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| Tuesday, July 9, 2013, 1:31:40 AM |
Many large cranes are broken down into major sub-assemblies and loaded onto flatbed or drop deck trailers for transport to a new job site or back to the yard for maintenance. I was walking across a truck stop parking lot one evening and as I passed the fuel island, there was a flatbed there with one set of the tracks on its deck. I found the driver, who was washing his windshield and told him that thieves had stolen his crane and all they left behind was one set of tracks. The way he talked to me after that, he should have spent more time washing out his mouth, instead of cleaning bugs off his glass. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Last fall, during college football season, I made a delivery in Ohio. I called the young man unloading my truck over and said, “What is a Buckeye?” He said, “It’s some kind of nut”. I said, “I know that, but what exactly is a buckeye”. The conversation sort of died after that. ----------------------------------------------------------------- One way we communicate with our dispatchers is with a Qualcomm system (another instance of a brand name becoming a generic name for a type of product). It consists of a satellite dome and a keyboard. Messages are typed in the truck and bounced off a satellite back to the office and vice versa. It is also used to track the trucks to see where they are and if they are moving. I told you all that to relate this story. In my first year with USA Truck, I was sent to pick up a load in Ticonderoga, NY. This town is located in upstate New York along Lake Champlain; it is very isolated. I arrived at my customer on a Saturday morning and sent a message back saying that I had arrived. Some time later, I received a message back asking if I was truly there, for the satellite showed I was still 58 miles away. It being a Saturday, my regular dispatcher wasn’t in – I don’t think it would have mattered. Anyway, I sent a note back saying that I had hooked up with a hootchie kootchie doll from a club the night before and had just kicked her out of the truck and was on my way; I sent the note so I wouldn’t get in trouble for being late for the pick-up. I got no reply – until Monday morning at about 0735 (my dispatcher gets into the office at 0730). My dispatcher? Yeah, she didn’t find it near as funny as I did. ----------------------------------------------------------------- My best joke almost turned out to be my undoing. I arrived at a customer and checked in at the guard shack. The guard I was talking with – there were two in the shack – told me how to get around the complex and which dock to back my trailer into. “It’ll be easy”, he said. I said, “Maybe for a real trucker. I hijacked this truck a day ago and, before I gagged the driver and threw him in the back of someone’s empty trailer, he asked if I could finish this run for him so he could get credit for it and therefore paid. I figured out how to get this xxxxx down the highway, but I don’t think I can back it up. Do you have someone who could do that for me? Then when I am empty, I am headed for Mexico.” The next words out of my mouth were pleas to them to NOT call 911. After ten minutes of checking my license and company ID, they called my dispatcher to verify my employment history. Nuff said. |
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