Annacis Island Switch

____ It is 12 Noon when a trailer, coming from Ohio, arrives at the Steinbach terminal. I have wasted half the available day-light hours but at least the snow-ploughs have had more time to clear the 20 centimetres that fell in the last 24 hours. A long-haul to Swift Current on roads in varying states of slippery-ness. I have three days to get the load to the West Coast and by the end of day two I have reached Revelstoke.

The snow-shed on the way down the Coquihalla Pass.

____ A truck-driver can average 60 miles an hour on the Mid-West Interstates and it brings in a decent hourly wage. But in the mountains, in the dark, in adverse weather conditions; that average can be cut in half. There is no double-time for working on a Sunday. I am an experienced driver with all the skills needed to handle an 18-wheel-semi in any situation, on any road in the World. Here I am selling my services for less than the minimum wage. Next time I look in the shaving mirror; I will see an idiot. But on the plus side; the falling snowflakes will save on the screen wash.

Changeable conditions on the Coquihalla Pass

____ Fuel and food at Hope, after a chain-less descent of the Coquihalla, and I decide to doorstep the load at the customer. Annacis Island is in the heart of sprawling Vancouver, an early-morning arrival would be problematic. Surprisingly the island is almost totally industrial with no private dwellings. Enough industry for the office to find a reload on the island. Heading East, in the right direction, but as only a far as Calgary. A long 16 hour day ends at Golden, back into the Rockies in the dark. A  west-bound super-B grain-hauler jack-knifes at the summit of the Rogers Pass. The wrecker has yet to arrive, but I manage to squeeze past on the shoulder. No injury to the driver but the unit is a mess, a highway closure looks certain. Golden was a good result.

Annacis Island in the Fraser River Delta Area.

____ Calgary is a trailer switch but only south, to Lethbridge. Another switch with the back-end and eastwards again. Driving home for Christmas, but only as far as Regina. Unloaded, and I expected a message to send me back to Steinbach; but no. One final trailer change, a grain mill just north of Yorkton and a pre-loaded trailer for Etobicoke in Ontario. I just have to take it to my home terminal where another weather system from Colorado has just dumped another 20 centimetres of the white stuff. A White Christmas for me and Happy Christmas to you all.

Low cloud on the summit of the Coquihalla Pass.

Tug Of War.

5004 kilometres - 6 days.

____ The trip started like so many have done since I started at Penners; an empty trailer from the Steinbach yard to the paper mill at Dryden. Snow flurries had died out before the Manitoba/Ontario border and temperatures were above freezing for the next five days in a mid-December warm spell. Into the States at International Falls with a heavy load going to Appleton, Wisconsin. Not a long-distance load; but when the re-load is a trailer switch at nearby Neenah going to Mississauga, then things start looking good.

The Inuksuk at Vermilion Bay, Ontario.

____ The company doesn't pay a driver anything to switch trailers but it never takes more than half an hour and the truck is back out on the road; earning cents per mile. How things have changed from when I was at Big Freight! Every load needed strapping down and usually tarping. At Flying Eagle, things got easier with just the opening and closing of the van doors. Now at Penners; at least half the loads are ready to go before I arrive. Another switch at Mississauga and I am heading back down Highway 401 towards Detroit on Saturday afternoon. Sunday is just a short drive to Carol Stream, a western suburb of Chicago.

The Dragon Wrecker.

____ But as with most trips, there is always a hiccup. Monday morning and the clamp truck at Carol Stream springs an hydraulic leak. It is the only thing in the factory that can unload my huge rolls of cardboard and it's 4 o'clock before it is working again. The office has a re-load organised from Brook, Indiana, luckily they work until ten in the evening so I do get loaded but it was a slow run through the Chicago evening rush-hour. Then in the morning I had a slow run through the morning rush-hour, going back in the other direction.

Early morning snow at the Big Chief Travel Plaza, Home of the Bison Burger.

____ The re-load was for Steinbach; so I put in the full 11 hours driving. Making it as far as Fergus Falls as the temperature dropped and the light rain started freezing on the windshield. Miler-marker 86 and things got tricky. The Big Chief Travel Plaza at MM 61 took a long time coming. The rain turned to snow as I slept and it kept snowing all the way home. The wipers on the Volvo didn't handle the conditions very well; I soon had great lumps of ice swishing across the screen. The only way to clear them was to stop, get out, climb up and bang the blades on the screen until the ice dropped off.  "Twenty centimetres of white stuff"; they said on the radio and from the look of the patio table on the deck; they were right.

