On any given day, I put up with more stupidity before eight o'clock in the morning than most people get in a week. I endure careless drivers cutting me off, rude truckers refusing to pull out of fuel lanes, third world truckers making obscene facial expressions, and scheduling problems any airline would be proud to tackle.
Last night a slobby character driving a junky truck and pulling a Hill's Brothers trailer, filled his reefer tank and then went inside the Petro to pay without first pulling away from the pump. He knew I was waiting behind him; he knows he is supposed to pull ahead into the space provided for people waiting in the checkout line. He was just too lazy. He cost me an hour. The men from the shop had to come over and ask him to leave; he was that rude. He called me a lot lizard and suggested I should back up and go to another pump. All of the pumps were taken, the Petro was in the midst of a rush.
Yesterday morning in Oxnard, California, at Western Cooling (a truly tough place to back into) a John Christener driver grabbed three gears in the parking lot so he could beat me to the street and get backed in ahead of me. He had door twelve. I had door eleven, and another truck was in door ten. This meant I had to jack my truck into a spot between a curb, some big yellow posts, and 2 trucks. The check in window at Western Cooling dispatches the trucks into docks in numerical order to prevent this kind of mess. I confronted John Christener, and he talked like an idiot.
Now we have the third world trucker...a man who acts as if he has never seen a woman behind the wheel. In fact, they act like they have never seen any women at all. Most of them are new arrivals from Latin America, but not all. This is an unintended consequence of our new cross border trucking mess. Not only are they radically different in tradition and culture, they have weird ideas about American women. Some of them are so obscene and rude, it's truly disturbing. They use their lips, hands, and hips to make romantic proposals. I am totally sick of them.
I used to enjoy trucking; but, the new hours of service rules are so stupid and capricious, driver quality is getting so low, and truckstops and facilities are so overwhelmed, it's now like a prison.
I can't wait to get out!
