A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  As luck would have it, he asked that I come to his office the next day to patch up differences with the fellow who’d caused me to leave in the first place. Sure enough, in January 1980, I left Slidell, Louisiana, and went back to work for WMTS; this time, at its brand-new terminal outside Pittsburgh. I was happy to correct a bad mistake. Call it what you may, luck or fate, but trucking allowed me to move to Pittsburgh, where I met and married my lovely wife of thirty-eight years.

  * * *

  1The act of sliding a tandem is uncomplicated enough that a driver can typically perform this maneuver by himself. All that’s necessary is to pull the spring-loaded locking pins to release them, and then get in the trailer, lock the trailer’s brakes to keep them from moving, and drive the rig forward or backward a few feet to move the tandem whatever number of holes is necessary to transfer the weight. If a trailer’s tandems hadn’t been slid in a long time, rust buildup made this more difficult, but still doable.

  Part Five

  Management

  The new WMTS terminal was about five miles from downtown Pittsburgh. The location was perfect in that it was across the street from our largest flatbed shipper—the steel producer that had supported our application for the “operating authority” to carry steel, which, like any other commodity carrying, had to have a shipper as a supporter and be approved by Interstate Commerce Commission.2 It was also within thirty miles of many of the largest steel shippers in the country, and not far from one of our largest van shippers. At the time, Pittsburgh was so rich in steel shippers that it earned its nickname Steel City. Today, there are hardly any left.

  At first, I was a one-man show since I was the only employee at the terminal. I made sales calls, answered phones, accepted freight from steel shippers, and dispatched trucks to pick up loads of steel for delivery in southern states. Our drivers also transported lumber and other building supplies to the Pittsburgh area, and typically made their deliveries when receivers opened in the mornings.

  I was unmarried at the beginning of my time in Pittsburgh (I met my lovely wife there later), and enjoyed driving tractor trailers when it happened that I did not have any drivers, and these situations invariably took place during nighttime hours.

  Many of the late pick-ups were at a steel pipe mill in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, close to thirty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. After signing in at the gate, I would arrive at the shipping dock on time, although, just like all the other trucks, I had to wait a considerable amount of time before being directed to either pull into, or back up into, a specific loading bay.

  In the 1980s, the days of Big Steel, there were fewer restrictions on steelworkers, which meant that loading one truckload of pipes could take anywhere from a half hour if you carried a six-pack of beer to the guys loading your truck and they worked swiftly in return, or four or five hours if you pissed them off or rushed them. Sometimes it took a long time to load a truck because a crew member was on his “sleep shift.” Tenured carriers explained to me that after everyone clocked in for their shift, they alternated spending the entire eight-hour shift sleeping in a makeshift bedroom they had fabricated in an empty, secluded section of the pipe mill.

  I certainly dealt with my fair share of characters at the WMTS Pittsburgh terminal too. One of our owner-operators, Ed, was parked on the yard one afternoon, and was diligently washing and waxing his truck, while waiting to pick up his next load that evening. When he had pulled into the yard earlier, I’d noticed that his tarpaulins were all balled up, rather than being rolled properly into neat bundles. I surmised that he had unloaded at some location that hadn’t had enough room for him to spread out the tarps, thereby making it difficult to properly fold them.

  While I spent the afternoon answering phones and dispatching other drivers, I could observe Ed through the office window as he cleaned his truck. I kept wondering when, or if, he was going to fold his tarps, or if he was going to arrive at his next shipper with his tarps still in mess. Eventually, when he didn’t seem to be ready to do anything about the tarps, I walked down the lot to where he was and politely asked, “Ed. Are you going to leave your tarps that way when you go to the steel mill later?”

  Ed looked at me, grinned and offered, “Damn, man. I was gonna do just that. You must have ESPN!” Maybe he truly did possess ESP, since the network came into existence years later.

  One of the most difficult roles of a terminal manager is to be a disciplinarian, which requires giving the ever-unpopular reprimand. Most drivers are aware, unless they’re missing those pallets, of why they’re getting their ass chewed out, and, truthfully, most ass chewings go pretty well. The times that don’t stick with you.

  One time, I had to speak with a driver who’d been very rude to our largest shipper. Several other drivers had observed the verbal altercation, and all had reported that the driver had been out of line. The driver’s attitude was that the shipper was an asshole, and therefore, it was his right to get in the guy’s face. It was a poor defense and the behavior was inexcusable. I told him I’d have to give him three days off without pay, and if this behavior happened again, we would have to let him go.

  At this, the driver jumped out of his chair, stood up, and shouted, “I ought to just whip your goddamned ass and get it over with!”

  Now, this big, strapping young fellow could have wiped the floor with my ass, seeing that he had about five inches and over one hundred pounds on me, so I replied, “Well, you can probably whip my ass, but when I finally get up, I will still have a job. You, on the other hand, will be in jail, and you will have no job.”

  He pondered this for a few seconds, then said, “Hell, you ain’t worth it!” and slammed the office door on his way out. He ended up taking more than three days off because, thankfully, he found a job driving for another carrier. I’m fairly certain he didn’t join a first-class, upstanding trucking company with strict hiring guidelines, since we didn’t even get a past employer confirmation request from his new company.

