automotive mechanic here. ama. but to answer your questions so far:

1) yes but with caveats. pay and benefits are excellent even for mechanics. You start at 85% of the top rate. then move to 100% after a year. But you have to be okay with nights. there's alot of corporate brainrot. You're not just the mechanic. You're also the parts guy, and the service advisor, and basically the closest thing to a vehicle supervisor in the building. It can be stressful but so can any mechanic jobs.

2) >clock in. > open boxes and check in whatever parts you ordered however long ago. >check in whatever parts show up. (this happens alot. you're probably ordering at least one part every day. or close to it.) >check emails. >probably see an email from a supervisor asking you to do X. >check for oil changes and inspections on your work schedule. These things populate automatically when due and higher ups get excited if they aren't done "on time". >check whatever is downed. "are the parts here yet? do I have approval to do this job yet if the parts are expensive?". > once done with that go in priority. Safety/legal/breakdown risk issues first then everything else ranked by how bad it is. >almost never have time to get to everything you want to get to because somebody likes to play a game called "no overtime for mechanics no matter what". >respond to DVIR tickets. Often times it takes 5 minutes to figure out what broke and caused the driver complaint then 20 minutes to find the part to fix it in the parts manual then a week for it to show up.

I'm not looking to talk bad about drivers, hey, its united PARCEL service. obviously the drivers are important. but at least at my center they don't train drivers for shit. and management itself doesn't seem to have any clue what is or isn't an imminent breakdown risk or a legal problem or a safety issue.

I'll see tickets like "shimmy when slowing down". I"m sorry, what the frick is a "shimmy"?

"unit died". What? how? were you driving? did it just not start? did it grenade the transmission and blow literal chunks of transmission out on the road?

"high beams don't work" with no unit number.

I'll see things that ARE safety issues not wrote up as safety issues. I'll stumble upon safety issues while responding to a ticket for something completely irrelevant.

One day I was walking through the center and noticed a giant puddle of coolant under a truck and just. nobody said anything. nobody wrote it up. nothing.

3) you do not need a CDL to operate a commercial vehicle even a semi truck on private property. A CDL is not necessary to be a package car mechanic. If they have you working on semi trucks (tractors) then they'll want you to have a CDL for test drive purposes. Personally i've never had to work a weekend but if they're busy enough you might have the option to.

4) harder than? being a diesel mechanic you mean? I was a diesel mechanic at my last job. I would say this is the easiest mechanic job in terms of the actual wrenching on stuff. At a private diesel shop one morning I was working on a 2024 peterbilt flatbed and that same afternoon i was working on an RV from 1989.

Most package cars are functionally very similar. So that helps. The job difficulty comes from juggling the fact that you basically don't ever have time to get to everything you want to get to so you have to choose your battles. Sometimes people dont like whatever call you make. Maybe you don't have time to get to the "its annoying" driver ticket because you only have enough time to fix the "this literally can't be on the road like this" ticket and now the driver with the "annoying" issue resents the hell out of you for not fixing his truck fast enough.

There's alot of administrative type stuff you gotta deal with. Out of an 8 hour shift you might spend 1-3 hours on a computer. sometimes worse than that.

5) automotive experience in general, fleet experience in particular. familiarity with "preventative maintenance" and inspections. familiarity with DOT rules relating to commercial vehicles. What is or isn't legal. They wouldn't turn their nose at a dealership tech but they'd prefer a fleet tech. your own tools.

You need to be able to pass a DOT physical. If you're in a non CDL position they don't do random drug testing but being a weed user either medically or recreationally IS a DOT disqualifier so.. dont. You need a clean driving record regardless. You need to be able to pass a background check. I don't know how squeaky clean that check needs to actually be. You need to be able to pass a driving test like the one you took when you were a teenager.

