Mike Gaffin

Jeremy Perkins  0:00  

This is Jeremy here with Eric. Your hosts of Bucha, powered by brunt, this week, we have Mike Gaffin, aka the Boston trucker, a legend in the trucking community. But before we jump in, I want to recap what's been going on in Eric's life.

Unknown Speaker  0:14  

This is bucket talk, a

Eric Girouard  0:16  

weekly podcast for people who work in the trades and construction that aren't just trying to survive, but have the ambition and desire to thrive. The opportunity that trades in construction is absolutely ridiculous right now. So if you're hungry, it's time to eat. We discuss what it takes to rise from the bottom to the top with people who are well on their way and roll up their sleeves every single day. Ian All right, since last episode this past weekend, very rare occurrence. Actually had a bachelor party in Lake Winnipeg. Winnipeg, Winnipeg in like

Jeremy Perkins  0:57  

there's a lake name, yeah,

Eric Girouard  0:58  

somewhere in Pennsylvania, near the New York border, with a crazy group of 20 guys. It was a wild weekend to save at least a lot of boating, a lot of breweries and all that stuff. So came in, came in hot off the weekend. Dude, how

Jeremy Perkins  1:12  

many beers do you think you crushed that? Too

Eric Girouard  1:14  

many to count. To be honest, I actually probably don't even want to know the number. It was one of those weekends and then, and then we came in on Monday and was hoping to get home, you know, licked my wounds that night a little earlier, and we happened to have a delivery of some boots coming here, actually, to the office in North Reading, Massachusetts. And we had a pleasant surprise, which is the truck was a few hours late, so it was coming in around 630 and then we also figured out they had 13 pallets of boots on it, and didn't have a lift gate or any type of mechanism to get actually off the truck. So that kind of ruined Friday, and we scrambled. And luckily, we called our buddy, who's our neighbor, Mike distazio. He's he's in the bay next to us. He has some bobcats. His was tied up at a job, but he ended up calling Bobcat of Boston, and they ended up giving him a brand new Bobcat with forks. He drove it down the street here, actually, and it was pretty crazy. I mean, we had to unload 13 pallets of boots off of a truck that was being delivered here ourselves, which is crazy. If we didn't have Mike or Bobcat of Boston, I don't know how we would have done it. So that was a pretty wild Monday that wasn't expected in the deck and and here we are. So, you know, Bender of a weekend turned into a late MONTH, really late Monday night calling friends and in favors and yeah. I mean, the biggest thing is a big thanks to both Bobcat of Boston and Mike dystagio, because we would have been pretty screwed otherwise,

Jeremy Perkins  2:50  

dude, my weekend also involves a tractor trailer. I think this is a theme for the podcast this week. But I got a hay delivery from Canada, and we have to unload 30 to 40 pound bales. I'm 750 of them by hand. So me, Michael, Jenny and and some of the people from the barn. We unload this thing. And it's quite the workout. It's, I mean, it was a nice day. It wasn't that hot, so that was good. But, dude, it's awesome. We got this old John Deere conveyor that's on some sketchy barrel, and we're like, Don't knock it off. And one of these days when it does, is gonna, it's gonna be quite the scene. But, yeah, 750 Bales is no joke. Wow. But what time you start? So I prepped the night before all the horses have to be in their stalls, and like everybody's gone, the truck from Canada shows up the night before. He actually stays in the lot at our house. And then I'll position the the conveyor and everything. They don't want all that noise, because our hay loft is above the stall. So we want to put that horses out prior to dropping bales on the stall. So probably around seven o'clock we start that, and then, depending on how good we go or whatever, you know, it's probably about four hours a lot of pre workout, and everybody leaves their store, but yeah, that's fun. That's an absolute blast. Sweet,

Unknown Speaker  4:04  

sweet. All right,

Eric Girouard  4:06  

let's dive in. Sounds like a pretty crazy weekend for both of us and totally different things going on, but let's dive into the Boston trucker. Hell yeah. All

Jeremy Perkins  4:16  

right. Today we're here with Mike Gaffin, aka the Boston trucker. Welcome Mike, thank you. You are our second podcast of the season three, so we're really excited to have you, and you are a truck driver by trade. Correct, correct. How'd you get started?

