Susan Rockey loved trucking. What she hated was compliance.
Lured by the call of the open road after years of working as an ER tech and running group homes for emotionally disturbed kids, she took a job in 2015 at Conner Logistics. Mostly she drove an 18-wheeler, a reefer — meaning “ree-frigerated,” as she’s had to explain way too often — hauling meat and produce across America. But half the time, she was rooting around in the truck for a pencil and her three-ringed binder to enter her hours on the required gridded paper. She needed a ruler, too, and often had to fax the logs in from the next truck stop. All drivers had to do some version of this; no one liked the rigamarole. “There was a lot of noncompliance, a lot of cheating,” she says.