DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour   al@motorwayamerica.com

As stated many times during my term of community service writing these columns I have always been fascinated by over-the-road trucks. I live in a part of the Midwest (Detroit-area) that is chockablock (what the hell kind of word is that, anyway?) with trucks — both those going to and from Canada and those dropping off components and filling up with machines to be delivered all over this land.

Some are unique by their colorful liveries. Others by where in the country — or even hemisphere they’re from. But today, as I was driving to downtown Detroit to attend an automotive luncheon, I noticed something that would make a Billy Goat puke. Tooling along in the right-hand lane of I-75 was what I thought was an 18-wheeler. It was a beautiful dark blue and looked really shiny. However, as I got closer I noticed something wasn’t right. This was no 18-wheeler, it was a, well ah, well, a 14-wheeler??!!

I’m not a religious man but what were the truck gods thinking when they gave someone the inspiration to create one tire where there would normally be a pair?

Instead of double-truck axles (tandem axles to you ignorant pipe-smoking brie-eaters who don’t know jack about trucks) there are the two tires in the front…and two axles with one tire on each side of the axle. It’s making me wretch just trying to describe this! Add these to the normal twin axles on the trailer with double tires at each end and no matter how you count it the total is 14.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of the truck-driving cowboy who flies these trucks. We’ll create a driver we’ll call “Bud.” Bud was born and raised in the hills of Kentucky. He grew up eating squirrels and possum, washing it down with his Uncle Charlie’s home brew.

After about the fourth grade Bud stopped going to school regular and helped out at the family farm, watering the weeds and rocks that grew there. While Bud didn’t have a lot of book-learning he could drive a big-rig truck like he was born with a 16-speed Road Ranger in his hand. By the time he was 14 his left leg was the size of a sequoia tree from the thousands upon thousands of times he worked the clutch of his Uncle Cletus’s Brockway twin-screw diesel.

Eventually Bud earns his commercial driver’s license and gets a full-time job driving 18-wheelers for the Clem Brocius Cartage Company of Paducah, Kentucky. Life is good for Bud. He’s making big money, earning respect as a senior captain of a tractor-trailer while barely in his mid-20s and known by Lot Lizards from coast-to-coast. He’s even been known to shout out in passion, “I’m an 18-Wheeler Truck Drivin’ Man.”

But then one day Bud shows up at the depot to pick up his load and his new rig he’d earned from having driven 20 million accident-free miles the previous year when what does he see but a new K-Whopper (Kenilworth, for you sushi-eating liberals from Groton, Connecticut) with four, huge SINGLE-WHEEL tires in the rear of the truck! Bud thinks he’s got to be seeing things, takes out his flask and proceeds to have a long pull of his old family friend’s mixture (Mr. Daniels and Mr. Cola) and looks again.

The scenery hasn’t changed. He storms into dispatch and asks what in the Sam-hell has happened to his ride? The chief dispatcher proudly tells Bud that he’s the first one in the company who is going to driving the new look of the corporation, 6-wheeler cabs instead of the traditional 10. His truck is sporting the new Hankook 50-ply industrial truck tires that will revolutionize the way trucks are equipped for over-the-road driving. Bud runs behind the driver’s latrine and throws up for a solid four minutes. Half the stuff that came up he never remembered eating.

Once he calms down he figures he owes it to the company and to his boss, Clem, who taught him to write-up log books with the same aplomb as JK Rowling pumps out Harry Potter novels. How else would he be able to drive an average of 21 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year with his only days off being Christmas and Jim Beam’s birthday?

So he leaves the freight yard and hits the interstate. As he hits his usual cruising speed of 80 mph he starts to notice horn-honkings from the trucks he’s passing. Occasionally he would look at the cabs and noticed that every time he passed one of the rigs the driver would obviously be laughing. At first he attributed this to the assumption the drivers were listening to Raw Dog Comedy on satellite radio. But then a few started pointing at him while laughing and then it hit him, they were laughing at the emasculation of one of the country’s most famous drivers.

Fully aware of what his future would be now that those who witnessed his new ride had no doubt put on the airwaves to be on the lookout for a 14-wheeled-sissypants, sadly, Bud pulled off the interstate into a rest area, parked his rig and cut the power. He mentally said his good-byes to those he loved and whom he figured loved him, reached into his tool bin and found an ax. Since his left leg was so muscular that nothing shorts of a harpoon thrown by the legendary Queequeg could pierce it he chopped it off and committed suicide by beating himself to death with the severed leg.

The moral of this story is easy; you trucking executives should be careful how you mess with the dignity of America’s heroes of the highway. Please stop thinking only of the bottom line when it comes to purchasing fleets. Single-wheeled truck tires may save thousands of dollars over the course of a lease, consider what you’ve done to your most valuable assets – your drivers.

You’re subliminally telling them that they might as well wear pink tutus instead of jeans and “Who Farted” T-shirts. Oh, the inhumanity of it all!!!!