A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  When the officer finished telling William about his fatal disease, he said that William did not miss a beat as he replied, “tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk, well, sir, tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk, JB’s gonna die too!”

  Ricky

  All trucking company employees, whether drivers or office personnel, have always been known as hardworking men and women. Their reputation also has them known as hard drinkers when they’re off the clock.

  One of WMTS’s drivers, Ricky, certainly enjoyed his alcohol, but never while he drove. When sober, he was a driver you could usually count on to deliver and pick up on time, but every several months, Ricky would tie one on and go AWOL. Each time this happened, we knew exactly where to find him, so we would put two drivers in a truck headed south from Baltimore, and one of them would drive Ricky’s rig back to Baltimore. The drivers would find Ricky’s tractor trailer sitting in a parking lot on Highway 301, just south of La Plata, Maryland, and Ricky would be across the highway in a motel, better known as his “drunken home away from home.” Sometimes the motel owner would call our office to let us know Ricky was a guest, and that Ricky had given the owner the keys to his truck. The owner always assured us the rig would be safe. The guys would pick up the truck, leaving Ricky at the motel, and several days later, after achieving sobriety, he would call for someone to come get him. We would ask a northbound driver to pick him up and bring him to Baltimore to get the truck. After each “episode,” Ricky would stay sober for a couple of months before the bottle lured him back to his motel room.

  Through the years, I have often thought that Ricky’s drinking habits would have fit in well with those of Obie’s crew. Ricky was a nice guy and I hope things worked out for him—that he didn’t do anything stupid while drinking.

  Jackson

  I’m not certain why bad things happen to certain people, whether they’re unlucky, stupid, or just use bad judgment, and other people who do stupid things are unscathed. One guy, Jackson, was an elderly driver by the time we met, and he’d done pretty much everything you can think of. He had always been there, done that, or been there, done that twice, and he had plenty of T-shirts to prove it. No matter how many miles other truckers had driven or how many places they’d traveled to, if you asked Jackson, he had driven more and seen more than anyone else ever could. He was highly opinionated—to the point that Obie would have said, “Jackson would have argued with a stop sign!”

  One of Jackson’s legs was quite a bit shorter than the other, which made his gait more up and down than forward and earned him the nickname “Hop Along.” I remember him saying, “They better not try putting me in a flatbed because of this leg,” although no dispatcher would have even considered doing so because he physically couldn’t have climbed on and off a flatbed to load, chain, and tarp a load.

  One Sunday morning, Jackson arrived at the terminal, ready to begin his trip to New York City. His trailer contained forty-three thousand pounds of paper stock consigned to a printer, and as he and the other drivers filled their trucks with fuel, he shot the breeze with several of them. I am certain the audience allowed Jackson to “hold court.” When the other drivers finally said they were leaving the yard, Jackson told them to wait long enough for him to hook his trailer, and then he would run with them up I-95.

  When Jackson arrived at his destination in Manhattan the next morning, he climbed out of the cab to open the trailer doors before he backed up to the dock. Well, Jackson opened the doors only to find the trailer empty. His first declarations were that someone was trying to fuck with him, although he later said that the trailer number that he hooked his tractor to was “awfully close” to the trailer number that he should have hooked it to, the one containing the paper, which seems to me to show who’s responsible for the missing load.

  It turned out that Jackson had pulled an empty trailer for five hundred miles, rather than one with a load of paper weighing forty-­three thousand pounds. He had been running his mouth so much, and been in such a hurry to catch the other drivers, that he had failed to open the trailer doors to look inside before he got on the road. He later said that he thought the truck was pulling really well, and figured this was because the maintenance shop had done a great job on it following his repair request. Jackson kept to himself for a few days after the episode, due to all the ribbing he received. He never questioned why he didn’t get paid for those five hundred miles.

  Another of Jackson’s boneheaded moves came about after he picked up a load of beer at a Baltimore brewery. There were no weigh scales at the brewery, so Jackson brought the load to our terminal yard, and upon weighing his rig, he found that the trailer axles weighed in at more than thirty-four thousand pounds, rendering the trailer illegal to drive. Rather than unloading the entire load of beer, and then reloading the pallets in a different configuration to redistribute the weight, he utilized the trailer’s sliding tandem.

  Most closed vans are equipped with sliding tandems. A sliding tandem is used to move tandems, which are close-coupled pairs of axles, forward and backward to redistribute weight.1 Depending on the distance between each hole, four inches or six inches, between 250 to four hundred pounds per hole is moved. In Jackson’s case, moving four thousand pounds required him to move the sliding tandem ten holes.

  When Jackson prepared to redistribute the weight, he began by driving his rig into the middle of our paved lot, where he climbed from the cab and opened the trailer doors, although, when asked later, he was never able to offer any good reasons for opening them. He then released the locking pins, reentered his cab, locked the trailer brakes, and pulled forward, but the tandems did not slide. They were held in place by a scourge of rust. To break the tandems loose, Jackson released his trailer brakes and backed up his rig. When he decided he had attained the proper speed, he locked his trailer’s brakes, which accomplished his goal of unsticking the tandems, but the stop was so abrupt that two full pallets of glass beer bottles toppled over and spilled out of the opened trailer doors. They hit the asphalt and almost all the ones that fell shattered all to hell. (We did salvage a few bottles, and took them into the office to keep them safe, but they slowly disappeared.)

