With all the distribution problems these days I thought I’d share some of my own missadventures from the 5 years I was in the truck driving industry.
The Saga of the Idiot Team Driver:
I drove as a team driver for a few months. This is where one driver drives for 10 hours while the other sleeps, then you switch.
So I get this new guy to team drive with. Top notch driver I was told.
I knew he’d be trouble right from the git-go. I meet him for the first time at the company headquarters. He’s fumbling with a bag of chips, trying to get it open. As you know chips come bagged with an air packet, so they all don’t get broken up. He squeezes at the air packet with both hands as hard as he could, and the bag splits open down the side seam and the whole fuckin’ works go’s flying all over the place.
Fast forward to him setting up the cabin with his stuff. In the cabin (where you sleep), he sets up so much shit that you could only sleep if you curled yourself up in a ball every night. Further more, he sets up a small TV set in the cabin, so he can watch tv while he drives.
I think this guy is gonna get me killed. Keep in mind a fully loaded 53 foot truck can weigh up to 80,000 lbs. This set-up is a no-go. The TV had to go and half the shit in the cabin had to go with it.
Fast forward again to our first week of driving. Lucky for me, he didn’t get me killed. But that was just because he hardley ever drove.
Everytime it was his turn to drive he’d come out of the back, blearry eyed and sleepy and say, “I’m just too tired to drive…I barely got 1/2 hour sleep.” So I’d tell him to go back to bed and I’ll drive another 4 or 5 hours.
Turns out he was taking diet pills jam packed with stimulants right before his sleep shift. He thought it was a ground-breaking idea to loose weight while you sleep.
I still can’t believe he he needed me to explain that the stimulants were keeping him awake. We’re parked at a rest stop and he heads out to go to the bathroom.
I wait his returned perfectly prepared for him to enter smelling like shit because he forgot to wipe his stupid ass.
After multiple mishaps, a week later we find ourselves at West Memphis where its his turn to drive. All he needed to do, is drive east bound on I-40 for 10 hours. No interstate changes for him to mess up. No big cities for him to get lost in…just drive a straight line heading east in Tennessee.
For folks who don’t drive trucks for a living, this is how mile markers work. Mile markers start on the west side of the state and count up. So if the mile markers count down your going west. If they count up, your going east.
Similar rule for north and south interstates, they start at the south side of the state and count up when your going north and visa versa. If your not a driver maybe you never noticed this, that’s normal.
But if its your job to travel the interstates, this is basic stuff. Not knowing this is like a mathmatician not knowing how to count.
So back to the story.
He wakes me up after 4 hours of sleep and says, “I can’t figure out this map, all the mile markers don’t make sense in this stupid state!”
He’s still driving, so I keep an eye on the mile markers, as that’s the first thing you do if your not sure where your going. They’re counting down instead of up…which tells me we’re heading west instead of east. “What was the name of the last city you drove thru?” I ask.
“Little Rock.”
“Little Rock is in Arkansas, your going the wrong way you dumb-ass…” He drove 4 hours in the wrong direction.
That’s my story about the idiot driver.
I told dispatch I wasn’t workinig with this guy anymore and that was that. A week later, I was back to driving solo.
This is an example of what happens when someone who ranks on the lower 40% percentile is elevated to a position which they’re not qualified. Someone else has to pick up the slack and fix the mess they made.
Something to think about when looking at government officials. I’m sure a lot of these guys are replica’s of the idiot truck driver who are good with the bullshit.
So if you have a representative that said 3 years ago giving a crap-load of money to wealthy businesses is gonna somehow make your life better, and it doesn’t…then you got yourself an idiot truck driver on your hands.
Just make sure you look at this stuff in terms of years, not months. It takes years for a good or bad policy to kick into daily life. What your experiencing now is the result of decisions made a couple of years ago.
Let’s say you think the infrastructure stuff was a bad idea, well it’s done. You can’t try to measure its success or failure a few months later. You have to wait until 2023 to see if it increases jobs and wages. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t…you just have to wait and see.
I guess what I’m trying to say is watch the bullshit provided by those idiot truck driver politicians. I never saw those “death squads” pulling the elderly out of their homes when Obama Care was passed. Christmas wasn’t cancelled when Trump wasn’t elected. Guns weren’t outlawed when Obama became president. My income didn’t increase when huge tax breaks were given to corporations. It was all malarkey.
And of course, the big one. There was all sorts of talk about election fraud, but when those claims went to court, every single judge found absolutely no evidence. I guess the plan was to have all these nonsense court cases to get tied up in court for years and in the meantime keep control of the country, but not one judge would entertain this bullshit.
Not one.
None of these claim’s benefit any of us, it just promotes more idiot truck drivers who don’t really care about any of us.
And now you know!
Song in my head:
Coming Next: She just wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. No means no!
