Cheyenne Man’s Midlife Career Change: From TV Reporter To Truck Driver

The day Daryl Orr lost his job as a Denver television reporter is one he’ll never forget.

His first reaction was shell shock and panic.

“There was no warning,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “My contract says I’m supposed to get 30-day’s notice, but there was nothing.”

At first, it was surreal. He’d been on his way to an assignment. His manager nonchalantly asked him to first meet with HR and fill out some paperwork.

That didn’t seem unusual, but next thing he knew, he was being given forms to fill out if he wanted to keep his insurance and numbers he could call for help. But all he could think about was the $1,000 truck payment and $3,000 mortgage staring him down from the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Not to mention the six people in his family who all needed to eat.

“Since your position is being eliminated, you can apply for unemployment,” the HR supervisor was telling him then. “We’re not going to fight it.”

It took a minute for those words to really sink in.

Then relief rushed through his veins like too much caffeine after an all-nighter in college.

He was going to be OK, he thought.

Unemployment would give him time to find something else. Something better.

He had experience. He had lots of transferable skills. What was he worried about?

This wasn’t ideal, but it was going to be all right.

He would be fine.

Next Step

Orr took a couple of days to relax and regroup. He figured he’d more than earned a break after commuting to Denver every day from Cheyenne.

He wanted some time to think about his options. One thing he knew he didn’t want to do is commute to Denver anymore. He’d moved to Cheyenne because he hated it down there. He was putting 214 miles a day on his vehicle, and the drive was forcing him to buy new vehicles. He could do without that in his life anymore.

So, he looked at media jobs in Cheyenne first. But he quickly realized those salaries wouldn’t work for him. He had too many expenses. He looked at airlines, too, because he had some training in flight school. But their salaries weren’t going to cover his expenses either.

But he still wasn’t worried. He had a meteorology degree. He had experience with electronics, he had great communications skills. He could do a lot of things. There surely had to be something out there for him.

Unfortunately, his transferable skills and his experience didn’t turn out to be the ace-in-the-hole Orr had thought it would be.

In fact, it seemed to work against him more than anything.

“I can run satellite equipment, and I did broadcast engineering, so I applied at Spectrum in Cheyenne multiple, times,” he said. “And every time the answer was the same. Overqualified. Everywhere I went, overqualified.”

Orr got into a routine. He’d send out resumes and hear nothing back. So, he’d give them a call after a little while, to ask if they’d gotten his resume.

“I wasn’t getting any calls from them, so I’d give them a call,” he said. “And they’d say, ‘Well you’re overqualified.’”

After about six months of the same routine, a new wave of panic started to set in. His savings were disappearing faster than expected, and unemployment wasn’t going as far as he’d hoped.

“I’m like, what are my options?” he said. “What would any sane person do? I’d go out during the day by myself, and I’d think, ‘What else can I do?’”

Midlife Job Hunts

Orr’s situation isn’t unique. More than 50% of people who lose their jobs at midlife aren’t leaving by choice. It’s some type of lay-off or some type of forced retirement, according to a Propublica analysis of layoffs.

Finding that next job for those individuals is more than just problematic. The analysis found nine of 10 do not find jobs that equal their previous salary. They work multiple lesser paying jobs, or sometimes make considerable sacrifices — commuting hundreds of miles, or they move from the home and state where they’d planned to retire.

Orr has seen the trends before plenty of times, though he never thought it would happen to him.

“When October comes around, every year, people get a little antsy, because they know that’s the end of the quarter,” Orr said. “That’s when heads start getting chopped. You get too old, you make too much money, and employers like hiring the 30-year-olds for $30,000 a year. They call that 30 for 30.”

Outside The Box

There are ways to buck these discouraging trends and be the one in 10 who comes out ahead.

Orr is a case in point. Being “overqualified” forced Orr to stop looking at what he could already do and let go of all preconceived notions about who he was and what his career was.

He had to look instead at new things. Things that he had no skill in doing. Things that he’d never thought about doing before. And things that were actually way more lucrative than what he’d been doing most of his life.

That’s when he finally noticed the large number of trucking companies that were hiring drivers.

Could he do something like that?

Why not give it a try.

