Adventures in something other than navigation (the sequel)

Homeward bound, on a nice wide interstate. Ahead is one of those electronic signs. This far from a major city, they usually say things like "TEST" or "DRIVE CAREFULLY." Right now, though, this one says "ACCIDENT AHEAD, MILE MARKER 234, LEFT LANE BLOCKED."

Since I'm in the right lane, I figure I've already done my part for traffic flow. Then I see an exit ahead. And traffic at a standstill right beside it. And the accident is still twelve miles away.

Fortunately there's a truck stop at the exit. I slip off and park, picking a place where I can see the cars go by--or sit there, as the case may be. Might as well wait it out, right?

Forty-five minutes later I start to wonder. Cars and trucks sit still for minutes at a time, then move slowly forward. The end of the line moves almost out of sight, then everything stops and the line reaches my exit once more.

The fourth of fifth time, the stoppage moves way out of sight, and the traffic keeps moving--slowly--for a good five or ten minutes. Guess it's starting to clear up, I say, and start the truck. Out of the truck stop parking lot, down the road to the entrance ramp, and down onto the Interstate--just in time to see everything grind to a halt again.

I cover twelve miles in the next two hours.

Remember that game I told you about some time back? Seeing how far you can get in slow traffic without stopping? It's kept me sane today. That and thinking how it could have been worse. You see, I think I saw that accident site. Several hours earlier, going the other way.

A place where the median widened, and a stand of trees grew in the middle of it. And a tractor trailer had apparently gone straight when the highway curved outward. Plowed into the trees, flipped over, and caught fire, starting a fire in the trees as well.

And sure enough, that's where the tie-up is. Emergency vehicles are still clustered around the spot. The semi has been moved, finally, but the cleanup is still underway. Environmental crews, maybe. There was a diesel fuel spill at the very least.

I remember the truck, on its side, just frame and engine. The cab completely gone.

*****

(Epilogue of sorts)
The tie-up slowed me down just enough to put me into a Major Metropolitan Area right at the beginning of rush hour. Another long slow pull--slow enough that I barely had half an hour left on the "clock" when I pulled into my home terminal. A little slower and I'd have had to find a rest area for the night and come the rest of the way tomorrow.

We're supposed to eat Thanksgiving dinner with friends. At lunchtime. I was that close to missing the holiday.

Hard to complain, though. Not after what I passed. Maybe I should be going over my thank-you-Lord list instead.

Adventures in navigation, part 3

And this time we have no idea where we're going at all. Won't this be fun?

Dispatch eventually gets us some directions. I am so relieved, I don't notice the ominous phrasing.

Turn left onto...toward...
Continue on...toward...
Turn right onto...toward...

It's bad enough that I can't find most of the roads mentioned. I head slowly and worriedly into the heart of town*, my head on a swivel, and suddenly I see a beautiful sight. There! A highway that my directions actually mentioned! And it's a big enough highway that I needn't worry about it suddenly petering out and leaving me stranded far from any turnarounds. So make my best guess as to direction and head down the highway, head on a swivel.

No sign of the side street the directions tell me to look for. And I'm past the city limits. Time to do the un-manly thing again.

There is a building-supply place on my left. It looks like big rigs deliver there. So I pull in, park, and ask for directions. The nice man on the forklift tells me where to go.

The nice man in the other truck tells me something completely different. Goody.

Slowly I start back the way I came, comparing my directions to the forklift driver's directions, and both of those to the truck driver's directions. Not an exercise in confidence building.

But there! There! The side-street I'm supposed to turn on! Joyfully I swing onto Pomegranite Lane--and there's a police officer looking at me oddly.

When police officers look at you oddly, you don't assume they're admiring the paint job. I stop promptly and climb out. He's already out of his car. "Are you delivering on this street?" he asks politely.

Turn left onto...toward...
Continue on...toward...
Turn right onto...toward...

