Well, How Did I Get Here?

I'm Cindy, I'm 44, and for many years, I have had a variety of jobs that haven't paid very well.  I am the mother of two children and by the time I had my second child I realized daycare was not going to be doable on the pay I was making so I decided to go to technical school to get a degree in medical transcription.  At the time, the profession paid very well and with some in-house training you could move to working from home, which was a great perk.  So for 8 years I worked from home making what I considered to be an acceptable income doing that.  What I didn't realize was that anytime the internet went down I would be expected to make that time up each day, which really became an issue because even though I was married I was acting like a single mom during the week while my husband worked out of town.

I realized it was time to move on and see what else what out there for me and found a job at a local dental office that staffed 15+ dentists, so it was a rather large place.  The pay was less than transcription but better than minimum wage and the benefits outweighed the lost income.  I worked at this dental facility for 6 years and could see myself working there for a lifetime because I loved that job, but as can happen with life things changed.  My marriage had never been perfect from the start but it was tolerable and had it's happy moments, but they became too few and far between and I came to reality that it was time to make a change.  With that change, I started a new chapter in my life as a single mom with kids who at the time were teenagers. 

The new chapter had a bit of a bumpy start, but it wasn't long before I met a new man and moved on.  We lived 150 miles apart and dated long distance for some time  Even after we were married, we continued living apart for the first couple of years in order for my kids to continue going to their current school.  Plans changed a bit and my daughter decided she would like to move before she graduated so we both moved over to Western Wisconsin to live with my husband. 

Since transcription was an easy job for me to land, I applied to a few companies to work for from home and started doing that again.  Boy oh boy had things changed though.  The pay was maybe half of what I had made in the past due to speech recognition.  I was no longer considered a medical transcriptionist but instead a medical language specialist.  More or less the job was now mostly editing of reports that came through already typed by the system.  The doctors would talk and the system would type it out.  We had to fix any errors and because they consider this to be faster than manually typing out each and every word the pay was half.  You get paid by the line, not the hour.  They now also have line requirements you have to make each pay period, and if you do not make those requirements you don't earn vacation time and it messes with your benefits.  The pressure is definitely on and way more of a headache than it is worth for the pay.

Being my age though...what is there that I can do to start over in a new career making a decent wage.  Once you start looking, there isn't much unless you want to go back to college for a few years.  That just isn't for me.  I wanted something that would be completely different with better pay but not take a lot of schooling.  I had always wanted to drive a semi for as long as I can remember but it just never fit into my life with the kids and all.  I started throwing the idea around in my head asking myself, "could I really make this work?  Is it possible that I could get my class A being a woman and at my age?" Well...there's only one way to find out, right?

So this past fall, I really started investigating what it would take to enter the trucking industry by starting to research on the internet and picking up a CDL manual from our local DOT.  I am fortunate to live close to a couple of truck driving schools and began visiting them to see what their programs were all about.