If I were a truck driver, I’d want to be appreciated 52 weeks a year. Guess I’d be happy with the first week of June, when a lot of people in this industry will be telling drivers what a great job they do, how important they are in the transport scheme of things.

That’s great, but it’s only a week. If I were a truck driver, I’d like 51 more.

It’s a little like Mother’s Day, isn’t it? For a day we lavish Mom with our praise, our thanks, and our last-minute roses, but then we revert to taking the dear old girl for granted. At best. It’s going to be the same with drivers, isn’t it?

There’s no excessive cynicism here. I applaud the efforts of the Canadian Trucking Alliance for creating National Trucker Appreciation Week, and the dozens of sponsors who in many different ways are expressing their thanks to the people who literally keep things rolling.

It’s just that I fear these particular “roses” will be a one-shot deal.

And while the week is being promoted as a chance to give some credit to everyone who works in the industry, let’s face it, the focus will be on drivers.

But let’s appreciate dispatchers and mechanics and sales people and rate clerks, too. Much as I like the folks behind the wheel, it takes a lot of people to make a trucking outfit tick. Drivers have an all too public role, and huge responsibilities to boot, but they’d be going nowhere fast if somebody hadn’t priced the route, sold the service, lubed the trailer, and figured out who takes which load where.

If you ask me, that last job may be the toughest one in the whole operation.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the dispatcher is this industry’s unsung hero. Sure, automated systems have made one part of the job easier for a lot of them, but the fact remains that nobody else has to juggle as many conflicting priorities. The sales manager says the load’s hot, the shop says the trailer needs service right now, the driver demands a backhaul to get him home for his wife’s birthday-well, you all know the picture. The poor sod at the dispatch desk is caught smack in the middle, doing a balancing act that would look good in most circuses.

There aren’t many businesses more complex than this one in LTL mode, and I’ll always remember one of my early visits to a dispatch office because it seemed to be the perfect demonstration of that complexity.

It was a pretty big fleet, and there was a long wall of cards and colors staring down on a few sweating guys with phones stuck firmly in their ears. No computers to be seen. The office was electric with activity and I remember thinking I’d found the hub, the core of it all.

But who’s working in that hub? Chances are good that it’s an ex-driver who wanted in from the cold (and sometimes a fleet owner who just loves to be in the thick of it every once in a while). Chances are even better that he or she has no training whatsoever, except maybe in the software being used.

There’s unlikely to be any coaching, for example, in how to deal with the conflict that will inevitably arise.

Come to think of it, where would you go for dispatcher training anyhow? I believe that the Canadian Trucking Human Resources Council is working on it, but they’re no doubt alone.

Now, even though it’s clear that drivers are under-appreciated in general, none of us would have any trouble naming a fleet that works hard to appreciate drivers every day of the week. Instantly, I think of ECL’s special commodities division in Edmonton, or Kleysen Transport in Winnipeg with its Knights of the Road program. And there are certainly others.

But I’d venture to say that we couldn’t conjure up one carrier that shows the same readiness to applaud dispatchers. Or anybody else at all except maybe sales people by way of bonuses. It’s a matter of perspective. Yes, by all means, let’s show our respect and let’s give our thanks to drivers. They’ve got a rough job, no question, but they’re not alone.

And if I were a driver, I’d be the first to thank all those others for helping me do my rough job better. Heck, I might even thank a manager or two.