  Jackson’s excuse for the incident was that it was entirely due to the “damned shoddy shrink-wrapping job” on the pallets of beer, and he declared, “I’ll give those bastards hell the next time I go there to pick up another load of beer.”

  Jackson probably should have been fired many times, especially after this incident of damaged beer. In another industry, his incompetence would certainly have led to his dismissal. The truth is that trucking companies tolerated drivers like Jackson simply because of the shortage of truck drivers. As long as drivers didn’t damage their tractors and trailers, or crash into four-wheelers, or knock down low-hanging gas pump awnings, or tear the hood off another tractor while backing into a slot at a truck stop, or blow several tires when they turned too sharply, thereby dragging their trailer through a concrete ditch, then the carriers put up with the occasional product damage by even the most boneheaded drivers.

  The BM Owner

  During one of those young, stupid, fly-off-the-handle situations, I had a disagreement with one of my bosses at WMTS. Rather than acquiesce, I resigned and went to work for another trucking company, as a manager at a terminal in Louisiana, acting in accordance with the old adage that the grass is always greener on the other side. Well, it turns out the grass was hardly green at all.

  One time, the owner of the other carrier, which I’ll call Big Mistake Trucking (BM), flew in on his private jet to attend a drivers’ safety meeting we had scheduled for Saturday morning at our terminal in Louisiana. I picked him up at the local airport, and drove us to the terminal. When we got there, he told me to drive through the yard so he could look at the equipment. I had anticipated his wanting to do this, so the previous evening I’d parked the thirty tractors and trailers into a very presentable arrangement.

  When we got out
of the car after parking in the fuel lane, the owner walked up so close to me that I could smell his stale breath. It was clear he hadn’t brushed his teeth since at least the day before.

  He looked me in the eye and said, “What’s all those empty tractors doing out there, boy?”

  Well, we did have four or five available trucks, so I replied, “Well, sir, we are doing our best to find qualified drivers to put in them.”

  He thought a moment and then very slowly announced, “I’d rather have a warm body in those trucks than see them sitting on the fence. Do you catch my drift?”

  After assuring him that I certainly did, we went into the building for the safety meeting, where the old man promptly pissed off all the drivers. He informed them that he was ending BM’s safety bonus program because he felt he was paying the drivers extra money to do something they were supposed to do already—drive safely.

  As soon as he said his piece, he turned to me, told me to take him to the airport, and then walked out of the building and toward the car. Most drivers sat wide-eyed, stunned by what they were just told, but one fellow jumped up and ran after the owner. He got very close to the old man and yelled that he had never worked for a sorrier son of a bitch in his life. I stepped in and pulled the driver away from the owner. On the way to the airport, I was instructed to terminate the irate driver’s employment within the hour. The driver was waiting for me when I got back to the office, and after learning of his firing, he said he figured it would happen, and that it really was okay, because he didn’t want to work for that motherfucker anyway.

  Well, we got busy hiring drivers, and it only took us about two weeks to fill the empty tractors with warm bodies. Most of us were not at all surprised that it took less than thirty days before three of the five tractors were wrecked and torn all to pieces by those warm bodies. And why the hell not? They wouldn’t have received a safety bonus even if they hadn’t wrecked their tractors.

  It was pretty ironic that the owner wanted more truckers because it became clear very quickly that he enjoyed firing people, and, like with his firing of the driver after the safety meeting, didn’t give it a second thought. One time, he passed one of his trucks as it was traveling down an interstate highway. Trucks have quite a bit of room in them, so the driver of this rig, in his effort to be comfortable, was driving with his left foot resting on the dash of the truck. The owner clearly didn’t approve of this and after somehow getting the driver to pull over onto the shoulder of the highway, he fired him on the spot, just because of the way he’d been sitting.

  Another time, he was in his office at corporate headquarters when he saw something that pissed him off without good reason. He’d designed the office so it had one-way glass, similar to what police interrogation rooms have, and from it he watched a driver pull into one of two fuel lanes he’d installed alongside the office. The driver then got out, put both fuel hoses in his tanks and set them on automatic shut off, and then walked around his rig, thumping the tires to check that none of them were flat. When the old man saw the driver miss thumping several inside tires, he walked out of his office and fired the driver on the spot.

  Several years prior to my employment with BM, something happened that I wish I’d known about before I took the job. One Friday evening, BM sent their company planes to pick up all terminal managers, along with their wives, and then flew them to a management meeting at the corporate office. When the husbands and wives finished eating breakfast on Saturday morning, BM gave some cash to each wife and provided them with transportation to go shopping and have a fun morning. The wives were asked to return in time for everyone to have lunch together.

