Hauling Secrets

The other day I saw this little display someone had made on the counter at the scrapyard.  I thought it was an amusing response to Anystate’s recent ban on the practice of using bait to attract deer.

Trying not to be seen, since scrapyard and landfill operators usually don’t allow photographs of their operations, I took out my phone as I journeyed up the side of the landfill on a nice sunny day and captured these shots:

Sorry, that’s my finger in the last one.  From the top of this mountain of trash, on a clear day, you can see the next city 40 miles away.

Handyman and I loaded a truck full of car seats from a testing agency’s storage unit and came across this little crash-test-dummy child:

The creepy thing is that they make real crash-test-dummies to be about the same weight as a normal person would be, so that when I picked this one up, it felt like I was picking up a real boy.  A real boy in two pieces.

Yes, that is - was - a large bag full of shit, and yes, that is my tire tread that went right through the middle of it.  How did so much shit get stuffed into a shopping bag?  Your guess is as good as mine.
Sometimes I think I should just never look down towards the floor at the MRF.  I don’t want to know what’s there.  Thenagain, I don’t want to step in it either.

So I turned 30 the other day.  I hauled all day.  A long, tiring day.

Around the middle of the day, I pulled up to the little shed at the Recycle Station where people hauling recyclables pay their fees and fill out paperwork.  I did what I sometimes do when no one is waiting in line behind me and I cut my engine to relax for a minute and talk to the person in the shed.  That way the person inside doesn’t have to smell my truck’s diesel fumes, and we can hear each other better.  The way my work day is (when we’re not in a mad rush) you really get to treasure these little interactions with familiar faces, even if it’s just a minute of small talk. Both of us are doing what amounts to customer service all day, and when you see someone you know, you can have a little break from being ‘on’ all the time.

Most of the time, and this time, the person working the shed is Shirley.  Even though she’s been working there longer than anyone, she always has some kind of trouble with the cash machine.  It’s cute. This time was no exception.  So as she fumbles with the machine, apologizing, I decide to share with her that I’m turning thirty today.  She stops what she’s doing to turn to me and say “Congratulations” in a way that doesn’t seem more significant than anyone else registering my big two-number-change that day.  “Thanks,” I say, putting my fists up in a little mock celebration: “I made it!”

She asks me why I’m working on my birthday and I say that I don’t really care enough to think to take the day off ahead of time.  As we exchange the rest of the usual chit-chat, she laboriously punches keys on the machine and finally gets it to print out a receipt for me to sign.  “Sorry,” she says as she hands it to me, rubbing her glazed-over eyes.  “It’s one of those mornings.”

So I sign the receipt and go on my way, and it’s only after I go through the warehouse and finish dropping off my stuff that I realize what a profound mistake I’ve just made talking to Shirley.  I’d completely forgotten what I’d heard a few months earlier - that Shirley’s son had recently committed suicide.

He was about to turn 30.  I realize now that Shirley might have been forcing back tears when she rubbed her eyes, that it wasn’t just the usual fumbling that had slowed her down just then.

So I pull the truck back around, get out, and walk up to the window of the shed.  Shirley’s inside, sitting, smoking a cigarette.

“I’m an asshole” is all I can think to offer.  She returns me a dazed look.  “Your son,” I clarify.  She puts out the cigarette and comes to the window. I stammer some kind of apology about saying “I made it” when not everyone does, while she listens and shakes her head, telling me that it’s okay.  After a minute we’re both crying.  Then she takes both my hands, squeezes them, leans forward and says, “Let me tell you something.  You have so much ahead of you.”

That’s probably what she didn’t have a chance to tell her son.

I didn’t really know what to say except “Thank you.”  She squeezed my hands again and thanked me back, and we froze there for a second until a truck pulled up to the shed and interrupted our moment.  We pulled away from each other and I got back into my truck and went on my way.

And now every time I pull up to the Recycle shed, the small talk never seems quite as small as it used to.

I had to get a physical to renew the license I need to drive the hauling trucks. As I sat in the waiting room, it occurred to me to actually read the fine print on the form they handed me.  Under the heading “Physical Qualifications for Drivers”, there was a section called “The Driver’s Role” which did a nice summary of some of the physical as well as the emotional stresses truck drivers face.  I’m reprinting it here for your reading pleasure:

Responsibilities, work schedules, physical and emotional demands, and lifestyles among commercial drivers vary by the type of driving that they do. Some of the main types of drivers include the following: turn around or short relay (drivers return to their home base each evening), long relay (drivers drive 8-10 hours and then have an 8-hour off-duty period), straight through haul (cross country drivers); and team drivers (drivers share the driving by alternating their 4-hour driving periods and 4-hour rest periods). The following factors may be involved in a driver’s performance of duties: abrupt schedule changes and rotating work schedules, which may result in irregular sleep patterns and a driver beginning a trip in a fatigued condition; long hours; extended time away from family and friends, which may result in lack of social support; tight pickup and delivery schedules, with irregularity in work, rest, and eating patterns, adverse road, weather and traffic conditions, which may cause delays and lead to hurriedly loading or unloading cargo in order to compensate for the lost drive time; and environmental conditions such as excessive vibration, noise, and extremes in temperature. Transporting passengers or hazardous materials may add to the demands on the commercial driver. There may be duties in addition to the driving task for which a driver is responsible and needs to be fit. Some of these responsibilities are: coupling and uncoupling trailer(s) from the tractor, loading and unloading trailer(s) (sometimes a driver may lift a heavy load or unload as much as 50,000 lbs. of freight after sitting for a long period of time without any stretching period); inspecting the operating condition of tractor and trailer(s) before, during, and after delivery of cargo; lifting, installing, and removing heavy tire chains; and, lifting heavy tarpaulins to cover open top trailers. The above tasks demand agility, the ability to bend and stoop, the ability to maintain a crouching position to inspect the underside of the vehicle, frequent entering and exiting of the cab, and the ability to climb ladders on the tractor and/or trailer(s). In addition, a driver must have the perceptual skills to monitor a sometimes complex driving situation, the judgment skills to make quick decisions, when necessary, and the manipulative skills to control an oversize steering wheel, shift gears using a manual transmission, and maneuver a vehicle in crowded areas.

So next time you see a truck with its blinker on, give it some room to merge. The person driving it has probably had a rough day. Watch after they merge and you just might see a ‘thank you’ flash from its tail lights.

Wonder Boy and I did a job the other day for this old guy with a trailer full of stuff.  The guy said he was having carpet installed, and you could tell that he had put the things that had been scattered on the floor up onto every possible countertop or surface in order to “clear” the area.  It smelled, too, a smell I don’t think new carpet could have remedied.  The man seemed slightly embarrassed about it, but in a strange way, as if he was too tired of being embarrassed to really care anymore.

At one point the man was standing there supervising my bundling of some things he had laying in a pile against a wall.  Among the things were about fifteen back-of-door hanging mirrors, on which he noted there had been a “really good sale”.  I thought he was just being funny, but then, as I grabbed a handful of things, he stated matter-of-factly: “Agent Orange.”

At first I thought he was referring to something in the pile, so I pointed to something or other and asked “You mean that?”  No reply.  I pointed out something else, and again no reply.  Finally I said “What, you mean the whole pile?”  And finally he explained:

“Yup, Agent Orange.  Makes you crazy.”

Not knowing quite how to respond, and my hands now full with the bundle of mirrors or whatever I had been gathering, I headed over to load it into the truck.  On my way I noticed some old camo fatigues in a closet and a calendar with an ‘X’ on every Thursday of the month.  Next to each ‘X’ were the words “NO SHOT.”
I assumed this meant that he recieved a shot on every day not marked - meaning almost every single day.

According to Wikipedia’s Agent Orange entry, when some US veterans obtained a settlement from the US government for its use of this highly toxic herbicide and defoliant, most affected veterans received a one-time lump sum of $1200.  Yep, $1200.  Enough to buy a whole store full of mirrors.

As we were wrapping up the job, closing our truck doors and pushing in our ramp, the man called out from the deck of his trailer and echoed what veterans groups whose government “is just waiting for us all to die” have been saying for at least 25 years.  He said:

“Now you know what happens to vets.  They just sit at home making rat’s nests.”

What do haulers do when our trucks break down?

Haul them to the scrapyard with another truck, of course.

Usually having to use elevators is a pain for a hauler. Sure, they make things easier, but they also slow things down. But the other day was different. Handyman and I were entrusted with unsupervised operation of the oldest working elevator in the state. You know, the kind you can get to stop between floors. I took this video with my cell phone, to share the experience with you, Dear Readers:

[Apologies for the recent lack of posts - I got really busy with other work and have gone down to one day a week of hauling.  It’ll pick back up again soon, though.]

I often find myself backing the truck into the MRF and stepping out into what we call “MRF sludge”. It’s the leachate that the city trucks empty out onto the floor after they’ve emptied their trucks of residential trash. The collective drippings of thirty to forty compacted cubic yards of municipal solid waste. And it gets slippery.

The other day I spied this sad teddy bear lying in a pool of MRF sludge:

And I had to take a picture after I almost slipped and fell into this bag filled with deer carcass:

To make it as a hauler, you have to be able to just ignore what’s always being ground into your shoes/gloves/soul.  And some people just can’t.