My husband and I have been married for 23 years. His profession then and now is driving tractor trailer. Shortly after our marriage, he taught me how to drive "big" truck so we could be a team. Over the next 13 years we worked driving truck across country delivering a variety of goods from one side of the country to the other.
We saw the best of the country and the worst of the country. From our vantage point of being above the crowd, we saw people in cars engaged in activities that even today make me shake my head either in awe or incredulousness at their antics.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s it wasn’t cell phones, texting or laptops that people did while driving. It was drinking…party vans going to ball games, drugs…we all know what was big during the disco years, reading…novels, newspapers, reports for the boss, and then there was people engaged in freeway sex…we won’t go there.
I have been off the “big” road for 10 years. Some things have changed for the better. Drivers no longer carry briefcases of “uppers” that they got from a buddy that worked for a pharmaceutical company, or other vices that weren’t good for us or for the industry. These days the younger drivers don’t look out for their fellow truckers like we did “back in the day”. That was before you had to worry about getting robbed, stabbed, or shot for stopping out of concern for someone broke down along a empty stretch of highway. But the antics of people in cars have degraded in ways we never dreamed of ten years ago.
Sure there are still people out there having freeway sex...like they are the first ones to ever come up with the idea. But now we have smart phones the size of a cigarette pack, and laptops that can access the internet anywhere. We can surf the "Net", text, email and fax. Who needs an office when you can just ride around in your car and do all the things you do at your desk?
Just the other day one man in a Jeep almost caused 4 separate accidents, because he was so involved with what was happening with one of his electronic toys that he became a hazard to himself and everyone else travelling on the same road. When he finally got his vehicle back under control, he waved out the window as if to say, “Sorry I almost caused 4 loaded tractor-trailers and half a dozen cars to wreck.”
So the more things change, the more they stay the same.
