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June 16, 2020 17 mins

Just about 200,000 of the estimated 3.5 million truckers on the road today are women - and that number represents a 65% increase over the last decade. Today we catch up with one of them, Ingrid Brown, a 5'2" 50-something grandma who's been driving a rig for over four decades. Calling from the cab of her truck, Ingrid, whose role has been deemed "essential" throughout the Covid-19 crisis, gives us insight into what keeps her happily rolling across the country as she surpasses the 4 million mile mark, looking forward to spending time with her family while simultaneously dreaming about her next journey.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is on the Job. This season, we're speaking with
folks who are finding their professional stride in a tumultuous
job market and learning how to double down on their
skills and their experience to overcome challenges. We'll bring you
inspiring stories of people making themselves essential, an important skill
set in any economy. As Americans shut their doors and
stay home in the midst of a pandemic, truckers continue

(00:28):
to keep the country moving and stocked up on food
as they always have. It's tough, demanding work that can
keep you on the road for months at a time,
but there are a few jobs that come with the
freedom and purpose that the open road has to offer. Hello, Hi,
how are you doing? Super fantastic? How are you? This

(00:51):
is Ingrid Brown. We hopped on a zoom call while
she was at a rest stop. She was calling from
the cab of her truck. I am actually sitting in
the driver's cheek and I am in Abingdon, Virginia. I
just delivered cherries yesterday and they came from Stockton, California.
She will be here long though. She's headed to Wilkesboro,
North Carolina to pick up a load of chickens to

(01:13):
haul those all the way to Arkansas at least in
eleven hour drive. The truck you're driving right now, does
it have a name? Peach, A peach of mind? Peach? Ohman,
this truck is like this one of a cut. She's
a piece of mind, but I said, will be a
piece of mind. Peach white teeth. Her color. She sends

(01:34):
me a picture. It's this amazing peach color with teal
and white stripes along the sides. It is a very
attractive truck. Yeah. And just like most big rigs have
a name, the drivers also have nicknames that they're known
by over the radio. Do you have a call name
on the radio? I used to go be half pint. Well,

(01:56):
I'm five too, and I used to be skinny and young.
But know what I you know? Ingrid, I'm Ingrid, but
I'm a truck driver, That's what I do. Ingrid is
from Zionville, North Carolina, right near Boone on the Tennessee border.
She's fifty eight and she's been trucking for over four

(02:18):
decades years. In December, I love what I do. I
run for State O, my own independence whole owned company,
Rolling B, and I also drive as a company driver
for Flaner Brothers out of Carthage, Missouri. Ingrid is one
of three point five million truckers on the American Highway.
About two thousand of those are women. In the last decade,

(02:40):
the amount of women in trucking has increased by six
and Ingrid is a huge proponent of keeping that number growing.
Here's my thing. My steering will doesn't know the gender
that holds it, and it really doesn't care as long
as it gets safely from point A to point B.

(03:01):
There are all kinds of different ways you can go
about trucking. Some drivers prefer to specialize in hauling one
kind of load, whether it's veggies or lumber, but a
lot of truckers, like Ingrid, become a jack of all
trades and know how to haul pretty much anything. So
you may see me under a conostogo, which is a
curtain sided flat bed and hollow machinery and that kind

(03:23):
of thing. Sometimes you might be driving a refrigerated trailer
used for transporting anything that needs to keep cool. These
trailers are known in trucker lingo as reefers. No, I'm
not hauling reefer, I am pulling a refrigerated trailer. And
each individual load she picks up comes with its own
completely unique set of tasks exactly exactly, and and my

(03:44):
biggest one, honestly is when I load, I have to
make sure that it's loaded properly and it's loaded to
where it's going to ride across the country. Any product
draft right toilet paper, produce cows at the load, something
like peaches. She'll make sure that her route avoids any
rough roads so the fruit doesn't get bruised before it

(04:05):
gets to the market. And a lot of care goes
into hauling her favorite load, cattle, which she constantly checks
on make sure that they're hydrated, and takes corners real
slow to make sure that they're okay. And I've not
met many of that halk cows that don't do that
because you have kids on board. Yeah, you've got the
babies on board. Do you care about them? You take