The customer didn't give us those directions. Dispatch got them off Mapquest or Google Maps or some such. And those services, like most GPS's I've seen, often overlook little things like "NO THRU TRUCKS" postings.

Fortunately I look convincingly lost. (It helps when you really are that lost...) He confirms that the highway I'm looking for is just a hundred yards up the street, and lets me off with a warning. The next driver might not be so lucky. I'll have to warn somebody about that...

And with the wind from the bullet I just dodged still stirring my hair, I turn onto the correct highway and find the turnoff to the shipper. An hour or two later I'm loaded and homeward bound.

Headed for my home terminal. No chance of getting lost. Interstates all the way. What could go wrong?

(To be continued...)
-----
*The heart of town is a bad place, when your truck is longer than some of the city blocks you pass...

Adventures in navigation, part 2

After yesterday, it's good to have a nice straightforward set of directions. Just get off the Interstate at THIS exit, head SOUTH about a mile, and turn into Valley Industrial Park. Even so, it's a pleasant thing to be ahead of schedule. A good half-hour to hunt for the place once we arrive.

Ah, here we are. We get off the Interstate and turn in the proper direction. And a mile down is a entrance to--Enterprise Circle Industrial Park.

Um.

Is there another park? No. They must have renamed it. And while we were figuring this out, we passed another factory a hundred yards down. The only place in sight with room to pull into and room to turn around. And ahead of us is your classic two-lane country highway. So down the road we go, looking for the next safe pulloff. And we can't go all that fast, since we may have to swing into a drive at any moment.

As it happens, that's not a problem. For twenty miles the road curves and rollercoasters, cresting hilltops decorated with small farms and then diving into long stretches of bottom land. The scenery is lovely, but we're not looking for scenery, are we? We're looking for a place to turn around.

We find one eventually. Twenty miles down. Nervously (not much room even here) we turn around. And drive twenty miles back. And pull into Enterprise Circle Industrial Park.

And there's the customer. We've arrived. Only half an hour late.

Believe it or not, this is cause for rejoicing. At least we didn't end up in a place where we couldn't turn around at all. Believe me, it happens. It's happened to me more than once. And calling the police to help you get out of a place like that is not the highlight of your working day.

This time we got there. And the customer wasn't too mad. And we're only an hour behind schedule heading toward the next pickup. Maybe they won't be too mad either.

The romance of the open road.

Adventures in navigation, part 1

Part of this job is finding your way around. A sample from this past week follows. The place names have been changed to protect the guilty and the merely amused.

Let's say you spent the night at a truck stop a few exits down from your next pickup, and you're ready to head that way. First things first--don't follow your GPS. I may write a long screed about that someday, but the short form is--GPS is not ready for trucker prime time. Not the ones I've had a chance to use or watch in use. They tend to send you down exotic and scenic shortcuts--and they don't always know about little things like low underpasses, bridges that won't hold your weight, or streets that are just plain illegal for a semi to follow. A GPS is nice for seeing where you are now, but don't trust the directions you get from the thing.

Usually you will get directions when you get your load information--written either by the customer or by another driver who found the way. In this case, you're told to take THIS highway into Paris, then turn right on Oxbridge Road, left on De Mille Street, and right on Connector Road. Eternalite should be on the left. Simple, right?

So you drive cheerfully into town and look for Oxbridge Road. And you don't find it. No surprise--you're only seeing street signs about every third intersection. Everybody here knows where they are, don't they?

After a time you reach the end of the highway you came in on. Fortunately you kept an eye open and made sure there was a place to turn the truck around. So back you go.

But first do a little thinking. Oxbridge Road. Well you grew up in small southern towns. You know that "Hooterville Road" often means "the road to Hooterville."

So get out the map. Is there a town called Oxbridge anywhere nearby?
Yep, there it is. And is there a road between Paris and Oxbridge?
Yep. And it's a major highway. And you passed it a mile or two ago.

