dr_lizardo

Hey folks

Well, tonight I'm driving my truck back to Rome NY for the last time, and taking a bus back home tomorrow. I don't feel great about it but I wouldn't exactly feel great about staying either, so. . .

Time to get persistent with my brother's boss at coca cola so as to get started there asap. I wouldn't mind just doing merchandising for them until I get into grad school or become a successful photographer, but if they want me to drive the trucks, at least their equipment is smaller and more appropriate for the local delivery mission than the uber long kenworth trucks and 48 foot trailers I've been doing this family dollar shit with.

I see that I could keep doing what I've been doing, but it doesn't agree with me at all. If I had icewater for veins, no emotional reactions to super difficult high pressure situations maybe I'd keep doing this, but I'm not like that.

This past new years day when I made may last two deliveries, the first one was at a store where you could only get into the store from the parking lot of the funeral parlor next door. If there was a funeral at the parlor, you couldn't get in. Which is why that store always has 6am deliveries. Well, that's fine, but if a funeral starts up when you're in the loading area, and your KW W900L is too long to get out by pulling forward out of the loading area, especially when there are snowbanks up against the adjacent building right in front of you, you're stuck there until the funeral gets out, unless maybe you're cool with going into the parlor and asking the mourners to move their vehicles. Then at the second stop, the docking situation was a more reasonable, but I still couldn't get more than maybe 20 feet from the loading door, again because of snowbanks on the side of the paved loading area, in the exact spot where I need to start straightening the tractor in front of the trailer to get it to back up rather than just turn. A couple of days later I met another Family Dollar guy who lives in springfield, we were both waiting for our trucks to be jumpstarted, and he told me that he couldn't his shorter noses Freightliner Century into that dock either, even without snow on the ground.

So when I've been thinking about trying to stick this out another three weeks till my exact one year anniversary over the road, I've really just been dwelling on the presensce of massive snowbanks everywhere. My front bumper is bent in on both sides, and my mud flaps are torn off from trying to get that goddamned longnosed KW into places, that yeah, maybe you could do in the summer, if there were not cars parked in the exact wrong places that the owners must have been psychics who hate truck drivers to have parked them just exactly where they're parked.

The three accidents I've had with werner are also just the ones I haven't gotten away with. I've flattened at least two street signs that I know of, broken off at least one small decorative tree at its base, broke a good sized branch off another. If you look at the trucks at the Family Dollar DC out in rome, they're covered with scratches, dents, and gouges from all the other drivers who coundn't rewrite the laws of physics any more than I could. Oh and I scratched up the mirror on nice white acura in new york city, where I had to unload the truck double parked up against parked cars along the side of the street, because the store personnel did not see to it that there would be no cars parked there, like they said they would. Got away with that one because with my truck right next to it the owners of the vehicle had to get in on the passenger side and did not see what I'd done to the driver's side mirror.

I saw it as a gamble going in, on this account, that I would beat the odds, with respect to having an accident, in the hopes of making halfway decent money, and getting some home time. I've made a little better money that I was running 48 states, and the hometime I've gotten has only made me want more, there is so much to life that you can have when you're home. And as far as beating the odds with respect to accidents, the odds have completely kicked my butt.

It's just not cool to go into an area where you just don't know what the hell you're doing. Where I flattened that first street sign that I mentioned, it was on staten Island. I followed my directions to the letter, but as happens with directions all too often, I was pointed in the wrong direction when I got there. Which is just fucking ridiculous actually. So the store owner tells me that the truckers turn around "down the road up ahead" and whenever I get advice like that it invariably leads to major or minor disaster. I don't fucking know what's ahead up there and a longnosed KW with a 48 footer attached is really not a great thing to be improvising in. So I headed down the road to a T intersection where I could turn left out to the main road or turn right and head through a housing project. so of course I tried to turn out to the main road, and of course a car parked too close to the intersection made it impossible for me to do so. So I had just a jolly excellent time backing her up with cars behind me honking at me, and when I finally got it back on the road I'd come up, a couple of guys in an electric company truck told me how to get through the housing project. So I headed through there and out to the main road, with the idea of heading back in on the street I'd not been able to turn onto because of the parked car,, because I was pretty sure I could make the turn going the other way, and If I couldn't I could just head back through the housing project again.

Well wouldn't cha know it, another tractor trailer, the shorter kind that could make those turns that I had just been unable to, had come up that street and situated himself so as to make it impossible for me to get down that street. So now what I had to do was keep going down that main street to find somewhere to turn around so as to go back through the housing project the other way and get to the docking area pointed in the right direction. For those of you unfamiliar with staten island as viewed from the perspective of a truck driver, it is not characterized by large areas of paved real estate sitting vacant for the use of truck drivers in need of someplace to turn around. There are parking lots, but the tend to be full of cars, and/or too small and/or fenced and guarded with cement posts at the entrances so as to prevent people like me from getting into them and turning around. So Eventually i had to pick a side street and just go, and wouldn'tcha know it it got a lot narrower all of a sudden and I found myself faced with turning a corner I couldn't make or backing up a longish ways and trying to back it back out onto a main road. I guess you're sposta call the police for help in these situations, but being an emotionally immature person I just said fuckit and flattened the street sign on the corner. Didn't scratch the trailer as the corner of the trailer knocked it out of the way.

Anyway, i guess maybe that's sufficient explanation as to why I'm not right for this. A lot of things could be different that would make this job doable. The trailers could be shorter when they need to be. The directions to stores could put you into the loading areas pointed in the right direction to get into them, really no kidding, it would be possible to do this with the technology available in the 21st century. You type them on a computer and it prints them out. They do this , but they do it with directions that are wrong, and it only takes just slightly wrong to really mess up your day when you're in one of these vehicles, and noone bothers to make sure that those directions are right. This job is not doable with the equipment I'm doing it with, and there are going to be more accidents that I don't get away with. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get any other driving jobs with a record of five accidents my first year, but I'm only going to slam the door further shut on any such prospects If i keep doing this and rack up more accidents. I would imagine that I'd be able to get a job driving a dump truck or a cement truck or some such staight vehicle. Those jobs tend to be seasonal though.


It also bothers me that almost nothing I was ever told about Werner Eterprises has proved to be true. What's true is that they use paperless logging and the split loads, one drive taking a load a ways and another driver taking it the rest of the way. Other than that, the average age of the fleet is a lot older than the 1.5 years that they tell you, and you don't get to pick out the truck you want, even when you do a dedicated account for which your longnose truck is grossly inappropriate. When I had that big fight with stephanie about not doing NYC anymore, she tried to tell me that all the drivers on the account have to do NYC, among other bullshit things she said. But when I was talking to that other springfield based driver, while we waited for jumpstarts for our trucks, he told me he doesn't do NYC either.