Mike Gaffin  4:33  

My dad was a trucker, and he was a Teamster when I was a kid, and I used to ride with him when I was started, when I was about six years old, back in the 70s, you know, no frills truck. I'd sit on a hood, milk crate, no seat belt, no air conditioning, no stereo event, window, vent windows, no air ride, no sound control and no whining. Back then. Yeah, it's truckers in wine back then he's got it done, yeah. And then 1980 he started driving over the road because a lot of the Teamster outfits were going out of business. And so he got a cab over truck with a bunk in it. We headed to Chicago, and I was hooked in trucking from that moment on, I knew that's what I was going to

Jeremy Perkins  5:19  

do. That's awesome. So you're obviously the Boston trucker, but we're in Massachusetts. You're based out of I

Mike Gaffin  5:24  

grew up in Brockton, shoe city, by the way, and I live in Waltham, awesome,

Jeremy Perkins  5:29  

awesome. And you work for a construction company. I

Mike Gaffin  5:32  

work for a car dealer. And sons, we're an excavation company. Do demolition and make our own materials awesome.

Jeremy Perkins  5:38  

So how did you get your start? I know you worked with your father and you got the itch and you got the bug, but, but how'd you get into it? I mean, there's a lot of licensing and stuff behind it. Yeah.

Mike Gaffin  5:49  

So my dad taught me how to drive when I was real young. By the time I was 14 and 15, I could double clutch with the best of them, and on summer vacations, we'd run coast to coast together, and I do some driving night time. Yeah, he'd take a little short nap, but all along, he would tell me, you're not going to be a truck driver. I didn't work this hard for you to be a truck driver. Over my dead body, you're going to be a truck driver. So I'd start kind of hiding my passion for it, but it kept dangling in my face. Yeah, so by the time I was in high school, I knew how to drive a truck and you had to shift gears. I wasn't proficient in backing up yet. So there was a local driving school that would charge $50 a lesson. Yeah, so after school, I pay him $50 and I took three lessons, two hours a lesson, and the guy took me down to state police in Hanover mass, and I want to get my license. I had my license. I was still in high school when I was 18, some

Jeremy Perkins  6:42  

of those maneuvers are crazy. Like, was it a blind side docking? Yeah, blind side,

Mike Gaffin  6:46  

straight side. You got to do a pre trip air brake check, yeah, but it was kind of basic then, because now it's so technical, I probably couldn't even pass a test now. I mean, I've been doing this for like, 31 years.

Jeremy Perkins  6:58  

It's wild. And now they got, like, the d o, t physicals. I mean, there's just so much maintenance to

Eric Girouard  7:02  

the Yeah, yeah. Jeremy knows a little too much about trucking, because he was a diesel mechanic. Okay? I know zero. For the people in our listeners that know nothing give us like the highest level. And as I think about trucking, you know, you guys are moving the Earth. You're moving products all across the country, from your perspective, the most extreme high level, like as a professional trucker, what do you have the most pride in you? Give me that highest level. What's going on?

Mike Gaffin  7:27  

I mean, where everything that you see comes to your house comes from a truck, whether it's milk, whether it's building products, shoes, food, everything we're moving it. That's what we do. And without us, the nation would stop, because truckers run the nation basically, you know, well,

Jeremy Perkins  7:46  

it's crazy, too. You guys are hurting for drivers, right? There's, there's driver shortage.

Mike Gaffin  7:50  

It's all there's always been a driver shortage. Now, more than ever, yeah, and it's, yeah, it's really hard to find drivers. It's a hard job, because it's hard to get guys that want to do this kind of work nowadays. You know, it's a lot of work.