First hurdle past.

So you go back, turn onto the highway also known as Oxbridge Road (if you're a local). Two streets up you see De Mille Street. So you make your turn and wend your way around the curve and back around the other curve--looking for something called Connector Road.

Only there isn't one. You go clear to the end of the street, make a guess about which way to turn, and find yourself within a hundred feet of a tiny two-lane road to nowhere.

Hastily you turn in to a small factory--the only place in sight with a parking lot big enough to turn around in. Then you go in and ask directions. (A professional driver is not ashamed to admit he's lost. It beats the alternative...) Only the people at the factory don't know where Connector Road is, either.

So you make a loop and watch more carefully. And reach the end of the street. This time you turn the other way, so you don't get stuck on that two-lane-to-nowhere again. Congratulations--you loop back to the main road without incident this time.

Now to ask directions again. Before you made your turn, you saw a place that does truck repairs. There will be room to pull in, and maybe they will know where this place is...

Well, they knew a few things.

1. Connector Road is on the map, but it doesn't exist yet. They'll build it one of these days, when the industrial park gets better built up. Meanwhile, if you shifted into eighteen-wheel drive and headed cross country across muddy farm fields, the right-of-way would take you right where you're trying to go.
2. There is a place that more or less matches what you're looking for. Here are the directions.

So you follow the new directions. Slowly. Carefully. With a grain of salt. As it turns out, they're wrong, but not VERY wrong. You pull up to a factory that seems to be in the right place, making the right kind of product. The name's wrong, but that's no big deal. Many of these places are making products for the big companies and labeling them appropriately. "Paris Candles" could easily be holding stuff for "Eternalite."

You pull in and cross the rain-swept yard to the shipping dept. A man is waiting inside. He shakes your hand and says "We aren't expecting a truck this week. Where are you really trying to go?"

Sigh.

You tell him. He grins and says, "We get guys trying to find that place all the time." And he tells you how to find it--on the other side of town.

Sigh.

So you follow his directions, just as carefully and just as suspiciously. And you reach another factory. This one is called "BrightNights, LLC." That sounds slightly encouraging. So you trudge through the rain again. And sure enough, they're a contractor for Eternalite. And they're wondering where you've been.

Congratulations. Now get back in your truck and get in line. Only six people in front of you...

B. J. and the Blog

First snowfall of the season this morning.

It's about five o'clock, in that same dark parking lot I typed in last night. And it's snowing in November. Maybe I'm just too Southern--it don't seem right, somehow. At least it's not sticking.
***
It didn't stick. And I fled to the south with a trailer full of something. It's not much warmer down here, but it's a little drier.

Some of you may be wondering why I talk so vaguely about where I am and where I'm going. And what I'm carrying, and for whom. And who pays me to do it.

Well, I covered most of those questions a while back, briefly. What it comes down to is, the company doesn't like us talking too much about where we go and what we carry. Partly it's to preserve the customer's privacy. Partly, it's to protect the customer's product, and the truck, and us.

Hijackers do exist, it appears. And they tend to hit trucks they know are hauling something they want. So talking too much about cargoes and schedules is a good way to encourage the less-than-honest. And the company frowns very hard on any casual conversation about specific runs and specific customers.
***
And why do I call them "the company," you ask? And am I ashamed of my name, you wonder? Well, to understand the answer to those questions, you'd have to meet B. J.

I met B. J. shortly after I finished my training period and was assigned my own truck. He had no more experience that I did, but he did have a good bit more cynicism. We sat down and compared notes, and at some point I mentioned my idea for this blog.

"Did you look in your employee manual?" he said.

"For what? The number for their Censorship Department?"

"Think that's funny, do you?" He pulled a beat-up paperback out of his coat pocket, flipped through it, found a spot, and handed it across the table. "Take a look," he said. "And you might want to see if yours has something like it."

