Typical Day

Typical Day

Okay, forget the notion of mornings at 7:00AM and evenings at 6:00PM. They don't exist for truckers. Truckers drive odd hours and prefer driving in the wee hours. No traffic. No cops. No hassles. They can zip along the highways and get to where they need to go. Life is free and easy with the windows down and the wind blowing through their ha…across their scalp.

Sure, it can be lonely, but there are cell phones and music services and trucker stops along the way where hardcore truckers can share stories of the road and argue optimal oil viscosities for their monster engines.

Wily Willie Wheelie works for Greedy Jerks R Us, Inc. They hired him during boom economic times right out of high school; they trained him, took them under their wing, and taught him the ropes. His parents were so proud—Wily Willie had been hanging out with rougher and rougher crowds, and they worried he'd end up in jail, or shot…or worse, a Libertarian.

So when GJRU gave him a salary and minimal mile targets to hit, his parents were thrilled. He could pay his bills and "get some real world experience," as his father, a mechanic, liked to say.

WWW had an uneventful first two years. He took every shift offered to him, made some extra money from overtime, and the days sort of evaporated. Like...a "day," or at least a typical one, doesn't exist. His life revolves around delivery missions more than the sun.

So he thinks about his life in typical units:

• Show up at main truck depot hub in the far outskirts of town at 6:00PM.

• Watch the tractors load the truck he was taking with...whatever.

• Take a good luck walk around the truck to inspect everything from its tires to the oil to the way in which the toys were loaded.

• Print a paper copy of the Google map to the destination.

• Be sure cell phone battery charger is in the car; suitcase is loaded; extra underwear —it'll be a hot run to Texas, this trip.

• And then, by 7:00PM, as traffic is dying, he starts on his 1,400-mile journey.

WWW has a handy-dandy calculator which he mastered his third time through Algebra 1 in high school. He plugs in a predicted speed average of seventy miles an hour over 1,400 miles and realizes that it'll be a twenty-hour mission. If he drives it straight through, he'll show up in Galveston at 11:00PM—the toy store would be totally closed.

So driving twenty hours straight doesn't make any sense. It'll be a long sit anyway, and he's only moderately rested. He always tries to get in a good nap or three before a mission, but his body doesn't adjust all that fast and he knows he'll be groggy at some point.

So he decides that he'll make this mission easy on himself and just drive halfway or so. He wants to show up at the toy store at 7:00AM—early enough to avoid traffic around the city central of Galveston (not that it's NYC or anything), and he wants to be sure he's there so that he'll be the first (ish) truck on the loading dock. He also wants to avoid the Texas summer heat as much as possible, so this schedule made sense.

Poking through his map, he notes the forty-seven rest stops that he's visited in the past. The best ones—with actual heated water in the showers—are starred in yellow in his little rest stop diary. This is countered by black stars around bad experiences he's had in rest stops; he prefers to avoid rest stop diarrhea.

He'll drive twelve hours and sleep from 7:00AM the following morning until 6:00PM, and then drive all night to finish the leg to Galveston and hit his time targets. Easy.

And since WWW's produced good results in the past (meaning no red flags, no problems, no tickets, no accidents), he gets the nicer truck this time. It has its own mini satellite dish for TV (when he isn't driving, of course), back-up camera, and programmable jukebox horn.

The big new thing for WWW is that he's was now a trainer class driver. WWW, at twenty-one years old, is now able to take new drivers under his wing, and this trip will be his first as a trainer. He simply has to sit in the passenger seat and direct his trainee in...driving. And this trainee will only drive with him for about 140 miles—or about two hours—he'll then be dropped at a different truck rest stop along the edge of the highway, where another trainer would work with him.

For the pleasure of training, WWW gets an extra dime a mile on top of the money he's already making. And this way, there's at least some company to gab with. Makes life easier.

WWW drives on, and the days continue to blend into one. As he drives, he thinks to himself that it might be nice to go home one of these days.