Jeremy Perkins  8:03  

I got a guy that delivers our hay comes down from Canada and but he goes all the way down to Florida, and he says he's gone five days a week. So he comes back to, like, shower, and then he's on the road again. He goes, if you can tailor your lifestyle in a way that like that works for you, you make all the money in the world doing this, and he enjoys it. So, you know, he comes back, tucks his kids in, back out again, but he's home on the weekends. You know? Well, the

Mike Gaffin  8:28  

key is lifestyle, yeah? And trucking, to me and to a lot of the people that I know, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle, yeah? And when you're not trucking, you're thinking about trucking, yeah? And it's not fair to the family that your mind is on trucking and getting back in the truck. Yeah, and that's more for over the road guys, yeah, and, which I did for 20 years, but it's always on the lifestyle, so

Eric Girouard  8:51  

that's important. So it sounds like, and I don't know anything about it, there's different types of trucking. There's guys going cross country. That sounds like, that's over the road. Yes, what you're doing now is different, correct? So, so

Mike Gaffin  9:01  

I started driving when I was 18. Soon as I got out of high school, I was driving local for about nine months, and you legally can leave the state till you 21 this is back in 8889 but I was itching to go, and I worked for a company called land transport and Framingham mass, they're out of business. So I can say that, and you don't have to cut that. They added they had, they had a driver call in sick one night, and they're like, Hey, we got a load going Indiana. You want to go? And I was off to the races. And I ran coast to coast for the next 20 years, for 1819, 20 years old, right till I had my first kid. And absolutely loved it. I loved everything about it. It was hard work. I ran illegal every day. Never ran a legal day in my life, the years I wrote, ran over the road, and that's part of the lifestyle. It's different nowadays, not everybody, most people, are running legal. I say that with a wink. Now they got electronic logs, electronic logs, and I got out before any of that. Thank God. I got out before that and out before a lot of the emissions stuff. I did it when it was fun. Yeah, and it was more of a brotherhood, a lot of camaraderie back then. And it was a good time. I loved it. Yeah. I

Jeremy Perkins  10:08  

mean, I know why those rules and regulations are in place, but it just seems like it's over regulated now for a lot of smaller reasons. It's not doing the industry good a lot of the times, the time limits. I mean, there's some guys that were driving 20 hours, sure,

Mike Gaffin  10:20  

but I'm an adult. I'm gonna go to sleep when I'm tired. I don't need a log book or an electric logbook telling me when I gotta go to bed. And tell me you gotta sleep during the daytime with the sun up and sometimes you can't sleep. But now, now the computer says I gotta go now I'm tired because I couldn't sleep all day. It's a little too much regulation, and the accidents are way up. Look at the videos you see on YouTube with these pile ups. These truck drivers are driving tired. They're not sleeping when they're tired, they're sleeping when the computer tells them to Yeah, got

Eric Girouard  10:53  

it. That's interesting. Actually, yeah, the laws are causing more problems than Ian. Yeah,

Mike Gaffin  10:57  

it's people who never drove a truck, sitting behind a desk, looking at a spreadsheet, making the rules.

Jeremy Perkins  11:04  

We talked with the fishing industry, and the guys were saying that it's so overregulated you can't even make a business anymore. Yeah, it just seems like any time you know, big brother comes down and makes a rule, it absolutely hurts our industries. I

Mike Gaffin  11:17  

mean, there are people that take advantage of it, yeah? I mean, I used to drive 1000 miles in 24 hours. Yeah, and was I wide awake? I think I was awake. And I didn't do drugs, and I didn't drink coffee. I drink a lot of but it's a lot of lost miles, yeah, and a lot of miles, I don't remember. And just just, just going, you

Jeremy Perkins  11:37  

got over a million? You think, oh, I

Mike Gaffin  11:39  

got over 3 million. Really, wow, accident free, ticket free, wow, yeah, yeah, wow.

Eric Girouard  11:44  

One question. So I don't know when you actually consider your career started, because you started with, you know, seeing your dad, and then you kind of rolled into it. But if you can rewind back when you kind of made the decision of, hey, you know, I want to get into trucking. If you can go back that far, maybe tell us when you thought it was and at that point what you were thinking your career was gonna go and where you are today. My

Mike Gaffin  12:10  

whole intention when I got into trucking was to just drive coast to coast till I died. That was the plan. I'd probably marry a stripper or a shipping clerk or a waitress, because pretty much those are the only women I would run into on the road back in the day, to be to be truthful, and I just thought I would live and die doing it. I mean, my dad did it to lose almost 70 he had to get out because of health reasons, but that was always the goal. I mean, my life is far from that now, though

Eric Girouard  12:40  

you would have thought running coast to coast till as close to you died as possible. When did you make the change?