(04:26):
care of them. And even though she takes extra care
of the cows that she hauls, it's pretty clear that
she treats all of her loads as precious cargo. Exactly.
You don't just shut the doors and drive down the road.
Trucking has definitely become its own subculture in the last
century It's got its own language, its own conventions, even

(04:47):
its own music. Today some people call truckers the last
of the cowboys, lone rangers roaming the American landscape. It's
a job that attracts a certain kind of person, independent, curious.
So in lot of ways, Ingrid was born to do this.
I had the greatest childhood. I was adventurous. Imagine that
my dad owned a construction company, and that's how I

(05:10):
got into trucks because I started learning equipment. And I
always said, I'm kind of the other boy that he
never had. She's got an older brother, but ever since
she was young, when her mother hoped that she would
have stayed in frills and dresses, she was much happier
playing in the dirt and riding along with her dad
on the job. The philosophy he instilled in her as
a kid is something that she still lives by today.

(05:32):
He said, you know, there is nothing that you can't
do if you want to do it. She wanted to
drive big trucks, so at sixteen, in high school, she
got her permit and started driving dump trucks with her
dad's company. At eighteen, she moved on to bigger rigs
and was hauling asphalt. I get out of high school
and I'm thinking, oh yeah, I'm eighteen. I'm going to work.

(05:54):
I'm going to road. He's like, you get an education
and then we'll talk. If you want to trump, you
get to school. School was not Ingrid's thing, so she
reluctantly went to college and got her degree in engineering,
and she eventually got hired to do just that. I
was going to build roads. I was gonna have a
sicker career. They put me on five in North Carolina,

(06:18):
and you know, I'm I'm doing construction engineer and inspection
and bridges and all this stuff. And I kept watching
trucks go up throad and down the road. What were
you thinking when you saw those trucks driving by? What
am I doing? So Ingrid went trucking. Her first big

(06:43):
hall was from North Carolina all the way to California.
That first feeling, it almost is so much adrenaline. I
was scared to dance and then you don't want to quit.
Her love for dirt as a kid translated directly to trucking.
She took lots of jobs where she'd be hauling it
all of the place. They call me mud puppy. No,
give me asphalt, Give me dirt. There's so much can

(07:06):
be done with it, and there's there's things that bridges
and and roads. There's a way to get that done
and get that to happen. Her love for dirt may
seem extreme, but she gets pretty romantic when talking about
anything that she's hauling. I do, I do. I have

(07:26):
this passion because you know what, they mean something to me,
because they mean something to people. This is the greatest
thing I've ever dreamed I could ever do. If you
don't have dirt, what are you going to build upon?
Everything has a purpose and you get to bring that
to people. I try more in a good story after

(07:54):
the break. A strong work ethic, takes pride in a
job well done, sweats over the details. This is the
kind of person you need. Express Employment professionals can help.
Finding the best people requires more than sorting through applications.

(08:17):
You need to conduct a thorough surge. Express understands what
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we find people for jobs and companies of all sizes

(08:40):
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Sometimes finding the best new employee really is about who
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Trucking is a way of life as much as it's

(09:01):
a job. Just like a long haul from the East
to West coast, being a professional driver as a career
takes stamina. How many miles Hi fourties plus years? I
have four point one million, four point one million miles.
I mean I have gentlemen and ladies that I've seen
up in the sixes. To put that in perspective, Ingrid

(09:23):
has driven enough to circle the globe about one sixty
four times. I asked her if she had a goal
she was trying to hit, maybe get the six million,
But she said no, because you know what, three years
ago I was diagnosed with melano with cancer. So I've
had a third of my throat out, I've had several surgeries.

(09:45):
And here's the thing. Today, All that matters is today.
That's it. Besides doing this job because she loves it.
Her philosophy is it's something that has to be done,
and she says a lot of drivers feel the same way.
Some do it for the freedom, some do it because
it can be great money. But she says, the ones

(10:06):
that succeed and enjoy their work are the ones that
recognize the importance of their job. People need you, people
need us, but we need them as well. I asked
how it felt to be an essential worker in a
time where the country especially needs her to keep driving,
even when she's realistically putting herself at risk by doing it.

