June 2014: After 6+ months of only seeing each other on the weekends (mind you, we live together!) we decide it's time to take our lives into our own hands and become owner/operators. We were both driving locally and my BF (now fiancee) was putting in 14hr days and my boss had changed me to a run to Dallas that started at 1800 and ended at 0500 the next morning. We were both miserable in our jobs and felt like we had no relationship. We were getting desperate. We were both familiar with a carrier that uses strictly owner operators and no forced dispatch. The company's business model truly allows their owner operators to be their own boss. We though "this is it!". We had come off the road in mid-2013 because we were unhappy with our company and the usual 3 days off for 3 weeks out left no time for life and we were both exhausted. Meanwhile, our local city jobs were leaving us no time for each other and leaving us both exhausted.
I made some calls to the carrier's recruiting office and on the 1st call was told my nightly run to Dallas counted as OTR because I had to run a log book. I thought "AWESOME! At least this nightmare has served a purpose!". A month or so later I got to thinking that maybe I should get a 2nd opinion and call them back. This was mostly due to a comment the recruiter made that made me think perhaps she didn't understand. So I called back and was informed "Oh, I'm sorry, that really doesn't count as OTR. This information also disqualified my BF's experience. So, it became apparent we were going to have to go back over the road, as company drivers, at some point. The company requires 1 year OTR in the last 3 years. Our most recent OTR experience started the summer of 2012 and ended mid-2013.
We weren't ready financially to buy at the time. Especially since we were thinking we wanted a newer truck due to the number of miles we'd be putting on it in a year. And the 3 year clock on our OTR experience was ticking down. I figured out we needed to be back on the road before mid-March.
February 2015: After much research and consideration, we settled on a mid-sized company that ran their teams out of Birmingham, AL. We planned to start March 2nd