Mike Gaffin  12:49  

So, you know, I remember, I remember making a trip one weekend. I loaded apples out of Yakima, Washington, going down to Deerfield Beach, Florida, and I had barely three days to get there. It's over 3000 miles, and it was a holiday weekend. I remember hauling ass across Wyoming one day. It was a holiday, and I remember seeing all these people driving by into cars looking like the going to the lake. And I just like trucking. I didn't know what vacation was. I didn't know what time off was. I just knew work and I enjoyed working, and I kind of started looking at those people and come on, it's probably more to life than just this. Yeah, and then computers came out, and my friends were computer dating. What does this computer dating? So one night I was going over my friend Greg's house, we're all gonna go to a club. It was one of the rear nights, I was home, and Greg was showing me all these girls he's going out. When I was like, Are you kidding me? So I started playing with this computer, and I signed up and I go, you guys, go without me. I'm gonna do this computer stuff. And then I started going out with girls from the computer. Got some girlfriends started realizing I want to be home a little more. I quit a job and got a job where I work local. And to me, working local means Boston, Chicago, Boston to Virginia, short day trips. I would call them, you know, I'd be home on the weekend, Sue part of the weekend, yeah, yeah. So I could go out with some girls, you know, get a girlfriend. I had a girlfriend a long time, and then I had a meeting my wife. I kept working regional, where I would leave like Sunday night and get home maybe once during the week, and I get home Friday night or Saturday, and then I kept doing that and doing that. Once you got pregnant with our son, that's when I decided that I should try and be home, because my dad was gone pretty much my whole childhood, and I wanted to see if I can try and do something different and be at home and be present for my kids. And it was really hard, though. It was really hard getting off the road. That was my real love until my son was born. Yeah, even for three years after I got off the road, I still felt like I had some place to go. And, yeah, it was, it was tough. And I still, I still missed around on the road every day. I swear. Go out, and it's been he's 15 now. So, yeah, 1415, years.

Jeremy Perkins  15:04  

I died the other day when I was watching one of your videos, you picked your daughter up from school. Yeah, she was sick. Oh, I mean, we get out of whatever. I mean, I showed up one day to daycare, and I'm just a mess. And it's hysterical. What's

Eric Girouard  15:22  

crazy to hear is Trucking is a job and a career, but for you, it was a passionate addiction, and you had to, like, give that up to be with your family.

Mike Gaffin  15:32  

But I haven't given it up, to be honest. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I work local. I work for a good company, a Cardillo and sons in Waltham, and I work near home. I'm a half a mile from work. I pick up the kids every day after work. My schedule is I start at six in the morning. I'm usually parking between four and five Nice. Pick them up at camp. Pick them up at school, run on the sports my company's so flexible. My kid gets sick, I go pick them up in the truck, they either ride with me in the truck all day, or I'll go home if I have to, but they usually ride with me in

Jeremy Perkins  16:04  

the so that's wild. That's actually a good high level takeaway too, yeah, is the fact that if you want to travel, see the world, you're young, you want to do something. You hop in. You're a long haul trucker. You go coast to coast and see what you want to do, right? But then there's a pace that you could slow down when you finally settle down with a family. You can do some intrastate trucking. And absolutely,

Mike Gaffin  16:23  

I mean, a lot of people write to me and they ask me career advice on trucking. And I always say, if you really want to go over the road, do it while you're young. Yeah, try it out. Some guys do it, you know, into the 70s, and it's a sacrifice for the family, but sometimes that's the only way they can make money, and it's got to be hard. It's going to be heartbreaking every day to leave, yeah, yeah. And I'm sure now with technology, when FaceTime, you can do that, but back in the day was pay phones. Was sitting at a truck stop, phone at a table, you know, ironing out your problems. And it was tough stuff, like watching my dad do it, you know, he was gone, and my mother was in charge, yeah. And that was always but when you come home with that, the thing is, with a lot over there, our truck is when they come home. Now the focus is on them. And now I'm king of the house, yes. And I'm focusing on how my dad was, you know, I'm king of the house, and this is how it's going to be, yeah.

Eric Girouard  17:14  

And you think, and so sons 15, and daughters 10. Daughters 10, yep, eventually, when they move on out of the house. Do you think you're gonna go back to coast to coast?