I smiled and shook my head as I took the book. Then I started reading and smiled a bit less. The page he'd found covered his company's policy on employees' personal web pages, and part of it read something like this:

...any derogatory remarks concerning the Company may be grounds for immediate termination. Truckbert Logistics reserves the right to decide whether a given remark is derogatory or not. Lack of action concerning any particular remark does not imply that said remark is NOT derogatory, or that said remark will not be judged derogatory at a later date. Truckbert Logistics may act on any statement concerning the Company at any time, and is the sole judge of whether a particular remark was appropriate...

"They're kidding," I said. I didn't sound too convincing.

"Nope. You want to write about what you do, fine. But you might want to check your six first. Even if your outfit don't have something like this in the fine print somewhere, that don't keep 'em from sticking it in later. Lawyers never take anything OUT."

"Point," I admitted. "But there are things about being a driver that you can't talk about if you can't mention your company at all."

"Yep," he said. "And if you think it's worth risking your job to tell folks about them, you go right ahead."

I stared at the table for a while. He sat back and crossed his arms and watched me. Eventually I looked up. "What about if I tell them what YOU said about those things? They can't fire me for what somebody else said about some other company."

"Right. So I get fired instead. Real clever."

"If nobody knows who you are, and nobody knows who you work for..."

He looked at me oddly for a second or two. Then he grinned. "Secret identity, huh? Do I get a Batmobile, too?"

"What, that puny thing? Your rig's bigger."

"Guess you're right. So what're you gonna call me?"

I gave it a little thought. "What about B. J.?" I said eventually.

He snorted a laugh. "I ain't got no monkey."

"You don't look old enough to remember that show."

"Flattery will get you nowhere."
***
Every once in a while B. J. calls me up. I nod and make sympathetic noises and take notes. He asks if I'm ever going to write about any of it, and I say I'm still getting up the nerve.

At least his name got on here, finally. Sort of.

(Oh, by the way, Truckbert Logistics isn't his company's name, either. Bet you never guessed.)

Progress, backwards

In a cold, dark parking lot outside a small truck stop in the Midwest. It's finally starting to feel like November, at least this far north. Darn.

I had a wonderful* experience this evening. Took a load into a somewhat elderly factory and found my assigned door. There it was, just outside my right-hand cab window. With a short ell sticking out from the building, just this side of it. And a fence, a gate, and several very hefty truck-proof posts to my left. A small lot opening before me. And while I was trying to figure out just how I could twist around to line up on the dock, a switch engine cruised by on one of the two railroad tracks that cut through the lot.

Joy.

After two false starts, several hesitations, and a few walks around the lot and truck, I accepted my fate. If that trailer was going to end up at that door, I would have to pull off a maneuver I'd never been stupid--or desperate--enough to try before. A ninety-degree alley dock to the right.

(Note to orchestra: Insert thunderous and frightening chord here.)

It has been said that if all you had to do was drive it down the highway, anybody could be a trucker. That's an exaggeration--I've touched on a few of the subtleties in earlier posts--but there's a lot of truth to it. Driving a truck down a straight road is fairly easy. Safely taking a curve is tougher. Taking a corner is nasty, sometimes. But even then you're still going forward.

They say if you want to know how good an airplane pilot is, watch him land. Well, if you want to check out a truck driver, watch him back up.

If you've ever backed your car or truck with a trailer, you know a little of what I'm talking about. Not all of it, though--in either direction. In some ways a tractor-trailer is actually better behaved than a boat trailer (for example). For one thing, the fifth-wheel hitch is more secure, and the truck and trailer were designed for backing at severe angle.** On the other hand, an eighteen-wheeler backing up gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "flying blind."

You've seen those diagrams, haven't you? The ones they put on the back of trailers nowadays, in a mostly futile attempt to scare you out of tailgating big rigs? Well, when I'm backing, those "NO-ZONE's" are AHEAD of me. Think about that for a moment.

