Trucks trucks everywhere! Part 1

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“30,000 pounds... of mashed... bananas” - Harry Chapin

Driving a truck isn’t for sissies. Most of you know that intellectually, but few of you appreciate it in your gut. What I’d like to do here is three important things: first, give you an appreciation for what it’s like to be a truck driver; second, help you if you want to be a truck driver; and third, provide a few useful resources to existing truck drivers to help them do their jobs better, safer, and with greater job satisfaction. Plus, the unwritten guarantee that we’ll entertain and educate!

I've got a few articles for you, and today's is about what it's like to BE a truck driver. Read on!

Stupid people are trying to kill you

I can't count the number of times I've had people do their level best to get either me or themselves killed. Sure, you've probably seen a trucker or two doing something crazy, and it sticks out in your mind because there's so few of them, but the overwhelming majority of truckers take their jobs seriously and drive safely. There are thousands of accidents every year, and trucks are in a disproportionately small fraction of them - that is, if trucks represent 25% of the vehicles on the road, significantly less than 25% of accidents involve trucks. But you can be sure they'll make the news! Of top of that, in accidents that do involve a truck and a car, over 90% of the time, it's the car-driver's fault; however, you can be sure the truck driver will be the one to take the blame. He went through a school to learn how to drive, he gets a year's experience driving every month, so obviously it's the fault of the guy who knows what he's doing, and not of the guy who cut him off.

Okay, so let's talk about that headline.

Crappy drivers try to kill you

I've had plenty of people drive crazy around me. I've had people jump in front of me and slam on their brakes in front of me when I was rolling down a hill at 70 mph because they wanted to make an illegal U-turn. (That person was lucky my brakes and experience were better than his!) I've had lots of people cut me off, or nearly hit me, or sit beside me for several miles or any number of other things.

You're driving a 40 ton vehicle, surrounded by 1 and 2 ton vehicles. You've got to be careful, because they get their licenses from a cereal box, and if you get into an accident, it doesn't matter who was really at fault, you're going to take the blame.

Politicians try to kill you

There are lots of restrictions on where you can take a truck, and few of them are made out of any sense of practicality or your living conditions. There are places where you can't idle your truck. Hey, when it's 50 below, I tell you what, governor of New Jersey, I'll trade beds with you. I'll let you sleep in my truck without any generator or heat, while I sleep in your bed with your wife watching your TV using your bathroom and your shower. Or when it's 100 or hotter, you can sleep in that oven and I'll enjoy your air conditioner.

Let's get realistic here. If you really expect to make a dent in pollution (which is what the no-idling laws are supposedly about), do something intelligent for a change. Ticket cars that belch more smoke than any 100 trucks on the highway. Insist trucking companies install an electrical plug that can power the truck's heater, a/c, and accessories, and then install outlets in truck parking spaces. Then we can just plug in and we don't need to run our engines. That would save a lot of diesel too.

The next thing some of them do is tell you that you can only park for a couple hours in a rest area. How idiotic is that? Federal law requires us to stop and sleep for 10 hours. Where are we supposed to do that? These states aren't exactly brimming with truckstops. Wasn't there some rest area funding bill passed recently because some trucker got killed because he couldn't find a proper place to park for the night?

On top of that, some states restrict a truck's speed. I can't think of anything more dangerous or wasteful of resources on the highway than a slow-moving vehicle on the same road with a lot of fast-moving vehicles. The fast vehicles get all clogged up behind the slow vehicles, wasting everyone's time, and what if someone's not paying attention? They're going to ram right into that slower vehicle, and with a huge speed difference, like 15 mph in some cases (California), that means the car driver is going to die. Considering all the attention that gets focused on insignificant dangers, I don't see why this huge one is ignored.

And let's not even mention the lane restrictions. Through 99% of the cities, a given truck is just trying to drive straight through it. Considering the amount of energy required to get one of these things moving, it makes a lot more sense to dedicate the HOV and express lanes to trucks, not to cars. Get those trucks through so they don't waste time clogging up the highways.

Hollywood turns the world against you

Has there ever been a movie with a truck in it that didn't paint the truck as some all-powerful force of nature and use that to scare the crap out of the viewers?

Your company tries to rip you off

And they usually succeed!

There's this myth that truckers make a lot of money, and therefore trucking companies spare no effort to rip you off. Same for the truckstops. But 95% of truckers are just as broke as the rest of us, if not moreso, because considering how long we have to be out there to get our paycheck, we don't even make minimum wage.

But the problem is that most of us are paid by the mile, and in every case, those miles get shorted. It's just the way the companies do business. You get a load that requires you to drive from the north side of Chicago to the south side, you drive 50 miles, but you don't get paid for any of them because both locations are within the city limits of Chicago. That's an extreme example, but it happens.