(10:29):
I would want to do that, whether it's a pandemic,
whether the country is closed down because people have to
eat every day. That's not going to change. That didn't
change before, It hasn't changed afterwards. Talking to Ingrid, you
might get kind of jealous. There's a sense of purpose
in everything she says about a job she's been doing

(10:50):
for forty years. And if you've ever been on a
long drive with nothing but the road ahead, that sense
of freedom. She does that for a living. She says,
she remembers the first time she really felt it. I'll
never forget it. I was coming down the road and
I was actually coming eastbound. It was the early nineties.

(11:11):
She was just outside Fort Worth, Texas on a long haul.
It was barely breaking daylight, barely barely enough that I
could see the white lines to my left. But in
my mirror I could watch him go by, and it
was almost like the whole world wasn't he didn't even exist.

(11:38):
The sun was in front of me, it was was
coming up, but behind me was just that little bit
of haze. If it was the most peaceful time in
my whole career, the whole world of stops. Nothing ad exists,

(12:01):
nobody has problems, nothing bad in this whole wide world exists.
You're just in that spot. You're succeeding, and you know it.
You're just you're you know you're you're accomplishing. That's what

(12:23):
it feels like. Yeah, in my own experience, I've been
chasing this feeling for a while. I felt it years
ago and I got hooked. So I've tried to make
a career where I can work and constantly be moving, exploring,

(12:44):
And for the most part, I got there before COVID hit.
I was traveling the country for months doing radio work
in a new place whenever I wanted to be. It
was about as liberated as I've ever felt. That feeling
is the reason a lot of people get into trucking too.
You're autonomous, you're free hand out the window with the
open road ahead. A cowboy. It's a romantic way to live,

(13:10):
but I've learned that that does not come without a price.
There's a lot of time where I really especially if
I've been on the road for months, I really crave roots,
stability home. I guess the grass is always greener kind
of thing. Do you feel that? Yeah? Sorry, I mean

(13:39):
this is life. This is life. I haven't seen my
grand babies, uh since before Christmas, and uh I was
pointing on seeing them at the time that the COVID
stuff happened. Um. Sorry, it's um, they're my world. We

(14:06):
face time all the time. Um, it's still not the same.
You such your priorities and uh sometimes you missed some
of those. But you make sure that they're in this
industry with you enough to understand Ingrid also has an

(14:29):
eighty eight year old mother, just two daughters of her own.
She knows she has to keep doing her job, but
she also knows in doing so, she won't risk carrying
COVID back to her family. Recently, she was at a
truck stop and called her grandkids to check in. My
grandson was standing there on FaceTime and said, Grammy, what
are you coming to see? Uh, Grammy, it's been too long.

(14:51):
And my granddaughter, my four year old granddaughter, literally turned
around and looked at him and said, Layton, Grammy livering
food to other people? Wow? How does that feel for
you to hear they get it? You know? A mr birthday?

(15:15):
I missed his birthday, and it is it is what
it is for the fact of the situation in the country.
But we make the best of it, just like everybody
else is doing the same thing. We all want a
job that puts food on the table. We want a
job that we can be good at. But maybe more

(15:37):
than anything, deep down, we want work that makes us
happy and gives us purpose being the person that does
what needs to be done. People will always have to eat,
and whether or not it's a time of crisis, if
you're the person making that happen, like Ingrid, at the
end of the day, you can be sure that you
are essential. And when a four year old says taking

(16:02):
food to other people, that's pretty strong. That must keep
you going every day from the job a motus Gray,

(16:37):
thanks for listening to on the job brought to you
by Express Employment Professionals. To see pictures of Ingrid's truck
Peach of Mind, go to Express Bros dot com slash podcast.
This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation
and Red Seat Ventures. The episodes were written and produced
by Metus Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. The
show is mixed by Matt Noble for Audiation Studios at

(17:00):
the Loft in Bronxville, New York. Music by Blue Dot
Sessions and mont Plus. Here find us an I Heart
Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard,
please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. For
more inspiring stories about making your self essential as you
discover your life's work, Audiation
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