Here is something I have been thinking about during Driver Appreciation Week. Most of the things a really good truck driver does will never make a Facebook post, never get mentioned in a company newsletter and probably never get noticed at all. That is because a good driver spends a whole lot of his or her career keeping bad things from happening.

Nobody notices when that driver catches the loose chain during a walk-around before it becomes a problem 100 miles down the road. Nobody sees the driver look at a road, a bridge, a weather report or a construction zone and say, Nope, we are not doing that. Nobody at the office knows how many times a driver catches something wrong on the paperwork, notices the load does not look right, realizes the directions are bad or sees something happening in traffic three seconds before everybody else does.

When everything goes right, it just looks like somebody drove a truck from Point A to Point B. But that is not really what happened. Somebody made a few hundred decisions along the way. Somebody watched mirrors, gauges, traffic, weather and the load. Somebody figured out where 70 feet of truck and trailer was going to fit before turning into a place obviously designed by somebody who has never driven one. Somebody backed into a hole with six inches to spare while three people stood around wondering why it was taking so long.

And sometimes the most professional thing that driver did all day was say no. No, this load is not secure. No, this equipment is not safe. No, I cannot legally make that appointment. No, I am not driving into that weather. No, that truck is not moving until this is fixed.

Those decisions may inconvenience somebody sitting behind a desk. They may delay a load. They may even cost somebody some money. But sometimes that driver’s judgment is the only thing standing between an ordinary Tuesday and a really bad day.

So for Driver Appreciation Week, maybe we ought to appreciate something that does not get talked about enough: the judgment, the experience, the patience and the thousand little decisions made every day that nobody notices because the driver got them right.

Sometimes the best driver is the one whose name you never hear all day because the freight got there, the truck came back, nobody got hurt and nothing happened. There is a whole lot more skill behind “nothing happened” than most people will ever know.