What a time and place for a tug of war! Actually the little white bus was winching the big yellow bus out of the ditch.

Mack In A Million.

4559 km in 6 days.

____ An empty trailer to Dryden starts a trip that I have done before in its entirety. Then I switch for a really heavy one and go to the border at International Falls. Highway 502 which is nearly 200 kilometres of pure Canadian Shield; no houses, no traffic, just rock, trees and lakes. I wonder how long this route is going to be usable as we enter the Winter season. This time it is bare and dry but it could be unwise to use it in bad weather. I reach Minong in Wisconsin for the night; home of the Links family and their beef jerky empire.

____ South into warmer temperatures, first to Troy in Illinois; then an early Saturday delivery in Jackson. Instant reload information sends me south to Olive Branch, a few hundred yards south of the Tennessee/Mississippi stateline. On my previous visit, I was loaded and away within an hour: not this time. Three Penner trucks have arrived for two available loads and I draw the short straw. It is a 27 hour wait; Sunday afternoon before I am on my way.

Cab-over beside the Interstate 55 in Missouri.

____ But every cloud has a silver lining and I have an opportunity to call in at a rural fire hall to look-over a fine old Mack fire-rescue truck. Twenty-five years old with just 22,000 miles on the clock. Three hundred and fifty horse-power with a five speed Allison automatic transmission, 4000 lbs winch, 15 kilowatt generator and automatic snow-chains. Something that would make a unique motor-home conversion.

____ A light load of just 11,000 lbs helps for a good run back to Manitoba. Twenty-seven minutes to get shot of 22 pallets. A warm spell brings temperatures to positive degrees but makes for a mucky truck. Luckily the workshops also have a wash bay and screen-wash in bulk. A mid-week finish, a hours reset and out again on maybe the last trip before Christmas.

Built in 1989 in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

22713 miles.

Mack R688FC with bodywork by Saulsbury.

4000 lb Electric Winch on front bumper.

Allison Transmission shifter and plenty of extra switches.

No clutch; just two buttons for air-horns and siren can lead to noisy mistakes.

Even has a built-in wine-rack.

Blow Over Some Cherry And Carry On.

8437 km-11 days

____Day 1: The girl-friend is along for the ride. Her office is closed because a new computer system is being installed. We take an empty trailer to Portage La Prairie and once loaded; we wait three hours for the paperwork. Their computer system is down. The g/f has this effect on things. After a 7.00am start; it is getting dark by the time we cross the border, which would have been a one hour drive from home. Pushing-on to the maximum 14 hour spread-over; we make it to Sauk Centre.

____Day 2: The Sunday before Black Friday and it seems that most of Chicago's shoppers are saving their dollars for the big sale day. An easy run through the city and it's sprawling suburbs. The EZ Pass toll-paying tag sure makes it easier than the cash-paying Flying Eagle days. Eleven hours driving gets us to the Elkhart Service Area on the Indiana Toll Road, aka Interstate 80 and 90.

____Day 3: Totally toll road; into Ohio and then the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Then there is an accident at the required exit with horrendous tail-backs. We push on past; stopping for the second night at a toll road service area. It's good to know that some of the toll dollars go to these places. They are always clean and tidy; the one on the south side of Reading has a 24/7 Starbucks.

For most truckers; Great Dane is a make of trailer. For this guy; it's a cab-mutt

____Day 4: As soon as I enter the foodstuff warehouse; I smell "Union." This delivery will not be quick. Old men slowly going about their jobs and sure enough; when I do finally get allocated an unloading bay: they go for a break before starting to unload. All off and away at eleven; luckily the reload is at nearby Hanover. The rest of the day; locking horns with the relentless PA traffic, around Harrisburg and up into New York State for a night at Dansville in the TA Travelcentre.

____Day 5: The load is from the US warehouse of a company to their Canadian counterparts in Mississauga. A 10 o'clock delivery appointment means an early start and a dawn crossing of the Peace Bridge, connecting Buffalo, New York, to Fort Erie, Ontario, just upstream from Niagara Falls. No-one at the delivery point knows anything about my arrival and my load; great inter-company communication. But as it looks like everything else in their warehouse; they unload me by noon. The next job is a trailer switch, also in Mississauga, but it won't be ready until mid-night. The g/f has never been to Niagara Falls and it is just an hour away on the Queen Elizabeth Way; but then I wouldn't have the only Canadian girl friend who hadn't seen them. So we play crib in the truck at the shambles that masquerades as the Mississauga Flying'J.

