Important things I'm learning

Some of you may follow my journey and make a life changing career decision based on my findings.  Most of you won’t.  This profession is not for the meek, that’s for sure. You have to deal with things like a sore ass, poor selection of radio stations for long stretches, and the truck doesn’t have enough electricity to push a flat iron (I know because I fried Aboy’s inverter).

You have to find clever ways of being a woman and not cross the line of appearing busted. There’s not a lot of time to be feminine because you have destinations to get to and usually there is a deadline to get there. You can wake up in Virginia and go to sleep in Arkansas. It’s like being a modern day gypsy.

I have to be honest, I’m not really learning a lot about driving.  I’ve been driving (professionally) since I was 19 years old.  I understand the road, having close to 700,000 miles under my belt. This is more like training to be able to handle the daily 12-14 hours cooped up in a truck with someone that likes to fart and wait till I smell it to admit he did it. I have to admit – eating truck stop food makes for good revenge and my timing is usually better.  I also have a poker face.  It’s become quite the game.

Wet wipes have become a staple in my beauty arsenal. We take a shower at night at the truck stop. Aboy wakes up way too early for me to go into the truck stop and act like I have any good sense – so, I just go in to use the bathroom and come right back out to the truck. I let him take care of all the important things like making coffee and any other important trucker shit. I’m usually ready to get my act together by time we make our first potty stop.

I have found that a lot of these truck stop parking lots smell like a subway station.  The piss smell is magnified by the engines idling.  I have a pair of flip flops that are exclusive truck stop shoes and once I get back in the truck, they get cleaned off with a clorox wipe, tucked under my seat and I wash my feet off with a wet wipe. I also use my hand sanitizer on my feet – one can never be too careful!!

At a previous job, Aboy said he had rode with an old guy and his truck smelled funny. Come to find out when he rode with another guy from the same company – the old guy used to poop in a bucket in his truck because he didn’t like to poop in public. So you can imagine some of the stuff that these truckers do. Needless to say when I heard this story – I gagged. Another time, we were riding through the truck stop and there was a full bottle of soda in the parking lot – I said, “Oh, man! Someone dropped their soda!”… Aboy said – “that’s a bottle of piss”. ILK!!!! 



That’s one side of being a trucker – I don’t need to learn about!!!