A female truck driver out on the roads of southern Australia revealed the ins and outs of life on the road, saying it took people a while to take her seriously.
Blayze Williams, who is 27 years old, and works for the company Toll in Adelaide, has been working as a driver in a semi for eight years. Speaking to Mail Online, she realised pretty early on that she'd stumbled on a passion that not many other people had.
"When I left one job and was looking for another I found a lot of people took convincing to take me seriously, I would even have them ask over and over again if I just had my license or actually drove! Of course I drove! It was little things like that that started to make me realise that women, especially young women, were not a common thing in trucks."
Blayze first discovered her love for driving as a teenager, when a friend of hers got her a job in a truck wash bay when she was just 18 years old. From there, she was allowed to drive the prime movers - which is a tractor unit with a heavy-duty towing engine.
"That was pretty cool," Blayze recalled. "At the time I was absolutely terrible at reversing and I would bunny hop around the yard thinking it was the greatest thing ever." Within a year, Blayze had scored a heavy combination license and had been repeatedly offered a job by a friend, who worked driving trucks.
"At first I didn't think much of it and thought no one would really give me a start as most places I'd had interviews for either thought I wasn't serious or set up an interview out of pure curiosity to see who would show up," she revealed, explaining that not many people took her seriously initially and thought her friend was the same.
'I eventually took him up on his offer and it turned out he was serious. Within the coming weeks I went for a test drive and refresher with the owner of Kwikwing Trans and before long I was off on my first day!'.
Now, nearly a decade later, Blayze says she's got a plenty of interesting responses as a semi truck driver; people have showered her with compliments at traffic lights, and leave their numbers on her truck.
"I have had a guy in a B double drive next to me and miss his turn because he was asking for my number over the CB radio. It's really funny, I don't dress up for work and I just go normal and guys still do funny things like that but I think it is more of an interest in a female driving a truck and the novelty of it because it is still seen very much so as a 'man's' job."
Sharing her time between driving trucks and modelling, Blayze says that between her twin passions, she's gained a ton of confidence. "I am overwhelmed that something I entered for a bit of fun and a confidence boost has now taken me so far," Blayze said.