And then they make you sit for long periods. Most companies claim to pay layover - that is, if you sit for more than 2 days, you get paid, because bill collector's don't accept "my company doesn't feel like paying me for all the time they expect me to be available out there but they won't let me do any real work". So they make you sit for a day and a half, and then they assign you a load that doesn't pick up for a couple days, and then they give you 5 days to make a 2 day drive. You're sitting 7 days and not getting paid for any of it. Now this is a rather extreme example, and it doesn't happen that way very often, but I'm no stranger to sitting 2-3 days per load without getting paid, and then being given a short run.

Your customers are all different

The majority of the places you go to pick up or drop off do things largely the same, but there are plenty of exceptions. What one will insist you do, another will forbid, and a third will cry bloody murder! It's rather silly; I'd think they'd want to improve efficiency rather than attack it, but I guess that's just me.

Kids love you

It's not all bad, of course. I don't think there's a month that goes by where I don't have some kid(s) asking me to toot my horn at them, and I'd say I average about once a week. It's fun!

You get to travel

I like traveling, and so do a lot of other people. In a given month, you're likely to drive as many miles as most people do in a whole year, and I've gotten to see quite a few interesting things in my time. I've also had the good fortune of being able to visit many friends and family members over the course of my driving days that I otherwise would not have gotten to see.

It's a bit isolating

You're away from home several weeks at a time. You drive about 10 hours and do some work for another four, and by the end of the day, you're tired and just want to sleep. Weeks can go by without you noticing. It's hard to have a lot of friends, unless you already made them before you started driving, and if you live someplace like Florida, where you don't get to go very often, then you don't get to see them. I happen to have family and friends scattered all around the country, but if you've got all your eggs in one basket, you'll never see them but once every month or two.

And unless you've got someone to take care of your affairs while you're on the road, you're going to get behind on your bills too.

There is variety

There are different types of driving jobs. There are local drivers who are home every night. It's not much different than any other job, except you drive a truck.

There are regional drivers, who stay within a few states and are home on the weekends.

And then there are the OTR drivers, who drive all over the country and only get home once every month or two. This one is the roughest on your social life, but it also gives you the best opportunity to see things you've never seen before.

Overall
Okay, so let's break it down. On the bad side, there are stupid people trying to kill you or otherwise make your job harder and more obnoxious than it has to be. It can be a real downer if you focus on it. However, you get a lot of interesting opportunities. You see things you've never seen, wake up to different scenery outside your window every morning, and if you're big on chatting, you encounter thousands of people each year. My first year driving a truck, I saw a dozen family members I hadn't seen since I was little, made a few dozen new friends, saw a few old friends from the Navy, and saw a lot of places few other people get to see. I discovered an awesome chain of Mongolian barbecue restaurants, took pictures of a couple hundred cities in 40 states, explored several towns and cities, and discovered all kinds of interesting tourist spots I can come back to in later years when I have a car.

It's rough some times, but ultimately I feel like I got paid to take a long vacation.

Next time: Next time I'll talk about how to get your start as a trucker, and later, I'll provide some trucker resources, including a list of free wifi locations you can make use of.

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Solar System - Venus

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Things you don't know about the Solar System

I've always found space fascinating, and among my first books was a book about astronomy. It was just a small, general guide that had a number of interesting facts about the solar system and the stars and galaxies. This was 1980 or before, and we've made a LOT of discoveries since then, and I've kept up on it, partly thanks to Ars Technica, the Science Channel, and NASA.

I'm going to present a few curious things to you about what surrounds you that I'll bet you don't know. It's time to discover the hottest planet: Venus.

Known in ancient times as both the Morning Star and the Evening Star, Venus is one of the brightest objects in the sky. When Galileo turned his telescope upon it, he discovered that it went through phases, just like the Moon. It does this because it's closer to the Sun than we are - Mercury also goes through phases, but the outer planets do not.

Better telescopes revealed that Venus was about the same size as Earth, and that it was covered in clouds. It gained the name of Earth's Twin, or even Sister Planet, because of this. It was believed for a long time that with it being of similar size and with clouds that it was probably like Earth, only warmer. When space probes finally reached it, they discovered it was just about the worst place you could be! The temperature was over 800 degrees - hotter than Mercury even though it's twice as far away from the Sun! - and the atmosphere was crushing - 90 times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere - and it was mostly carbon dioxide, plus the winds were constantly howling at supersonic speeds and the clouds were too thick for much light to get to the surface.