2006 Volvo with 15lt Cummins ISX, Eaton-Fuller 13 speed and 1.75 million kilometres on the clock.

____Day 6: An early start is needed if we are to swap trailers and get out of town before the early morning rush; 5 o'clock Eastern, 4 o'clock Central. Plus 8 and drizzle turns to Minus 2 and snow flurries by the time we reach North Bay. Highway 11, west-wards into the weather; New Liskeard onto Cochrane, Kapuskasing to Hearst, darkness falls on the last leg as we make the final push of the day, to Longlac. Hard-packed snow on the desolate two-hundred kays to a freezing parking spot on a service road.

____Day 7: The cold wakes me just after mid-night. I fire up the Cummins and turn on the bunk-heater. Sleep doesn't return and dead on 10 hours rest, we are under way with enough time to get home. Sun-rise at Thunder Bay, clear skies, bare and dry roads. It is all looking good until the engine conks out at Kenora. A bizarre situation with one diesel tank brim full and one tank bone dry. The balance pipe between the two is plugged; probably with frozen diesel. A short walk to a handy chain-saw dealer and I return with 10 feet of five-eighth inch coolant pipe. I stuff one end in each tank and take the blue air-line from the trailer; pushing it in the full tank. Some old rags block up the rest of the filler orifice while the g/f works the brake pedal. In no-time a third of a tank  of diesel is blown-over. The big 15 litre Cummins ISX is self-bleeding, we are soon up and running. But our troubles are not over. The diesel pump draws fuel from the empty-ish tank and returns fuel to the full tank. Within 100 kilometres, the engine dies again; luckily within sight of the Coop Cardlock fuel stop at Hadashville. The power-steering goes into arms-strong mode but I make the zig-zag and glide up to the pumps. My sigh of relief sounds like I have set the trailer brakes twice.

____Day 8: The guys in the workshop stayed late and checked out the problem with the tank-link pipe. Apparently Volvos are fitted with a valve between the tanks that stop fuel leakage in the event of a truck roll-over. It could have frozen or may have been activated by filling empty tanks with the engine running. You learn something new everyday in this trade. It is Saturday and driving hours are now short; enough time to get to Moose Jaw and again wonder how Canadian Flying'Js fail to give the same customer satisfaction as their American counterparts.

Not me Guv! It was already sealed when I picked it up.

____Day 9: The load must be in Calgary by noon; so the earliest start of the trip is needed for the seven hour stretch across the Prairies. No problem as Saskatchewan has yet to see snow, bare and dry Trans-Canada Highway. It takes four and a half hours for them to hand-ball my load out of the trailer which finishes my work-day with just enough time to catch the final match of this year's Canadian Football League; the Grey Cup.

____Day 10: Homeward bound; changing the empty trailer for loaded one at Medicine Hat. It's due for delivery on Friday in Chicago but my orders are to take it to Steinbach. To Brandon for the night with an endless Dire Straits compilation blasting from the speakers. Ride across the river. Brothers in arms. Telegraph road. Running every red light down memory lane. Stirring ghosts from thirty years ago. Bitter cold Winters on the vast plains of Romania; so similar to the vast empty deep-freeze that is central Canada. We are Sultans, we are the Sultans of Swing.

____Day 11: Another night of broken sleep due to the cold; but not a lot to do, three hours. End of the month and a quick check of pages 1 and 30 on the log-book tells me that the kilometre count is over 22,000. It was 20,055 for October, so it looks like the job is going in the right direction.

A 30 year old photo, taken in a Romanian lay-by just after I had blown-over some cherry red diesel from the trailer's belly-tank and into the running tank. I made a mess then and made a mess on this trip too. Some people never learn.

California in Missouri.

3412 km in 4 days.

____Day 1: Peat moss is a poor man's load; the worst rate in the industry. A company only pulls a load of dirt in a van if they haven't got good customers. All the premier hauliers of Manitoba deny that they carry the stuff; yet when you go to load at a peat moss plant, they are all there. Bison lining-up to load alongside Flying Eagle, and Penner too. But if you have a loaded trailer waiting for collection in Missouri; then any load going south is better than sending an empty trailer. The line is long and the loading slow. At the end of a fourteen hour day; I have only reached Fargo in North Dakota.