Mike Gaffin  17:24  

I don't think so. Now, at this point, I love to go a few weeks a year, just like it would be a vacation to me, maybe in my 60s. No, you can't put a price on being home. I never knew that. And now that I'm home and I can have the best of both worlds. I drive a cool truck. I go to truck shows,

Jeremy Perkins  17:43  

yeah, some of the trucks, the older trucks, are awesome, restored everything. It's, yeah,

Mike Gaffin  17:46  

I love it. I love I love trucks. I love everything. Trucks. When I'm sitting at home scrolling through my phone, my wife might think I'm looking at girls like she knows she knows me. It's trucks. And you can never see enough trucks. So I get the most best of both worlds. And I go, I go to a couple national truck shows every year. And we just took a family road trip. We went out to Iowa and Wisconsin. We went to a truck show out there, so I got a taste of it. Still, it's wild.

Jeremy Perkins  18:11  

That's wild. Awesome,

Eric Girouard  18:13  

awesome. So when you think about trucking, it sounds like it's deciding what you really want to do, forgetting the decision of, do you want to be on the road? What's like the biggest challenge that comes into play? Is it sleep deprivation? Is it keeping the truck maintained? Like, is it pulling in the weight? I don't I know nothing about this, so I'm speaking way out of school. But like, what's the big thing that you're like always is in the back of your mind when you're trucking? Okay,

Mike Gaffin  18:40  

there's a lot. First of all, there's so many positives, and most people focus on the negatives, right, which is about where I'm gonna want to go. But first of all, of course, the bad drivers, yeah, everybody wants to be in front of you, and nobody respects the size and the weight of the trucks, and people are pulling in front of you before they're even past you, so you're on a high alert at all times. Then you get the parking situation. It's you have now the computer is telling you you have to pull over within an hour. So now you're scrambling, if you have good truck driver plans or strip Yep, but you're scrambling for parking spot. Parking spots are limited. Now there's food with covid, the truck stops and restaurants, a lot of them are closed. Truck drivers. They eaten worse than ever. They already eat bad enough. That's a hard lifestyle, physically. And now they're a lot of fast food, pulling at all Walmart stocking up your cooler. And then there's the sleep. I mean, you're supposed to get 10 hours of sleep a day. I can't sleep 10 hours. So you get the sleep issue and your nerves. You get weather. You always have to be looking ahead at the weather. Is there a storm coming? And see the back in the day, if there was a storm coming in, you would maybe keep pushing and keep pushing. Now, the computer. It tells you you're gonna keep driving, so now you're driving into the storm, or when you should be shutting down maybe, and riding it out. And there's just so many factors. There's so many factors. It's a hard lifestyle. It takes its toll on your body. You become socially withdrawn. I know I personally have gone through that where I'm not comfortable in crowds. People think I'm like, Oh, you're the Boston trucker, you know? You must love being like talking. I'm gonna I'm actually really shy, and I'm not good at talking to people, because I think I was alone for 20 years, you know, just driving, talking to myself and talking on the CB radio, you know. So it's tough. It's a really tough lifestyle, but I was good to me. It's been good to me.

Eric Girouard  20:42  

Awesome. So let's pivot. How did you go from second generation trucking to cross country trucking to building a lifestyle of it, to becoming what is known as the Boston trucker, which is a social phenomenon which are highly related, but highly unrelated,

Mike Gaffin  21:02  

sure. Well, back in the 90s, I was doing a lot of truck shows. I was doing like, 160,000 miles a year, and eight to 10 national truck shows a year. I was in a lot of magazines truck and magazines like the trucker, truckers, news, overdrive, yeah. And so I got a little bit of notoriety from that. I wasn't known as the Boston truck back then, back then, I was known as Mr. Nice Guy, and my son was born, and I made a video one day, hey, Nathan, it's your dad. I'm here on the job, and he was, like, two or three years old, and I put on YouTube, I got some followers, and I just kept making videos from there. And been the Boston trucker on YouTube for 11 years now, and tick tock and Instagram. Well, I'm recognized. I don't do it to be famous, for sure, because you love trucking, because I love sharing my passion for trucking, and it's influenced a lot of people who were on the fence. And there are a lot of young kids who, you know, want to go into trucking. I always give them the disclaimer, you should go to college first, you know. And if that doesn't work out, use trucking as a background. Some kids, they just, they know it, it's in their blood, but yeah, I just do it to share my passion. If I have five good followers, I'd be happy. So

