Comments | soopageek: orientation, or being entertained by dead children

soopageek

orientation, or being entertained by dead children

Mar 30, 2010 19:29

I'm beginning to suspect that the high turnover rate in the trucking industry has nothing to do with traditional variables like job satisfaction or fickle drivers, but that it is linked to the pure fucking entertainment value of new driver orientation. It's full of unique characters, bizarre occurrences, and everything is on the company dime. I ( Read more... )

trucking, work

Comments 12

stormodacentury March 31 2010, 00:54:19 UTC

My favorite driver safety video was the one on backing & parking.

It was narrated & presented by an Asian woman.

I've still never figured out exactly how one is supposed to check their brake adjustment alone. I mean, should you just readjust them daily? I know I can tell once brakes are really really out of adjustment (and adjust them), but I don't think there's any way I'd notice only a slight difference.

soopageek March 31 2010, 01:55:20 UTC

Was she heavily accented? Because that would just make it even funnier.

As for brake adjustments, hell if I know. That's what shop mechanics are for.

stormodacentury March 31 2010, 10:16:27 UTC

See, that's the thing that gets me. I've yet to find anyone who could tell me how the hell one person is supposed to check brake adjustments without just re-setting them.

I was taught quickly in driving school, but never did it (and forgot how) until we had a truck with bad automatic adjusters over the last year or so. It got to the point where they needed to be adjusted about every other time truck went out, and our mechanics are busy guys, so I had one of them show me so we didn't have to wait for one of them to be available.

lossfound April 1 2010, 10:07:34 UTC

YOKO ONO PRESENTS: SAFE DRIVE TRUCK

resonant March 31 2010, 00:57:03 UTC

I still can't understand why everything doesn't travel in container by rail with short-haul truckers only covering the last few dozen kilometers. You'd get to sleep at home every night that way.

soopageek March 31 2010, 02:12:51 UTC

With containers, you now need two of everything to move a single load of freight: two tractors, two trailer chassis, and two drivers - one at each end - plus the train in between. Not to mention all of the cranes and infrastructure needed to run a container yard. A few dozen kilometers is what, about 30 miles? You'd need all of this multimillion dollar machinery, man power, and logistics basically... everywhere.

stormodacentury March 31 2010, 10:13:48 UTC

Yeah, that's the other thing - it only works where there's rail lines. And while there are a lot of rail lines, there are a lot of places that there aren't rail lines, too. And rail isn't the quickest way to get a load somewhere.

democritus March 31 2010, 01:19:26 UTC

RED ASPHALT! Man, reminds me of high school driver's training videos. I bet, if you could collect all those videos, you'd have a good blog right there.

Sounds like you were the last man standing, good on you! :)

soopageek March 31 2010, 02:14:08 UTC

I tried to webcam about 5 minutes of one of them but the audio is so bad and I've had trouble re-encoding it down to a manageable size for sharing online.

intendent March 31 2010, 11:48:49 UTC

I wonder why Phillip left..

But, hey, make sure you wear a polyester suit when you go kid killing.

lossfound April 1 2010, 10:10:05 UTC

i learn something new every day. and to think i never knew the meaning of broken blood vessels at the nose-tip. now i'm running through my mental photo albums trying to remember all the dudes i've met who've had that.

i would LOVE to cover the kid-killing country song. you have to get your hands on those videos, dude. did you catch the titles? maybe they come up on eBay.

i do know a few of the truly horrific high school drivers' ed movies from the 50s and 60s have ended up online. they were pretty hardcore, especially for the period! plus, the moustaches!

soopageek April 1 2010, 14:02:51 UTC

As much as we were left unattended, I probably could've shoved my thumb drive into the computer and grabbed all the movies if I had thought about it; they were all digitized and simply played with VLC and projected onto a screen. Of course, had I been caught it probably wouldn't have looked good to have a new employee trying to swipe training videos off the computer. I don't remember the company that produced the videos.

While I'm sure there are other reasons that can cause it, the broken blood vessels in the nose is the reason why the caricatures of a drunk (think golden era Warner Bros, W.C. Fields, cartoon editorials, etc.) is that of a man with a bulbous red nose.