“I just love my truck.” –Jeffrey Glanville, veteran truck driver and owner-operator
At first glance, you might not think the 110-inch studio sleeper adorning the back of Jeffrey Glanville’s 2006 model Kenworth W900 is all that practical. Yet if you talk with him for a while, pretty soon you come to understand that this mammoth sleeper is actually a huge boon to him and the job he performs week after countless week on the highways that crisscross the U.S.
A native of Jamaica, Glanville has worked for Interstate Van Lines based in Springfield, VA for over 20 years now – with a goodly portion spent driving long haul routes. In moving industry parlance, he’s known as a “super van operator” – an owner-operator whose specialty is loading up, transporting, and then unloading at destination a family’s worldly possessions long distances.
It’s some of the toughest work in the trucking business for a driver, because not only are you logging a lot of miles, you’re spending back-breaking hours emptying a house, loading everything onto your trailer, then reversing the process at destination – all the while face-to-face with customers that, at bare minimum, are on pins and needles.
Yet Glanville loves the work – and finds his big rig is an important tool in conveying to the customer his ability to take care of their household goods. “You drive up in front of their house with this truck, with everything shiny, and it changes their outlook,” he told me.
[For a tour of Jeffrey’s truck, watch the video below – he’ll also tell you a little bit about why he likes his job so much.]
Again, though, there’s a lot practicality built into Glanville’s truck. For example, it’s equipped with a shower [attached to a 40-gallon water reservoir] so he doesn’t have to waste precious time at the end of a long, exhausting day waiting in line at a truck stop to clean up. “You can wait three to four hours for a shower sometimes,” he told me. “Having my own shower allows me to clean up, relax and then sleep.”
His sleeper also comes equipped with all the comforts of home – stove, microwave, refrigerator, kitchen-style booth for eating, a full bed, and 20-inch flat screen TV, to name just a few of its comforts. His auxiliary power unit (APU) also fires up pretty easily, just with the touch of the button, and makes an almost inaudible hum while running – making sure his time in the sleeper isn’t disturbed by excessive noise and vibration.
His rig also doesn’t lack for power – with a 550 horsepower Caterpillar C-15 under the hood, he’s got enough “get up and go” when he needs it. But Glanville stresses he’s a cautious driver, never one to push a bad situation. “You get out in bad weather, heavy snow out in the plains, you stop,” he says. “You need to take care of yourself and your cargo – it’s not worth the risk.”
It’s that kind of philosophy that’s allowed Glanville to accumulate two decades of experience on the road and acquire the truck of his dreams. And he doesn’t plan to stop any time soon, he told me: “I just love what I do.”
