08/11/2012
I saw my father yesterday.
This is no small thing. In the four years I've been driving, I've taken enough time off to go home three times. One of those was for my wife's funeral.
I simply don't have the money to take that much time off ("paid vacation" is not a phrase most trucking companies understand). So seeing the family means either--
A)
They come to see me.
It has happened. But simple arithmetic tends to work against that.
--400 miles.
--80+ year old driver.
--2 chances in 14 I'll be home.*
Do the math.
B)
I have a load that takes me into the neighborhood.
Weirdly enough, this is almost as unlikely as them dropping in on me. I-40 between Nashville and Memphis is not precisely on the way from Atlanta to much of anywhere. As a normal thing, any time I'm within a hundred miles of home, I'm either in Nashville and headed toward Chicago, or I've arrived in Memphis by way of Birmingham and my destination is further west.
Yesterday, though, I had a load for a plant in Jackson, Tennessee. And there aren't a lot of ways to get there that don't involve that stretch of I-40.
Nevertheless, I was worried. They COULD have routed me through Birmingham and then north on two-lanes for a hundred-plus miles. Fuel efficiency, y'know.
But they didn't. And so I found myself pulling into a truck stop within twenty miles of home, with a good three hours to waste before I had to move on to the customer.
Enough time for my father and his wife to come and meet me at a restaurant across the street from the truck stop. Enough time for us to decide whether to eat breakfast or lunch and then eat it, slow and easy.
Enough time to catch up on family news, a little (When did my nephew become a pastor?!).
Enough time to see them off and still let the food and the memories settle before I had to drive again.
There are a number of reasons I don't update this blog as often as I used to.** One of them is that I've been having quite a few days lately that I don't especially want to talk about. I want you to enjoy reading this. So I try to write about things I can think about and smile.
Like today.
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*And that's optimistic. Once upon a time my schedule was slightly predictable. That's changed in the last year..
**I discuss a few more here.
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3 comments:
Seems like you're increasingly unhappy where you are. Are there any other carriers you might sign on with?
Ouch.
I've tried to keep the blog fairly light. Sorry I haven't succeeded as well as I'd hoped. But a lot of that has been less my mood than my experiences.
I read somewhere that a blog should be about something. Quasitrucker has always been about the parts of trucking that a non-trucker(like me, until recently) might not have thought of. Early on, that covered a lot of ground. But, of course, the longer you work at something, the more you understand it, and the fewer surprises it hands you. And the surprises that are left are not (on the average) the ones that fill you with wonder and delight.
So rather than tell my fifteenth funny story about getting fuel, I tend to talk less. And when something new and different comes up, it often has to do with the Company annoying me, or the truck annoying me, or [fill-in-the-blank] annoying me. Which does drag the tone down. Sorry 'bout that.
All that said, though, thanks for the concern. You aren't entirely wrong about the mood--my feelings about my job have always been pretty mixed. They've become more so since my wife died. Switching carriers wouldn't do much for that, I think. If I go elsewhere, it'll likely be in another line of work altogether.
Life's full of annoyances. The fun part is trying to dodge them creatively, and get things as good as possible for yourself. (If there's a rock in my shoe, I usually empty it out rather than keep walking and cuss the rock, for example.)
I've had jobs that werent so hot too, but changing who I worked for made a big improvement in how I felt about it.
Seems like there's a fair number of employers out there, too. Took a look, got some results at http://preview.tinyurl.com/8ld8tmw
(Just so you can check, so you can tell I'm not sending you to some virus-laden sex poodle page or something...)
But that's your call. You write good stuff - I'd like to see more of it, and I hope you stay safe!
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