A Potential Light at the End of the Tunnel

Chapter Nineteen – An Anguishing Solution

One day I was at one of our car lots with one of the paint techs whom I’ll call George. I was bewailing my lack of work. I made a statement that achieved legendary ironic repetition some months later when we were both in a completely different set of circumstances. I said, 

        “I just want to work.”

That was the day George began to tell me about a previous job he had had as a dispatcher in the trucking industry. I had some misgivings, as the job description didn’t really seem to suit my personality. It sounded like a fast-paced, high stress, quick puzzle-solving skills environment. Those weren’t my forte but I was so desperate for something to make more money, it intrigued me. I asked George to make inquiries for me.

In a bizarre turn of events, a short time later, George was asked to go help run a trucking company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Expedited Direct. The owner of the company was a guy who had started and run his own shipping company, sold it for millions of dollars, then started a new one. Trucking can be a bit of a ratty industry with not a whole lot of reliability. So he started the trucking company to complement the shipping side to give his clients a more fulsome reliability.

There was another guy “running” Expedited who had already lost the owner a million dollars or so and soon after George started, that guy was gone and George was running the company. It was a very small company so far and most of the clients were from the sister shipping company, running containers from a few ports to the clients. 

There was no way, with its size, the trucking company could handle all of the shipping company’s trucking needs but that was the ultimate goal. With that in mind, the company needed to grow. And that’s where I came in. George called from Charlotte to offer me a job.   

Because of our church and friends, Chesapeake had become our home and it was a place my family was loathe to leave. The beach was also a large part of their lives and Charlotte had no ocean. But circumstances often require you to make decisions that you would not otherwise care to make. And I was desperate.

I took a couple of days off work to surreptitiously go to Charlotte to check it out. Laura’s uncle and his family had actually recently moved to the Charlotte area so we talked to them about the possibility of me staying with them until we found a place to move the family.

There were only about five office employees, one of whom was in one of the port cities the company provided service out of. There were about ten drivers who were owner/operators. That means they worked exclusively for the company but were able to leave at any time. 

Despite so few employees and the desire to grow, George let me know that the employees were going to get fewer before take off. The industry attracts a bit of a sordid employee pool and he knew a few of them were not going to work out under his leadership.

The office was a ratty little place, rented from another trucking company right off the main freeway but within sight of downtown Charlotte. I hung with George and met the other three employees in Charlotte. Despite it’s humble circumstances, it looked like it could be a good opportunity with great potential growth. Laura’s uncle also agreed to let me stay with them. I went home, discussed it with Laura and gave my two weeks notice.

The hours were looooong. We had a lot to do and I needed to learn the ropes very quickly. Initially I was to get a good grounding in the whole business with the goal of becoming a dispatcher. George was dispatching at the time but it took up a lot of time that he needed to run the business.

We had to sell our house in Chesapeake but the timing wasn’t great. The economic downturn had started to knock housing prices down but it was still worth more than we bought it for. I decided to sell by owner but offer the buyer’s agent their commission. Selling the house was going to be a potential confirmation for Laura that this was the right move for us. We had a buyer within two weeks. Despite how difficult this move was, that was a confirmation for Laura that God was in it.


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