The Humorous Side of Trucking

By Buck Boylan

This book contains sixteen short humorous stories about a laid off steelworker and his career as a truck driver. The book begins with a look back at truck driving school of which he attended. He recalls his real life learning experiences on how to be a professional tractor trailer driver with very little guidance beginning as a local driver, then hitting the open road as a long haul driver. His unflappable quest of living on a houseboat and scuba diving for extra money fuel his interesting life style. There are many practical lessons of determination and sheer will power to overcome life's obstacles with a sense of humor. For information about "The Humorous Side of Trucking", please go to https://buckboylan.com/.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781682890554

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The Humorous Side of Trucking

Buck Boylan

Copyright © 2018 Buck Boylan

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-68289-054-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64424-691-7 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68289-055-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Funny Trucking School Days

It was Friday, four o’clock in the evening. I heard the mailman close the squeaky mailbox lid on the front porch. I waited for him to get into his car and drive away. After smoking a Camel cigarette, I dashed to the money (mail) box. There were only two envelopes, one white and one tan. The tan envelope contained my last unemployment check of the year from Bethlehem Steel. The second envelope, white in color, held a date with lady luck. Yes, this letter contained a tuition free voucher to a local tractor-trailer school. I started jumping up and down with joy, and so did my beautiful blonde-haired biker girlfriend. I had put in three applications to local trucking schools, and this one in Laurel, Maryland, said yes! I was to start school promptly 9:00 a.m. , on Monday, and Maryland’s Department of Unemployment and Retraining was going to pick up the entire tab! I felt like I just got a ticket to see America and get paid every mile I travel! I called all my family members and told them my good news. I was so excited I told my neighbor’s dog. Yes, sir. This school will give me a job forever!

I sprang out of bed early Monday morning, ready to drive a Big Rig. I drove thru the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel and paid the toll with a free toll ticket from those friendly folks at the Department of Unemployment. Half the way to my new school, I stopped at an Amoco gas station for twenty gallons of fuel for my F-150 Ford Pick-Up truck. My local unemployment office paid for the fuel! I stopped at McDonald’s for a large coffee and an Egg Mc’Muffin of which, you guessed it, paid for with my daily lunch money from those very friendly folks at my state Unemployment office. See, I told you, lady luck was in that white envelope!

I arrived at truck school about 8:45 a.m.. Turning on to the property, I saw two signs, one sign for student parking and one sign for staff parking. The student’s parking lot was full of motorcycles, pickup trucks, and hot rod cars. The staff parking lot was filled with new Cadillac’s and Corvette’s. In the far left corner of the parking lot was a new twin propeller airplane with its wings removed sitting on a gooseneck lowboy tractor-trailer. My first thought was, Man, these instructors are rich.

The school had three large two-story redbrick buildings and six well-lit, well-painted asphalt driver-training ranges. The place looked just like the schools brochures that were taped to my refrigerator door.

As soon as I parked my pickup truck and laid eyes on my fellow students, I started laughing out loud. Assembled around the guard dog cage were ten students feeding hamburgers, French fries, and breakfast sausage to a friendly Doberman pincher puppy. Assembled around a second, guard dog cage were about six laughing students. Inside the ten-foot high fence was an old, gray faced, Doberman pincher doing corny dog tricks for burgers. He would stand on his hind legs and beg. That was when the breakfast burgers came flying in. If the guard dogs are this nice, the school administrators must be just as nice!

I followed my handwritten directions to the Admission Office and grabbed a seat in a conference room filled with twenty-five potential truck drivers.

The very first person we met was Ms. Flowers. She was a fluffy hair blonde bombshell. She slowly walked into the conference room wearing a leopard skin, double-breasted jacket with a very short skirt, and four-inch spike heels. She walked past us without saying a word. Instead of standing at the podium, she sat on the edge of the large round table in the front of the room. She slowly and gracefully sat on the desktop. The clipboard she carried cleverly hid her shapely legs. She handed out some legal forms for us to fill out. Donna was so attractive that filling out our names and Social Security numbers were difficult. We all thought she was our driving instructor. Wrong. She was the wife of the owner of the trucking school. He had a new Corvette and a new airplane, which was parked on his private parking lot. Anyway, after two hours of botched paper work, she hopped off the desk. She wiggled and she giggled, then she disappeared into the new black corvette. We never saw her again.