I can't see half of what's behind me. And anything that's right in the trailer's path I can't see--period. The danger is so severe that most (if not all) states make it strictly illegal for a tractor-trailer to back up on a roadway AT ALL. Even a foot. Not without a police officer to keep everybody out of the juggernaut's path and to warn the driver if there's something in the way he didn't notice.

Backing in a straight line is just scary. You get out and look at what's behind you. Then you get back in and back--SLOWLY. And pray nothing ducked in there while you were climbing into the cab. But mostly you just make sure the trailer doesn't get too far out of line. It's not too bad, for short distances.

But the moment you start to back in a curve--even a gentle one--the whole world changes. All of a sudden the trailer is squarely between your mirror and whatever you're backing toward. And with a fifty-three foot trailer, even a gentle curve means the corner of the trailer disappears beyond your mirror's field of view.

You can't see what's behind you and you can't see where you're going. What fun.

Now let's consider a warehouse door. If you're extremely lucky there's half a football field worth of parking lot in front of you, and you can swing out until you're heading directly away from the door. It's kind of tricky, timing your turn to line up just right; but once you're there, you can just back straight in. Easy.

If you're extremely lucky. Don't count on it.

Most of the time, there'll be enough space to swing the truck around, and not a whole lot more. You're basically going to have to plant the rear wheels in front of the door (and in front of the trailers that are almost certainly parked on either side before you get there) and sort of swivel around them. The only question is how much extra room you'll have. Can you start from further out and get sorta lined up before you swivel? Hope so.

Oh, yes. And remember to set up so the door is on your left. That way you can open the window and lean out, and if you crane your neck you can see where the back of your trailer is. If the door is on your right--well, the window on that side is the end of a tunnel. And it's pointed at something that has nothing to do with where you're trying to go. If you try to look behind you, you'll get a fine view of the bunk bed in your sleeper section.*** Your mirrors are all you've got. And at some point your trailer will be so far out of every possible field of view you can't even GUESS what's behind it. Please, please, please, DON'T TRY TO BACK INTO A DOOR THAT'S ON YOUR BLIND SIDE!!!

Oops. Guess what I just did.

What can I say? Sometimes you don't have a choice. In this case, there wasn't a fraction of the room I'd have needed to line up straight in front of the door. And to swivel around in the normal way, I'd have had to back my truck (or maybe the front half of my trailer) right through those steel-and-concrete gateposts I mentioned earlier. So I did the stupid, desperate thing.

Back it around, SLOWLY, until the corner of the trailer is invisible even in my convex spot mirror. Stop. Get out and see where it really is. Make sure there isn't anything back there for it to hit. Climb back in the cab. Crank the wheel around the other way and pull forward a few feet--getting back in front of the trailer at the new angle. Now I can see the corner again--barely.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Eventually I've inched the trailer around to where I'm almost lined up in front of the door. I can actually see the dock itself now. And the trailer docked beside it--the one I'm trying not to hit. I may yet live.

This took something like twenty minutes. A Trucking Master I am not. But I did make the delivery.

The guy in the warehouse wondered why I took so long. The only other guy in the neighborhood was ticked off because I was blocking the alley. At least the railroad people didn't come wandering through while I was all over their tracks.

Oh, well. I know what I accomplished. I think I'll go to bed now, while the warm glow is still there.

G'night.

-----

*Full of wonder--as in "I stare in awe at this amazing thing." "Awful" used to mean kind of the same thing, in fact. Wish it still did--the double meaning would be entirely too appropriate...

**You can still overdo it, of course. And damaging your cab by trying to back through the trailer will not win you friends back at the terminal...

***Day cabs and yard tractors actually have rear windows. They're also shorter. Both these things help. But they don't solve all the problems.

It's just THERE...

Sitting in a rest area near the Tennessee-Kentucky border. Just finished eating supper (Campbell's Condensed Bean with Bacon goes down fairly well cold, straight out of the can). When I finish this brief note I'll go to bed, I think.