  The managers’ meeting rolled along smoothly until the owner asked the men if anyone had any gripes or complaints about the way things were done at BM. He said they could be candid and ask about or discuss any topic. Reportedly, one terminal manager did have a complaint, and then another manager chimed in with a separate issue to talk about. Some managers, who didn’t have complaints of their own, took sides with other managers’ issues.

  When the wives returned for lunch, they found their husbands without jobs, as the old man had fired every damned one of them. The lunch buffet went untouched because everyone lost their appetite. Everyone was then taken to their motel to check out, and the company planes flew them back home.

  James

  A story of the load from hell comes from James, one of BM’s drivers who had been with the company for several years before I met him. James was probably fifty years old when I knew him, and he struck me as a great guy. I never saw him in a foul mood, and he had an infectious grin that could make any of us smile. He was also a consummate professional, and always looked like he had just showered, shaved, and put on clean clothes.

  The story relates to a load of sheetrock James delivered to Dallas. We’d dispatched him on a backhaul load from Houston to Louisiana, and I’d asked James if he would have a problem hauling coiled steel wire rods using only nylon straps. All of BM’s flatbeds were equipped with only nylon straps for securement, and chains were not permitted to be used on the dedicated customer’s outbound products. He’d replied that it shouldn’t be a problem, because the load only had nine rolls of wire and didn’t need to be covered with a tarp.

  Any truck driver who’s hauled coiled wire rods know that the rolls can move to lay sideways, and poor James learned that nylon straps aren’t very effective at securing the product. It takes experience to be able to secure them well with only nylon straps. He had traveled less than one hundred miles before several bundles had already fallen over. When he eased into a truck stop, he found a fellow flatbed trucker willing to help him. Using this driver’s chains, they were able to stand the bundles that had fallen back up. Over the next twenty-four hours, James was forced to stop, find other drivers with chains, and then repeat the same process two more times. Thanks to his determination, he safely delivered the load in New Orleans the next afternoon.

  When James turned in his paperwork at our terminal the following morning, I added eight hours of on-the-clock time to his road pay before I sent it all to the home office. This was the least I could do to thank him for a job well done, and because the time he spent dealing with the wire rods had caused him to lose the pay of hauling another load that week. I was sure this “attaboy” was the right way for a terminal manager to take care of his driver.

  Unfortunately, the adage “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” became quite evident when one of the sons of BM’s owner called me the following week. He said he was looking at the hours I had added to James’s pay, and asked if I had checked James’s logbook to make sure he was due the extra money. I replied that I had not looked at his logbook, but felt that he was due the extra money because he had done such an outstanding job of getting the load there, in addition to not incurring any wrecker fees.

  Thirty-five years later, I still remember the son’s reply with crystal clarity: “Check his logs. If he didn’t include how he spent the extra time on the wire rods, or if he falsified his logs, then fuck him, and do not pay him!”

  Now, there were several reasons I made damned sure James got paid for those eight hours. Most importantly, he had earned it. Secondly, I thought that BM’s owner, and both of his sons, were crazy as hell.

  Early one morning, two weeks after I paid James the extra eight hours, BM’s VP of operations walked unannounced into our office, along with my Mobile, Alabama-based division manager. While I was on a lengthy phone call, I observed the VP pacing back and forth as he chewed on his pipe. When I finished the call, he sat down opposite me and I said to him, “Damn, man. What in the world is wrong with you?“

  He sighed, and then said, “I’ve been sent down here to relieve you of duty.” Although I knew exactly why this was happening, I asked anyway. He said the reason for my firing was that I didn’t get along well with the management team.

  “Well, no shit!”
I responded. That much was certainly true.

  Just then, the phone rang, and as I instinctively reached to answer it. I stopped myself. I looked at the VP, and said, “You probably should answer it since I don’t work here anymore.”

  The VP had flown in from Mobile and been driven the one hundred miles from the airport to our terminal by my division manager. The VP stayed at the office answering phones while the division manager drove me to my apartment, due to the fact that BM wouldn’t let me take their company car home with me. Just two weeks prior, this same VP had suggested that I sell my personal car because I had a very nice company car to use. I’m glad as hell I didn’t take his advice.

  I had become very good friends with my division manager during my six months with BM, and during our short ride to my apartment, he told me that he had been ordered, three days prior, to travel to our terminal to fire me himself. This fine fellow said he told BM that he wouldn’t fire me. He said he hadn’t hired me, I was moving all loads on time, my terminal’s empty miles were lower than any other terminal’s, and I was doing an excellent job. The guy was upstanding and earnest and I believed him. Not surprisingly, BM’s management team was not overjoyed by his refusal to follow their orders. They stripped him of his division managerial role, and demoted him to exclusively being the Mobile terminal manager. He quit working for BM a few months later, and I’m glad he did, because we got to work together for several more years at another company.

  There was a happy ending to getting canned by Big Mistake Trucking, because two days later, I interviewed for another terminal management position with a flatbed carrier based in Georgia. After leaving this carrier’s offices, I found a pay phone and called the president of WMTS to inform him that someone would be calling him for a reference and that he should lie to them and tell them something good!