____Day 2: Interstate 29, all the way to Kansas City. Final destination is California, not the West Coast state but the small town in the middle of Missouri; not the river but the state. I am always fascinated by how places get their names. Apparently unscrupulous guides who led the wagon trains across America set up a California in Missouri in order to hood-wink immigrant settlers. A few weeks travel from the East Coast and there was a big sign saying "Welcome to California." The happy wagoners paid-off their guides thinking they had reached the promised land: job done.

____Day 3: Just two hours of driving across Missouri before I reach the plant nursery and am quickly unloaded. Another couple of hours and I am swapping trailers in Lebanon, the town not the country, just alongside Interstate 44. But no interstate driving until I reach Des Moines, as I cut across the state highways, due north into Iowa. The full eleven hours of allowed driving gets me to the Flying'J at Williams, just close enough to strike-out for home in the morning.

____Day 4: Snow is in the forecast but I am around the Minneapolis ring-road and away north-west along the Interstate 94 before the storm blows. From there-on a strong wind, snow and blowing snow make driving difficult. Not everybody has revived their winter-driving skills. After dark the ditches of Manitoba are littered with headlights shining-out at various bizarre angles. Blowing snow is packed down hard by vehicle tyres giving a sheet of ice to drive on. I creep back into the yard and drop the trailer; somebody else can have the pleasure of taking it to Gimli in the morning.

Wind and snow can soon put a rig in the ditch.

Coquihalla Chains

5040 km - 6 days.

____ Day 1: Away from Steinbach bright and early on a Sunday morning; thankful that the roadwork season is winding down. Good progress with the light load and a near maximum driving-hours day as I reach Lloydminster and the Husky Truckstop.

All the harvest is now safely gathered.

____ Day 2: Just an eight hour break before pushing on to Edmonton and an 8 o'clock delivery appointment. Penners do have a depot in Edmonton but my instructions tell me to take the empty trailer to the Calgary yard. Waiting there is a loaded trailer for Surrey, British Columbia. All goes well until some roadworks in the mountains at Field; a long line of traffic in the dark as signs say the work is 24/7. To Golden for the night with the chance of a good nights rest as I take a 12 hour break to compensate for the previous short 8 hour rest.

The first snows of Winter at the Calgary Olympic Ski Jumps.

____ Day 3: The weather is mild and sunny as I tackle the Rocky Mountain section of the Trans-Canada Highway. Dry roads in day-light hours is the preferable way to cross any mountain range. It is just getting dark when I reach Surrey on the outskirts of Vancouver. The trailer goes Penner's Surrey yard and there should be another trailer, loaded and waiting to go to Regina. But it has not arrived and does not show-up until nine o'clock.

Trans Canada Highway through the Rocky Mountains.

____ Day 4: On holiday; in August, it was a bicycle chain when I came down the from Coquihalla Summit on my bike; following the Kettle Valley Rail Trail. Today it is snow chains. A storm has blown in from the northern Pacific Ocean, rain in the Fraser Valley means snow on the higher ground. Signs warn: "Heavy Snowfall - Trucks Chain-up." From Box Canyon, the snow is heavy. I chain-up in the dark and chomp-chomp-chomp to the summit. The snow doesn't ease-up for a couple of hours as I pray the chains are going to hold together; creeping along at 25 kilometres an hour. At Merritt, things get better and the chains go back in their tray between the chassis rails. By Kamloops the sun is out, causing a fine film of water to form on the hard-packed snow. Tricky driving conditions and the rear-end starts twitching. Revelstoke and the snow is back, big wet flakes, all the way to the summit of the Rogers Pass, where another set of 24/7 roadworks shut the highway for thirty minutes whilst they do some rock-blasting. Eventually I reach Golden and I am tempted to stop for the night. But with the first bare and dry road surface of the day; I push on for Calgary. For over an hour; nothing comes in the opposite direction; a sure sign of trouble ahead. An accident has closed the road and I am soon at the back of a long queue; crawling for mile after mile, back across the Continental Divide and into Alberta. The maximum-allowed 16 hour spread-over comes before I reach Calgary and I forced to spend a wind-battered night in a lay-by.

Coquihalla Pass Summit.

____ Day 5: Clear and bright; not a lot of driving compared to the previous day. Into the Calgary Flying'J for fuel, food and a shower; then Moose Jaw for the night, leaving an hour's drive to the customer in the morning.