  Part of his bad attitude may have had something to do with his tall, gorgeous wife, since I’m pretty sure he thought she was running around on him while he was on the road. Several weeks before I met with him, his wife had come to the office one Friday during the summer to pick up his paycheck. During our brief conversation, she sat in the chair beside my desk, wearing a damned nearly falling off halter top and marvelously flimsy short shorts. She kept crossing, then uncrossing, her legs, and leaning very close to me, which showcased her ample cleavage. If I was a betting man, I would wager all I have that she knew what she had. She certainly knew how to flaunt it. I have always been proud of myself for not succumbing to the unspoken—yet clearly implied—offer from this fine, redneck hussy—but the memory lingers on, and is still quite vivid. What can I say? We truckers love hot weather.

  I left WMTS in the early 1980s and went to work as a terminal manager at another trucking company in Pittsburgh, then worked as the president of a transportation brokerage company for ten years, working in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and Jamestown, North Carolina, and then went back to the first company to work as a terminal manager at their Baltimore terminal.

  While at the second trucking company in Pittsburgh, I met an owner operator named Ralph who one day in May informed me that he was parking his rig because he didn’t drive during the summer. When I inquired of his reason for not working, he told me that he didn’t drive his truck from Memorial Day through Labor Day each year, when “the terrorists are out on the highways.”

  “Terrorists?” I asked.

  His response was very matter-of-fact, and with a straight, serious expression he told me: “Some people call them tourists, but as far as I can tell, they are out to scare the hell out of me, so I consider every damned one of them as a terrorist.” You can’t make this stuff up, and, sure enough, Ralph went back to hauling steel after Labor Day.

  Another memorable oddball, a far less likable fellow,
was a dispatcher I met in Baltimore in the mid-1990s. I’d been at the job a year when our largest steel shipper told me that the dispatcher was not very effective, and wouldn’t accept any dispatch responsibility while I was away from the office. When I counseled the guy, I reminded him that he was in charge of dispatch responsibilities when I was away. I was more than surprised when he said, “I wasn’t aware of that!” He had evidently forgotten that he’d been performing, or was supposed to have been performing, these duties for the past year that I’d been there, and also for at least a year before I arrived.

  I chalked up his odd response to his manner of getting me off his ass, and might have been willing to let things go, assuming he changed his behavior, but then something too abhorrent happened. Upon returning to the office one afternoon, instead of walking in through the front door after parking in front of the building, I dropped my company car off at the mechanic’s bay and then walked through the warehouse and entered the driver’s lounge. Several drivers were hanging out there, awaiting their dispatches, and I bantered with them some and listened to a few of their jokes. After some time had gone by, I went through a door leading to the office hallway.

  As I stepped into the hallway, I heard the dispatcher say, “No, baby. I can’t help you with that because that ain’t my de-PART-ment! . . . Okay, I will have the terminal manager call you.”

  I thought to myself, Oh Lord, please don’t let this have been a conversation with our biggest shipper! When I confronted him, I learned that it had indeed been our biggest shipper, so I placed the call to apologize profusely and had my ass chewed out again.

  Later, when the offending dispatcher arrived for his evening shift, I asked him to follow me out to the yard, so we could talk in private. I began by telling him how disappointed I was by his actions, and that it was totally unacceptable to refer to someone from the shipper’s office as “baby.”

  He got a terribly wounded look on his face, as though I’d slapped him, and asked, “What are you coming down on me for?”

  I let him know I was coming down on him because if I couldn’t get him to do the job correctly, the shipper wanted me to find someone else to work with them. I said many other heated things too, and ended it with, “This is the company’s largest terminal, and we are moving one hell of a lot of freight. When I am away from the office, if you don’t look good, then I don’t look good. And let me tell you, I do like looking good!”

  With that, he hunkered down his shoulders, cocked his head to look up at me, and declared, “I see where you’re coming from! I’m gonna make us all look good!”

  For a while after, he acted like a true dispatching professional, and it made me feel great that our disciplining session had elicited positive results; I even started to feel very comfortable with my managerial acumen. Unfortunately, his professionalism only lasted for about a month. He then got so ornery and belligerent that I ended up firing him.

  After I informed him of his termination, he claimed that the reason I’d fired him was because he was black and I didn’t want a black man to have a dispatch position. I replied that his being black had nothing to do with it, and that I would have fired one of my brothers if he had been as damned sorry a dispatcher as he had been. Our predominantly black driver workforce didn’t agree with the dispatcher’s comments, and most of the drivers told me that that man should have been fired a lot sooner. The guy was certainly a piece of work.

  When I worked at the company’s Baltimore terminal, there was a driver who tested positive for illegal drug use. These tests were standard by then, and given randomly. After a driver gave his urine sample at a testing facility, he could go back to driving while the sample was sent to a lab and analyzed. If a driver tested positive, the testing lab’s medical review officer (MRO) would contact the driver to inquire why the test was positive. The MRO would talk with the driver before contacting the driver’s company.

