There are only two kinds of people in this world. Not big folks and little ones. Not even married and otherwise, though that can sometimes be a useful distinction.

Simply, there are drivers and then there are non-drivers.

Non-drivers get behind the wheel reluctantly, often fearfully. For them a car is an appliance, one of life’s basic tools. They’re a bit boring.

Real drivers like the process, and they respect it. They just plain like to drive, and so their steeds often show a little character. It’s the same with their trucks as their cars. More importantly they have skills that start forming when they first pull a little red wagon around the couch in the family living room. Within minutes or maybe hours, but soon, they learn the turning angles required to avoid further gouging of the sofa’s legs.

I was one of those kids, an early gearhead, and my dear departed mother used to tell stories-after I’d started writing about trucks, when this tiny fact became amusing-about me as a three-year-old literally kissing the fender of any big rig I came across. Any stationary big rig, I hasten to add.

It was a dozen years later that I first realized the nature of the gap between drivers and non-drivers. I was drinking root beer at the time. That’s because my deep understanding about this aspect of the universe hit me at the A&W drive-in where I spent too much time in the 1960s.

This particular A&W had two facing rows under a roof where the civilians, clearly the non-drivers, parked. But the carhops-carhops, I tell you-would prefer serving those of us who populated the two uncovered rows off to the side. We were probably kinda fun, leaning on our fenders and looking “way cool,” as my kids used to say until I started saying it, too.

In the very back row was a group we called the Chevy Boys. They drove sinister black Chevy Biscaynes with 409 motors and Hurst shifters while looking like a priest’s car to the cops. Most of these guys worked for a living, many of them at local gas stations. For fun they’d make their own drag strip on some quiet public road where we’d all gather until someone yelled “Cop!” the way street-hockey kids scream “Car!”

We inhabited the row just in front of them, and most of us were still students. We drove Austin Healeys and Minis, maybe Mom’s Corvair or Dad’s Desoto. We thought we were a little more sophisticated than the Chevy Boys, preferring road racing at Mosport to the drag strip, but the common bond was a passion for cars.

Around midnight somebody might yell “Snake Road” and we’d instantly drop whatever we were doing-including chatting up the carhops-and leap into our cars. A race was on! The Snake Road was just what the name implies, a twisting eight miles of semi-rural two-lane road where we’d take timed solo runs at lofty speeds from one end of the road to the other. One of us actually went on to compete at LeMans and make a life in racing.

The point of all this reminiscence-and I could go on-is that the boys in these two rows at the A&W were once one of the three main sources of truck drivers, along with the country’s farming communities and the military. And by one means or another, just about every one of them was a real driver with tangible skills. A natural driver.

Better yet, a driver with mechanical knowledge and a respect for machines.

Trouble is, the farmers and ex-soldiers dwindled in number and my chums from the A&W seem to be abandoning the truck-driver role, as are their offspring, apparently. Yet so much of what we do and how we do it-from training to dispatching-is predicated on those models. We wail about being unable to attract and/or retain drivers, but have we adjusted to the new recruit?

The fact is, he’s not necessarily a gearhead like I was. Nor is he as comfortable around machines as the guy who grew up on a farm or who learned about things mechanical as a tank driver. Today’s hot rodder is more likely a guy with a Honda Civic sporting $20,000 worth of nitro packs and other high-tech goodies than one with a 409 Biscayne. And he’s not likely to be attracted to trucking in the first place.

So we’re looking at recruits we wouldn’t have considered 10 or 20 years ago. Immigrants who used to be insurance salesmen, for instance. Or maybe women, though not as often as we all expected once upon a time. We’re recruiting non-drivers.

None of this is news. But a problem arises when we assume an affinity for the hardware of trucking. We can’t do that any longer, because that affinity just isn’t there. And that’s a problem when we demand, for example, that drivers adjust their own brakes. Or even fill out an accurate post-trip mechanical report. I think we assume too much on this front, so we’d do well to re-assess this aspect of the new-age truck driver. And then adjust accordingly.