Kinda strange where conversations can take you…

This rambling post has nothing to do with gaming, so if some QQing ain’t your thing, then you can safely pass this one up. See? ain’t I nice?

Back in the day, after I left the service, I was looking for something to make ends meet in the tough Southern California job market. In the mid nineties, the market was saturated with eager young electronics gurus, and no one was hiring The big two, Motorola and 3M, certainly weren’t, and Qualcomm was heading downhill.

So, following the philosophy that the world will always need folks that don’t mind getting their hands greasy, I went looking for something else, and since I’d enjoyed driving 5-ton trucks, humvees and such in the service when the chance came up, I figured I’d go to a commercial truck driver school, get my CDL class A license, and go drive a truck while I figured stuff out.

I graduated from the school, a 6 week course I think, and got recruited by a company called Dick Simon Trucking based out of Salt Lake City, a company that ran refrigerated 53′ trailers Over The Road in the lower 48 states, Canada and Mexico.

I spent the first 3 months riding with a ‘trainer’ in a shared truck cab, a nice guy that lived out of Salt Lake, doing boomerang runs from Salt Lake City to Boise, up to Seattle, and then back again for Albertsons’. Trainer was former Navy, married, owned a beautiful home in the area, and we got along real well. I heard lots of horror stories of trainers, so I was very fortunate. After my ‘orientation and an up check, I got my own nice shiny new truck, and spent the next two years driving over the road, and seeing this beautiful country of ours. I might have spent all of a weekend a month during those two years not on the road.

In that time, I learned that I loved the mountains and forests of northern Washington state, Virginia and West Virginia, and lots of Kentucky and Tennessee. And I learned that the country is, in reality, VERY, VERY small. Cities are very densely populated, and that can give a city kid the impression that the whole country is one teeming mass of folks (like much of eastern Europe), but the reality is that the US is one vast, empty landscape dotted with the occasional outbreak of civilisation.

Overall, I loved the driving and seeing the country, but the hardest part was seeing wonderful things, and having no one there to share the experience with. I could easily see someday doing the RV thing with my wife, and enjoying driving just to be seeing some of those wonderful sights again, like the look of the Sun over the river while pulling out of the mountains between Idaho and Oregon… having someone you love with you to share the experience would be very cool.

This all came to my mind today, because I was talking to a coworker who is thinking about retiring from his current electronics job, and going owner-operator over the road with his wife. It made me feel nostalgic about my old trucking days, and I decided to troll the internet looking for pictures of Dick Simon ‘skunk’ trucks, like what I used to drive.

What I found out was that, shortly after I left the company, one of the drivers for Dick Simon apparently had a deranged episode, went insane, and while in Sacramento, California, decided to circle the State Capitol, prior to accelerating to full speed and then ramming the Capitol building, resulting in the explosion of the truck, the death of the driver in the ensueing fireball, and considerable damage to the California State Capitol itself.

Sometimes, life is just so crazy. You just can’t make shit like that up.

According to news reports, it came out that the trainer that was supposed to spend 3 months with the guy told the company that the guy was nuts and needed to be let go. And whoever it was in charge of that stuff at Dick Simon refused, and gave the guy his own truck. So the State of California sued Dick Simon Trucking, and shortly thereafter the company filed chapter 11, the assets were sold off, and became a part of Central Refrigeration, under the CEO of Swift Trucking.

So, I go trolling the ‘net for pictures and find out that the entire company I drove for no longer exists. The trucks are not on the road. If I tell people I drove a ‘skunk truck’, they will never see one on the road to know what the heck I’m talking about.

I never had any thought of ever going back to that kind of life… but it still feels like a part of my past is lost or something. Heck, I still have a big exercise bag embroidered with my name and the company logo that was given to me on my two year anniversary with the company… and I just used it on vacation. It may have been ten years ago that I was a driver, but emotionally it just wasn’t THAT long ago. Maybe this is what it feel slike to go back to your home town and find out they bulldozed the family homestead to make a mini-mart (Grosse Point Blank)

Eh, I dunno. I just feel weird about it. And very, very old.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.