An owner-operator who was once named Overdrive Magazine’s Most Beautiful truck driver has decided to shut it down after more than a decade on the road after she says that her job has turned into “a miserable day to day activity.”
Driver Brita Nowak entered trucking after spending four years on screen on the television series “Star Trek: Voyager.” As her trucking career progressed, she became owner of Jupiter-Florida based trucking company Bratcat Express Corp. and was even named Overdrive Magazine’s Most Beautiful truck driver in 2016.
Owner-Operator Says That ELDs Made The Job She Loved “Thankless” and “Miserable”
However, things changed at the end of 2017 and Nowak says she’s been forced to take a stand. Here’s what she wrote in a January 6th Facebook post:
“To make things perfectly clear.
I spent 16 years transporting food and goods to every corner of this nation in snow, rain, traffic. I loved it. The inflexible Hours of Service combined with the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) stuck at the diagnostic port of my engine since December 18th of 2017 have turned my job into a miserable day to day activity, without the monetary compensation for being away from home more than necessary. I will not let anybody tell me when I should be awake to drive or that I need to go to sleep when I am energetic after resting all day in various warehouses waiting for hours for them to leisurely come around to take their freight of my trailer. This entire industry needs an overhaul. Starting with proper infrastructure to safely park our trucks, educating the motorist public how to give us space, efficient warehouse operations and most importantly FLEXIBLE Hours of Service. I closed my company in protest and if enough independent Owner/Operators follow, freight will not be moved as
easily, rates will go way up, YOUR food will get expensive (just in case you think none of this has any effect on you). I had one of the most THANKLESS jobs one can imagine. Nobody wants trucks around, yet without us everything stops and you have no food or toilet paper. It takes a crisis to get change. Here’s to starting a crisis.”