At first, his wife was not a fan of this idea. He would be gone 345 days out of the year. He might miss Christmas and Thanksgiving with the family. He might miss birthdays. Even if he didn’t miss those, he would definitely be missing important time with his family — school functions, the assemblies where children perform for their parents and just regular old things like tucking the kids into bed.

“She was like, ‘Oh hell no, you’re not doing that,’” Orr said. “And I said, well, somebody’s got to pay the bills around here. And I’m out of options at this point, and I don’t want to move. We can’t move. So, she finally gave in.”

Orr called one of the more promising trucking recruiters the next day to talk with him about what his options might be.

“He’s like ‘We’ve got the perfect trip for you,’” Orr recalled. “You could pace 30 miles from your house into Fort Collins … driving across the country and make anywhere from $2,500 to three grand a week.”

That didn’t just sound good, it sounded fantastic.

Never Too Old To Dream

Orr was ready to sign on the dotted line, but there was a sticking point. And it was a big one.

Truck-driving school was going to cost $6,500 of his own money. The school would finance it for him, and he could pay the loan back at $38 a week. If he stayed with the company for an entire year, they would even wipe the entire loan. But he wouldn’t be getting paid during this three-week training.

“You had to have the money to pay your bills at home and get food while in school,” he said. “You were paying them to teach you to get your CDL license and to drive a truck. So, I was worried about keeping myself alive, paying the bills at the house — truck payment, car payment, insurance, mortgage. You had to have some funds set aside before going and choosing to do this.”

There were also self-doubts to overcome.

“You’d think, ‘Oh my God, am I too old to do this? Am I going to pass the physical?’” Orr said. “And that was another big concern. Because being this age, if your blood pressure is over 130 over 90, they disqualify you.”

During the school, he also found himself facing an overwhelming amount of information.

“We had to learn well over 100 parts on the truck for like a pre-inspection,” he said. “And you had to learn the precise name, from the tie rods to the shocks to the calipers, brake drums, you name it. It was every mechanical part, because you had to do an inspection on the vehicle before you drive it and after you’re done. You do that twice a day and then you have to log it into the computer.”

If that twice daily inspection isn’t done correctly, Orr can be shut down by Department of Transportation instructors, who he said do frequently pull driers over at random to check their logbooks.

“It’s a big learning curve,” he said.

He got through that by focusing on the positive.

“This is going to be fun,” he’d tell himself whenever he felt overwhelmed. “You’re going to be traveling. You’re going to make good money.”

A Storm Chaser

Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think about all those 345 nights on the road. How many times was he going to miss a birthday or holiday with family?

But things have turned out better than he thought they would at the time.

“So far I’ve been lucky,” he said. “I’ve been home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas,” he said. “And both Christmases we had negative 51 windchill.”

Next time, he joked, maybe he should just “go to Florida and lay down for Christmas and come home afterward.”

Orr has also taken some preventive steps to safeguard his health now that he’s in a job where he’s seated so much of the time. He makes his meals from scratch, so that he’s not tempted by fast food.

“I’ve got an air fryer, grill, coffee maker and a crockpot in here,” he said. “In fact, I just left Winslow, Arizona, and I bought veggies there from Walmart and chicken. So, I prepare all my meals in the morning.”

He also makes sure to take a walk at the end of each day’s work, to get some exercise in.

“Some guys bring dumbbells in their truck to work with,” he said.

But there’s one more thing he’s been able to do that’s pleasantly surprised him that he didn’t realize would work out at the time. He had always loved his meteorological job, chasing the weather and storms. He has downtime on the road, which allows him to indulge his hobby, while making a nice little side income from time to time selling freelance storm video.

“My truck is set up like a TV station,” he said. “I’ve got laptops cameras, radios, ham radios, police scanners. I get in the truck and people are like, don’t you know you don’t work for the news anymore? Why do you have a studio in here?”

But these days, the storm chasing is for fun and pocket change, and not stressful at all, because he makes his real money in his brand-new career, one that’s paying him way more than his previous career ever would.

Midlife job losses are tough, Orr said, and they can be harrowing experiences. But, with persistence and an open mind, they can have a happy ending.

“Clear your mind,” Orr said. “Don’t do what a lot of people do and hit the bottle to start drowning your nerves. Be strong, keep your mind focused and don’t give up. There’s always light in every tunnel. Today may be a bad day. Tomorrow it can be a whole different world.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.