A Vice News mini-documentary recently took an intimate look at the life of one female truck driver.
The video follows 29-year-old Nicole Strickland, a female driver who took to trucking as a teenager to provide for her young son.
“I became a truck driver because I was a 19-year-old mom,” Strickland explained. “It has made me a financial provider for my son.”
Strickland is a local driver for Price Chopper, which she claims has both good and bad aspects.
Strickland says she believes local drivers have a tougher job than over-the-road drivers.
“When you’re local, your family is expecting you but you have an obligation to get your rest,” Strickland said. “When you’re over the road, all there is to do is sleep when you’re not working.”
“I would say being local is almost harder than being over the road,” she added.
Although she’s enjoyed her career in trucking, Strickland says that it’s not without its hardships — especially being a woman in a male-dominated industry.
“People think that because I’m a female that I have it easy, which is not true,” she added.
In the mini-documentary, she described an incident where a store manager refused to unload her truck because she wouldn’t go home with him.
“When I was in a sleeper cab for a different company, I was outside the produce market and the manager of the receiver was saying ‘you must get so lonely in that truck how about you come out to dinner with me and you can use my house to shower if you want?’”
“I had to keep going back there,” continued Strickland. “Because I declined [his invitation], he wouldn’t unload my trailer. He’d make me sit there and wait and make me the last truck.”
When it comes to the to threat of autonomous semi trucks, Strickland believes it’s not something that she’ll have to worry about in her lifetime.
“I don’t know about the future, [but] drones are never going to be delivering the pallets of food. That’s not happening. It’s not gonna apply in my lifetime,” she said.
Despite the hardships, Strickland says that her CDL allows her to provide a better life for her family and she takes her job seriously.
“My license is my resume. I treat it seriously.”
“No one is gonna stop me from giving my son the life I think he deserves,” she added.
Watch the clip from Vice News below.