condition the ice satisfactorily for figure skating shows. But I still feel like a rank amateur every time I hop on the “Zam.”