After Ms. Flowers left the conference room, the air-conditioning seemed to begin working again. That is when we were introduced to one of our new driving instructors. The door opened abruptly and in came, GI Joe. He was wearing full US Army camouflage uniform. He marched up to the front of the room. He grabbed a piece of white chalk and wrote his name on the green chalk board. Sergeant Taylor. He looked in the eyes of the curious twenty-five students and barked, You will do what I say, when I say it! Do you understand? Then he assumed a parade rest stance in a strict military fashion. Everyone stood up and started saluting and laughing. With a very serious voice he yelled, How many people here have been in the US Military? No one raised his or her hand. Again he yelled, How many people here are in the US Military Reserves? The group became quiet; no one raised their hand. Then from the back of the room Tom yelled, Hey, Gomer Pyle, are you going to teach us how to drive trucks, or are you going to teach us how to pitch pup tents? Everyone started laughing and saluting again. We all had a jolly laugh. Then the serious, square jawed leatherneck cracked a smile and said, OK, I will be friendly to all of you, Maryland civilians. Just don’t call me GI Joe.

On the second day of school we met two more driving instructors, Tex and Slick. Tex came into our classroom. CLOMP! CLOMP! CLOMP! Was the sound of his custom-made cowboy boots as they echoed off the polished tile floor. His tan Stetson hat was brand-new, and so was his black leather vest. Tex passed out a sheet of paper asking us to write down our tractor-trailer driving experiences. All twenty-five students wrote NONE on their papers. Then Tex rubbed both of his eyes with the palm of his hands. Then he asked, Who knows what is a Jake Brake, a Power Divider or a Quadruplex Transmission? No one knew what those words meant, and we did not have a dictionary handy either. Then with a smile on his disbelieving face, he asked, Who knows the difference between a chicken coup (a police barracks on a truck scale) and a chicken ranch (a brothel). Again no one said a word. I leaned back in my chair and thought to myself, Tomorrow I must carry a trucker’s only dictionary. After meeting Tex and asking questions all morning, we went to lunch.

Afternoon break was over, and it was time to meet our third and final driving instructor. Slick was his name. Slick walked up to the podium and addressed the new class. As he started to speak, some people laughed aloud, and some students placed their hands in front of them to hide their smirked faces. Good old Slick was wearing a black silk Italian suit, with matching black leather shoes. As he began to speak his three gold capped front teeth started to sparkle. He spoke with a terrible lisp! While he spoke you could hear the air rush between his chiseled teeth. Some guy sitting in the back row of the meeting room yelled, How did you get your name? Then Slick put both hands on his slender hips and said, I will tell you how I got my nick name, but you must promise not to laugh. Well, I was in a truck stop just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he told the class. I dashed into a desperately needed public bathroom. I noticed the floor was wet and slippery. The scent of cleaning supplies such as ammonia and bleach stunned my nose and eyes. I was in a stall, pulling my pants up and turning around after doing my business. That is when my feet slid out from underneath of me. I landed on to the wet slippery floor bruising my left kneecap. Within the blink of an eye, somehow my left shoulder hit the floor, my head snapped forward causing it to be firmly stuck between the black magic marker graffiti covered wall with long brown stains which covered a solid gray block bathroom wall and the smooth sided, cold, porcelain commode. To make matters worse, my right hand hit the toilet handle and the polluted water was over flowing out of the bowl. I became covered with the horrible smell of poop and pee. It was terrible, he said with a showering lisp. Everyone laughed and laughed. He ended his story fast by telling us the fire department arrived in the bathroom and poured three pounds of clear acrylic axle grease on his wet stinky head. Three firemen dressed in their rain gear pulled on my feet and slowly and painfully, slid me away from the cascading toilet water. Then I was rescued! There were twenty-five burley guys crowed into the bathroom laughing and elbowing each other. Everyone was looking my knee slapping humors situation and calling started calling me SLICK HEAD." By the time the class stopped laughing, the school day was over.

We spent the rest of our school days on a well-organized schedule. Half a day was spent in the classroom, and the other half of the day were spent driving big trucks.

There were twenty-five students in each classroom setting filled with men and woman of every background and color. Everyone got along very well. We watched movies about truck safety, log books, and freight handling. We had workbooks about the heavy responsibilities of being a professional driver. We learned about the financial end of trucking. Some sessions talked about how to budget our money while living on the road as a company driver or becoming an Owner Operator as compared to become a Lease Operator, which was discussed at great length. Our driving instructors spent one whole class talking about bankruptcy and how to avoid it. During the classroom phase of our training we learned a lot about map reading, which was very helpful. Practical examples of map reading are route numbers like I-95 or RT.13 are odd numbers, which go north and south. Route numbers Like RT-40, RT-80, and RT-90 are even numbers, which travel east and west; and routes that have three numbers like 695, 495 or 295 are usually beltway spurs or a road, which leads you, back to the original two digit route numbers. Logbook training took several days, which were filled with complicated laws and hand-drawn charts. Next, we learned what to do in case of a chemical spill. We ended our classroom training learning mechanical stuff about a tractor-trailer. The names of air brakes, diesel motor parts, and complicated trailer parts were soon used