Eric Girouard  22:13  

yeah, yeah, awesome. So before we get into the fun stuff for the listeners out there that might be thinking about trucking, it sounds like for the right person, it's their adrenaline, it's their drug, it's their life. It's ever for the wrong person, it's the, probably the worst thing. Yeah, young person that's thinking about, hey, do I want to get into trucking? What are the things to think about if you're

Mike Gaffin  22:36  

a company driver, never mind if you buy your own truck. If you're a company driver, you're either paid by the mile, or you paid on the clock. If you pay by the mile, you you have to drive a lot of miles to make a good living. Some weeks it's a hit some some weeks to miss. So you got to decide, if you're young, is that what I want to do and or do you want to be on the clock and have a regular life? And that's the really decision, decision you got to make. Yeah, mile versus clock. Got it miles clock home, whether or not home. Some drivers, you don't have to be gone weeks at a time. It can be gone every other night. There's a lot of variety in trucking. There's so many different jobs you can do. You don't have to drive a reefer trail. You could drive a flat bed. You could do a dump trailer. You could pull heavy machinery. There's so many jobs that it's unlimited, and once you get some experience under your belt, you can pretty much pick and choose, as long as you got a good driving record. Well, we

Jeremy Perkins  23:31  

got a buddy that he drives a straight job truck. He drives to the Teamsters, but then he's also in local four when he gets out and he operates the boom lift on the back. Yeah, he's putting sheetrock through the big windows, and so he loves it, because there's diversity in the trucking. So if you're interested in there's always some sort of aspect that you can take away, or,

Mike Gaffin  23:49  

yeah, and the more you learn in this business, the better off you're going to be in. The more jobs you can get, and the more licenses you have, like, I have hazmat doubles, triples tankers, I have a hydraulics license, so I can run heavy equipment, and I do that's awesome. And the more experiences you get, the more diversified you can be. Yeah, yeah,

Eric Girouard  24:08  

that's awesome. All right, so let's get into some of the fun stuff. You're running a truck any given day. We talk a lot about tools. What's the one tool that you depend on and count on the most to get through your day. Not that it's going to be the end all be all, but you need to keep trucking. What's it going to be? I

Mike Gaffin  24:26  

feel like you're lobbying this, lobbing us over the plate for me. I mean, like, besides my work boots, well, work gear, like a good pair of gloves, yeah? A flashlight, yep, some wrenches and some hammers. Got it.

Jeremy Perkins  24:43  

So you, you wrench on your own truck, and when I have to, yeah, I'm

Mike Gaffin  24:47  

not a mechanic, but I can, you got to change a headlight or, you know, a signal light, plug a tire. When you're on the side of the road, you can't sit there and wait two hours for a mechanic to come.

Jeremy Perkins  24:57  

Oh, yeah, it's probably even longer wait times. Yeah. I unfortunately,

Mike Gaffin  25:00  

some companies nowadays, they tell you to just wait. They don't want you working on the trucks. And these, some of these trucks are so technically but back in the day, I mean, just some some electrical tape and get you down the road, some

Eric Girouard  25:15  

more simple tools that they get you through the day. Yeah, and then All right, so forgetting trucking, which I know is your life really hard for me to forget exactly, you know, I like to ride ATVs. Jeremy likes to go shoot guns and to

Mike Gaffin  25:31  

be the most boring when you get to

Eric Girouard  25:34  

unwind from trucks. Sure, and it's not just spending time with your family. I know you love to spend time with your family. Do you have a release? Yeah, could be weird stuff, movies, TV, whatever. What is it?

Mike Gaffin  25:49  

Well, that's a good question. It

Jeremy Perkins  25:51  

could be weird stuff too. I'm the most boring.

Mike Gaffin  25:53  

I'm the most boring this person. So not not hanging out. My feeling we do go, like to go with a lot of nice restaurants, like restaurants you wouldn't expect. Okay, me to go to, we go to the expensive restaurants, the good food and get dressed up. Oh, nice. But for a release, I like to go out and stand by 95 and take pictures of trucks and take videos of trucks and drive around looking for people to videotape, looking for cool trucks. And that's my release. I swear I don't. I don't have any other barbecue. Ian dick, addicted to trucks. Yeah, so and, you know, luckily, my family supports that,

Eric Girouard  26:27  

trucks, trucks, trucks, a little bit of barbecuing and a little bit of fine dining.