  Apparently, however, the MRO tried to contact the driver who’d tested positive and couldn’t reach him. The MRO had left messages on the driver’s home phone, and then asked the trucking company to have the driver call him, but the driver did not return the calls. Finally, when the MRO hadn’t been able to reach the driver after an extended period of time, the MRO contacted our safety director, Bill, and told him he urgently needed to speak with the driver. Of course, Bill probably knew the MRO needed to speak with the driver because his drug test was positive.

  The driver’s luck in being able to avoid the MRO ran out a day later when Bill observed the driver getting fuel at a small fuel stop north of Philadelphia. Bill corralled the driver there, and walked him over to a phone booth. He then dialed the MRO’s phone number, handed the handset to the driver, and closed the phone booth door. He then watched the driver get very animated during this call, rapidly gesticulating with his free hand while he was talking. After some time, he opened the door, handed the phone to Bill, and walked back to his truck. Bill could hear the doctor laughing even before the receiver reached his ear. When he asked the MRO what was so funny, the MRO said he’d asked the driver if he could tell him why he’d tested positive for cocaine, and the driver had explained that he’d gone to the dentist the day before his drug test. He said the dentist had to do quite a bit a work on his teeth, and he’d been given a “more than usual” amount of lidocaine. He told the doctor that the lidocaine must still have been in his body at the time of the test, and that this is what caused him to test positive, saying “You know, doc, lidocaine, novocaine, cocaine—they are all in the ‘Caine’ family!”

  Needless to say, the driver was fired, and I have laughed about his excuse for many years.

  During my transportation brokerage days, I had one customer, located on the south side of Pittsburgh, who received truckloads of cut steel sheets from a shipper in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I had found only one carrier capable of handling the majority of the three or four shipments per day, due to the fact that the carrier had at least that many trucks per day delivering very close to Kalamazoo. After the first load, the carrier knew the pick up and delivery information, so all I had to do was call each morning and tell them the number of trucks needed that day, and the carrier would dispatch its drivers.

  The shipper called me one winter morning with the greeting, “What is this horse shit?“ Not sure what horse shit he was referring to, I said, “And good morning to you, too!”

  He was clearly pissed off, and told me he’d nearly had a heart attack when one of the “goddamn flatbeds came here to load, and had horse shit frozen to the fucking bed of the trailer.”

  This was certainly possible because one of the flatbeds was also used to haul horse manure from horse farms in Kentucky to a mushroom farm near Kalamazoo. The product was baled and tarped for this, but I learned that the driver had driven through freezing weather and substantial rains while travelling through Kentucky and Ohio, and that could have caused problems. It turned out that water had seeped in under the tarps and frozen some of the manure onto the flatbed’s floor. Even though the driver unloaded at the mushroom farm, quite a bit of horse shit had stuck to the aluminum floor of his trailer.

  The numbskull driver said that he had not even thought about the fact that the shipper might not want its product loaded on top of his trailer-bed full of horse shit. He reminded me of one of those fellows who might be a bit of a numbskull, or, as we described them, “missing a few pallets.” Eventually, we located a place in Kalamazoo that had a hot-water pressure washer, and the trailer was cleaned and made suitable for loading. The whole incident was a reminder that some fellows you meet in the business are awful, some are outlandish, and some are simply dense.

  * * *

  2This process, by the way, was bullshit, and terribly expensive. It severely restricted competition, but most trucking companies were happy with the status quo, especially the large LTL (less than truckload) carriers, because rates were high and most companies’ profit
s were good. Eventually Congress realized the rules were arcane and passed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, more commonly referred to as “deregulation.” The large trucking companies hated it because before deregulation, they’d enjoyed a monopolistic hold over shippers and could charge higher rates. Shippers, on the other hand, loved deregulation because freight rates practically dropped overnight. Most everyone else liked the fact that it was now possible for small trucking companies to get their feet through a shipper’s front door.

  Part Six

  Directions, Shippers, Strikes, and Baby Animals

  Directions

  Understanding directions can be as challenging for some drivers as taking exams are for some students, and I’ve certainly met my fair share of drivers who were missing pallets in this department. One time, after Joe, a WMTS truck driver, made a delivery of building supplies, he called to tell me he was empty. I asked where he was and heard him ask someone for the name of the establishment where he’d delivered. He then came back on the line and said, “I’m at ABC Supply.”

  “Okay. I meant, what town are you in, Joe?” I asked. His delivery was only 170 miles or so from Baltimore, so I couldn’t imagine he was too off track.

  “Hold on a minute.” There was a pause, and I’m sure he had to ask again. Then, “I’m in Little Creek.”

  “Damn, Joe, I’ve never heard of that one. What state?”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  I heard him ask what state he was in. I was incredulous, but felt sorry for him when I heard uproarious laughter in the background. I suppose ignorance truly is bliss, because Joe came back on the line, and didn’t seem to have a clue-in-hell that those folks were laughing at him. He told me he was in New Jersey.