It wasn't until we started turning our radars on the planet that we made an interesting discovery: Venus rotates backwards! Very slowly! They also discovered something else: Venus always points the same face at Earth.

Okay, that's not precisely true; here’s a more accurate statement: When Venus is closest to the Earth, it always points the same face at Earth. Because Venus is so covered in clouds that we can’t ever see the surface, except by bouncing radar signals off it, we didn’t know this until fairly recently.

Some of you may be aware that Venus rotates “backwards”, or “retrograde”. The Earth and most other solar-system bodies, when viewed from above the North Pole, spin counter-clockwise, but Venus spins clockwise instead. The Sun, if it was visible from Venus’ surface, would go from west to east.

Venus needs 225 Earth-days (about 7.5 months) to revolve around the Sun, and 243 Earth-days (usually listed as -243 days to denote that it rotates backwards) (about 8 months) to rotate 360 degrees. Its “day” is a little longer than its “year”.

Because it takes Venus 2/3 of an Earth-year to rotate, and about that long for Venus to go around the Sun, Venus comes closest to Earth in the same part of the sky every 2 Earth-years. In this time, Venus has gone around the Sun 3 times and also had three full “days”. The same side of Venus is always facing toward Earth when the two approach!

Future study of the planet is likely to reveal that this is not a coincidence, but rather that there is probably a concentration of mass on Venus that Earth “grabs onto”, in much the same way as the near-side of the Moon is heavier than the far side. Over billions of years, Earth’s gravity grabbed hold of these mass concentrations and caused both Venus and the Moon to always face this way on a regular basis. Chances are good that in its past, Venus rotated much like Earth does, then got hit by something big enough to cause it to slow down enough for Earth to grab hold of it and create this interesting 3-to-2 resonance.

I'm going to tell you one more interesting thing about Venus that you don't know: It's possible to live there without terraforming it. How? I'm glad you asked!

You know that Earth's atmosphere is about 100 miles thick, right? And that the higher you go, the thinner the air is, right? The same is true of other planets. Even though the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times that of Earth, a few dozen miles above that there is a point where it's a lot closer to Earth-normal pressure. By living in what amounts to giant balloons, we could build floating habitats - not much different from living in ships, which we do all the time here on Earth. The conditions in this band are a lot less hostile. The temperatures are better, and the clouds and storms are at a lower level, so it's calmer too. Plus, it's a lot easier to gather sunlight! It might even rain real water up there!

Okay, that's all I've got from Venus for you. Later!

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Further reading to whet your appetite for knowledge:
Solar System - Earth
Solar System - Mercury
To Your Health - Part 2

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You Might not Know how to Write in the English Language

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 Things you Might not Know

In my travels about the Earth, I have uncovered various truths. It seems there are a lot of people out there who aren’t aware that they don’t know how to drive, or that they don’t know the value of a dollar, or various other Earth-shattering problems. To help regular folks find out if they know this or not, I created some questionnaires so my friends and fans could find out if they are afflicted with these dangerous or inconvenient problems. We’re all often blind to our own problems, right? So take these tests to find out yours.

You Might not Know how to Write in the English Language

1. Have you ever used “should of”, “could of”, or “would of” when you meant “should’ve”, “could’ve”, or “would’ve”? (Double points for this question.)

2. Do you refuse to use any sort of punctuation, so that your readers have to guess where sentences begin and end?

3. Are you a stranger to lower case letters?

4. Are you a stranger to upper case letters?

5. Do you use apostrophes to denote all your plurals?

6. Do you shun the use of the ENTER key, or perhaps use it for just about every sentence?

7. Have you ever used “quote marks” to denote emphasis, rather than underlining, bolding, or italicizing?

8. Are you unaware that when used in that way, quote marks are being interpreted as Yarights? As in, “No” dumping gets read as “yeah, right, go ahead and dump”.

9. Do you despair that handwritten signs don’t come with spell-checkers?

10. Have you ever misspelled “school” when painting it on a road?

11. Do you not know the difference between your, you’re, and yore?

12. How about to, too, and two?

13. Or accept and except?

14. Or they’re, there, and their?

15. Perhaps affect and effect confuse you?

16. Are you frequently accused of being dyslexic, while ACTUAL dyslexics go unnoticed?

17. Have you ever used the word “literally” as an exclamation rather than to denote that something you were saying actually happened and was not just a clever turn of phrase?

18. Would your English teacher cry if she knew how many times you answered yes to these questions?

Scoring

0             Excellent! You probably know how to write in English.

1-2         Please ask your English teacher to smack you upside the head and then teach you what you slept through the first time.

3+          Please refrain from all written communication without a paid transcriptionist assisting you.

Here's a few language tools to help you out.