Mike Gaffin  26:31  

Yeah? Fine dining, yeah.

Jeremy Perkins  26:32  

Now, would you ever get an old truck and a show truck that would be a goal

Mike Gaffin  26:36  

of mine? What one would it be? Either a 350 9p to build, or a cab over Ken worth k1 100. That would be good. Yeah, just take it to shows like in my 60s. That'd be a nice goal. Stripe, the shit out of it, Chrome, pin stripe. Wax it, grow flower pots in it, put it on my lawn when I'm when I'm too old to drive. That's

Jeremy Perkins  26:57  

the goal. It's funny, because some of these trucks that I see it going to the truck shows they're absolutely gorgeous, like, Hallam or has got a nice setup. I mean, there's just so many of them out there that are crazy, and a lot of them have stayed in the family. A lot of them are trucks that they've just parked, and then they've been there for 3040, years, and they're like,

Mike Gaffin  27:16  

yeah, yeah. And they get passed down. There's a whole nother aspect of trucking. This truck show stuff. It's money Chrome, it's families are all into it, pin striping, spending a weekend at a truck show, and people like me like nothing better than to just sit there and look at trucks. And

Jeremy Perkins  27:34  

I tried to polish all the chrome on our Peterbilt. We have a sander, and after the sanding season, it would be just completely junk. And I'd sit there with a buffer and one rim. I'm like, This is ridiculous, yeah? And there's guys out there that's I'm

Mike Gaffin  27:49  

a polish and not. If you go to watch the Boston trucker on YouTube, you'll see I'm a polishing cleaning truck fanatic. Yeah, you will not see my truck dirty unless it just rained or snowed out. Wow. I will lose sleep. I will leave my family at two hours early to go wash my truck on a Sunday morning. And I'm going, I'll be back in an hour. I can do it pretty fast. It's crazy,

Jeremy Perkins  28:10  

because a lot of companies require their truck to be immaculate. I mean, probably back in the day was trucks would get destroyed. Well, they

Mike Gaffin  28:19  

still get destroyed. And you were saying, Eric, that you know a lot of guys either love or to hate it, and are a lot of drivers that they seem to be miserable, and you can tell that they're stuck in the job. And you can tell by the way the truck looks. Yeah, there's fuel caked on the tanks. The dashboards are covered. They might just be slobs too, yeah, but if you're into and you love it, you're going to treat your truck like your home, if you drill, if you live in it, even if you don't, you got to have, I always say, pride in your ride. You gotta have pride in your eye. And if you don't have that, you don't have any of them. Yeah, no, that's

Eric Girouard  28:51  

a perfect segment, a bumper sticker for you. Pride you, by the way, you shouldn't. Yeah,

Mike Gaffin  28:55  

I've used it. It's a few. There's a bunch of us are using now, but I coined it a long time ago. There you go. So

Eric Girouard  29:01  

this has been incredible. I went from zero to 60, and Jeremy knew probably 30, and went to maybe 80 and trucking. So for folks that are interested in this, interested in your story, interested in you, what social channels can they meet you on? What, whatever? What can we help you do?

Mike Gaffin  29:17  

The Boston truck on YouTube. Number one, I'm always looking to get subscribers on there, if you want to. I'm on tick tock now. My kids got me onto tick tock a year ago. I was against it. I am totally addicted

Unknown Speaker  29:30  

to tick tock personality,

Mike Gaffin  29:32  

yeah, social media for sure. And Instagram, if you want to send me a message on Instagram, I pretty much respond to everybody eventually, yep. So you want to get any questions about trucking, or want some advice, if you're local and you're looking for a job, sometimes I can point people in the right direction and try to help out anybody I can

Jeremy Perkins  29:50  

Awesome. Well, thanks for being on our show, and we're glad to have you, and it was great to take a deep dive into the trucking world. And this definitely won't be the last. Rest of Us so

Eric Girouard  30:01  

looking forward to it exactly.

Mike Gaffin  30:02  

I appreciate you.