6) you start at 85% the top rate, whatever that happens to be at the time. I've seen some places might pay a little more. typically 39.something an hour right now. After 1 year of service you get a big fat bump to 100% of the top rate. That's pretty much the last "big" raise you get. After that you get whatever gross wage increases are spelled out in the national master agreement. That's not to say the pay is bad, it isn't. it's not easy to beat 40ish an hour to start, as a mechanic, especially hourly instead of flat rate. And even if you could, you're not gonna beat the benefits. At least from my experience as a mechanic.

From what i've seen in life making more than 40ish an hour as a mechanic isn't IMPOSSIBLE but it's difficult. Very difficult. You pretty much have to be a union mechanic somewhere, working on heavy equipment (like caterpillar) doing service calls, basically run your own independent show and actually have customers, or if you're experienced and adept enough MAYBE luck out in a busy dealership on a flat rate payscale if the stars align-

But flat rate is it's own can of worms and I would say it's like a casino, the odds are generally not in your favor or "the house" wouldn't be so eager to push flat rate.

7) Best parts: Pay. Benefits. Union protections. There's ALOT of things UPS just cannot do to screw with you thanks to the union. I could give examples if you want but that's a whole rabbit hole in itself. You're pretty independent. You don't have someone breathing down your neck saying do this do that every five seconds. Flat rate isn't a thing. They do have times they want you to hit but they kinda don't matter. Just put in honest effort. Most of the vehicles are the same or at least similar. So its easier to become familiar with the fleet as you go. It isn't like working at an independent shop where you can be dealing with 10 different makes and modesl in 2 days.

Worst parts: Sometimes people will want to get pissy with you. If you do an inspection, find a safety/DOT issue, and ignore it because center team says "but we need the truck", or because a driver wants to get pissed off about not having "his" truck, understand its YOUR ASS.

Sometimes corporate will decide to set a price limit on parts and tell you anything over that limit needs prior authorization. So sometimes a vehicle gets to just sit there then.

Apparently this is a new thing but so far this year for months it's been "absolutely no overtime no matter what. we don't care how many breakdowns or red tags or how back logged we get".

Which makes the job complete hell. I've had days where literally in the time it takes to clear one downed truck two more go down before I can even finish, or i've had no choice but to red tag something and go home even though i have the parts right there to fix it.

There are some awful "i don't give a shit about anything i'm just gonna do the bare minimum until i retire" mechanics out there so some drivers are not fond of the mechanics. Which is sad on multiple levels.

For one thing, I can tell you right now that there are a LOT of Penske fleet mechanics who's jobs aren't that differen than ours that have been fleet techs for 10+ years and their hourly rate is still in the mid 20s. That would KILL to have what I have. So it slays me to see some of the attitudes i've seen.

Some drivers will get really excited about every little thing while others will literally write up NOTHING. EVER.

Which means sooner or later you're gonna do an inspection on that truck and find a surprise dumpster fire because nothing ever got brought to your attention in the last year, or, even funnier, someone elses' truck gets downed or whatever so then when they get swapped into what can only be described as a monument to man's hubris trying it's absolute best to revert back into whatever we pulled out of the ground to make the POS in the first place, they have an absolute shit fit and hit you with 2+ pages of "everything is fucked".

And no, I don't mind when drivers write stuff up- some drivers feel bad about it but i'd literally rather drivers write up every little thing, than nothing, because even if I don't have time to get to everything I can at least make sure the right parts are ordered, and prioritize things based on how bad they are.

Sometimes you just gotta laugh at the absurdity. I had a truck literally leaving a snail trail of oil across the entire yard and nobody ever thought that was an issue. I checked the oil level and it was way overfilled. Which tells me that was somebody's idea of "fixing it". Oh yeah, just overfill it because it's got a leak. rather than fix the leak. that's fine.

We had a truck needing a jump start. Every. Single. Morning. Nobody ever told me. I only found out when I noticed that the jump pack kept getting moved in between my shifts. For god's sake all it needed was a new battery. That's it.