It's odd, what you can get used to--the nuisances and the niceties both. Cold odds and ends for supper never bothered me, but I didn't expect to be quite so casual about it. And I never really thought I'd get jaded by autumn.

I expected the trees to be bare by now, for some reason. But the color isn't gone yet. I was surrounded by it today. Even under a gray sky it was lovely--pastels rather than flourescents. I was paying more attention to the road, though. The hills around me got passing glances.

I've been driving through valleys and along mountainsides for a couple of weeks now, surrounded by Color. The kind of (capital-C) Color that turns autumn into the major tourist season in the Appalachians. Bright yellows and reds in a hundred shades--sometimes almost glowing in bright sunlight, sometimes quiet and subdued in gray mists and fogs. Mountains rising out of clouds that I too was floating above--gray-mist pastel on the lower slopes, brilliant red-and-gold near the peak where the sun reached them. I would admire for a few seconds--then a curve would come up and I had to go back to work.

Eventually it occurred to me that while I was getting bored with all that beauty, my wife hadn't seen it at all. So last time I was home, I took her up into the north Georgia hills and we just wandered around. Like all the other tourists. She said it was the nicest present she'd had in a good while. I enjoyed it too.

Odd, how different something looks when you don't *have* to look at it.

The stuff in the back

One of my many* fans** suggested I comment on the products I haul. I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but I suspect he'll be disappointed by my answer regardless. Y'see, most of the time I never see what I'm carrying. Half the time I have no clue what it is.

Once upon a time, truck drivers loaded and unloaded their rigs most of the time. Some of them still do--car haulers and flatbed drivers, for instance, have to at least secure their loads. And local drivers frequently go "door-to-door" like a delivery truck, offloading part of their cargo at several locations.

Over-the-road drivers (in my company, at least) don't do much of that. We normally carry an entire trailer full of something from one single place to another single place. And as I mentioned in my discussion of "lumpers," loading those trailers has become a bit of an art--if you don't know how to run the forklift and distribute the weight properly, you have no business loading the trailer.

I've helped unload a few, but only a few. The usual run involves one of two things--at either end of the trip:

• You back up to a dock and sit in your truck while they load you (or unload you). When the truck stops rocking and bouncing, you go in, find the shipping/receiving office, and get your bills of lading (or get them to sign for what you've delivered). Often as not, you never see the inside of the warehouse.
• You find a place on the yard and drop the trailer (empty or loaded) you brought in. Then you find the trailer you're supposed to hook up to (pre-loaded with your assigned cargo or empty (so you have something to load at your next stop)). Once you've got your new trailer, you go in as above. Unless the other end of the trip is "option 1" (above), you never see the inside of your trailer.

So for many loads the only time you see what you're carrying is when you close (or open) your doors. Sometimes not even then.

You can look on your bill of lading and figure out what you're carrying, of course. Most of the time.*** But often as not you don't bother. You have to know how heavy it is, and whether there's any hazardous material.**** Other than that, you mostly think about where it's going. And getting it there.

All that said, I have hauled a fair variety of cargo. I've carried motorcycles and computers, bales of scrap cardboard and bales of dead soda bottles, beer and vitamin water, and a lot of things in between. My trainer once hauled the first car of the new model year to a private showing for a luxury automaker (and boy, was he watched!). Another driver I talked to pulled a trailer full of government checks (with massive police escort). We move a lot of different stuff.

But I, for one, don't spend much time thinking about what I'm moving. Sorry 'bout that.
-----
*More than two is many, right?
**Anyone who pays enough attention to have a comment is a fan. Right?
***If you just picked up a trailer from some major chain's regional warehouse, and you're carrying it to one of their stores, there could be a lot of different items in there. And the bill might just give you a list of order numbers or product codes.
****Now THERE's a subject for when I want to write a book. A very boring book...