Double-width snow-plough on the Coquihalla Pass.

____ Day 6: The stuff is unloaded quickly but for once the office doesn't have a reload. It is noon on Friday the Thirteenth before they give up looking and tell me to run back; empty to Steinbach. Six days on the road and 65 hours worked so a reset is needed before I go again.

Rusty and so was the driver who put them on.

New York-New York.

5410 km - 6 days.

____ Day 1: Back to New York state for the second time at Penner International. But not before a big mistake and my first for the new employer. Usually I fix my own faux pas or blame someone else but when I turned up at the wrong border crossing; it was all down to me. Two times it was written "Roseau" on my paperwork but I blindly went to "Pembina" as I always do. It took three hours for the customs broker to come home from church, eat his Sunday lunch and change the entry for my load of animal foodstuff. Luckily the US Customs were as surprised as I was about the load going through Roseau and didn't blame me; but everybody else did. There was still time to get down to Nelson's Petro at Clearwater; feeling deflated.

Cabover Pete on Manitoba plates.

____ Day 2: Penners' trucks have the EZ Pass tags for easy toll payments so cutting through Chicago is a lot easier. I choose Interstate 88 East and Interstate 355 South, just before rush-hour, pushing on to the rest-area at Rolling Prairie on the Indiana Toll Road.

Once seen never forgotten, custom hooded Kenworth.

____ Day 3: Flat toll-roads across Indiana and Ohio eat up the miles. A phone call to the customer and he wants the delivery at 5 o'clock on Wednesday morning. That's 4 o'clock Manitoba time but the man does say that I can park on the farm. The last part of the journey is across the Finger Lake area of New York; valleys with vineyards on the slopes. Narrow country lanes but the sat-nav leads me straight to the place. The owner appears, we open the trailer and I back-up to the unloading door.

Every van drivers worst nightmare. A folding trailer.

____ Day 4: The cab rocks as the fork-lift enters and exits the trailer, sixty-six times. I have to get-up. Luckily I have my reload information and I'm away from the village of Dundee by six. A trailer swap at the big RDC in Hazleton, Pennsylvania; 300 kilometres south. Switched in half-an-hour and en-route for the Penner yard in Mississauga. The trailer is loaded with four drops for superstores in the Toronto area; deliveries start at 1 o'clock in the morning. So it has to be there before the end of my shift. The early start on the farm is now a blessing. Customs at Fort Erie is a breeze which makes it a fruitful but long day.


____ Day 5: The job flow continues. A loaded trailer is ready to go to Edmonton, Alberta. So after battling through the busy GTA traffic; I get out into the countryside and make good time with a light load of only 7500 pounds. It's 22 degrees Centigrade at Sault Ste. Marie as the sun goes down on a very warm November afternoon. When I park at White River it is still a barmy 17 at 8 o'clock.

Marmon wrecker at Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

____ Day 6: Strong winds rocked the cab during the night; the jet-stream moving south across the Canadian Shield. Two degrees above freezing as I pull out at day-break; within five miles it is snowing. The weather stays the same all the way to Steinbach, 1000 kilometres away. The third day of  eleven hours at the wheel. A 36 hour re-set while the truck gets a service and attention to a coolant leak; then continue on to Edmonton.

Not Enough Hours In Oklahoma.

7504 kilometres - 10 days.

____ The trip didn't start well; a six hour wait to get loaded at Portage la Prairie. Five pallets of my load had gone missing and I sat on the loading bay while they bagged-up replacements. It was getting dark by the time I cleared customs and crossed the border. Fargo was as far as I would go on day one. Destination was Spencer, New York, but even with Tuesday's hiccup, Friday's 9 o'clock delivery was still possible. Wednesday night at Rochelle's Petro Truckstop and Thursday at the Seneca Casino at Salamanca, NY. Interstate 86, the Southern Tier Thruway across New York, doesn't have a lot of truckstops so a casino with a big patch of gravel is the best I can do.
____ Spencer is a very small town in the foothills of the Appalachians, surrounded by copper leaved woodland on a warm autumnal morning. Quickly unloaded and away, on twisting, undulating two-lane roads; across country to the Interstate 81, south into Pennsylvania and onto Hazleton. A trailer change in a chaotic RDC with trailers dropped everywhere. I surprise myself by getting in and out inside 30 minutes. The trailer is carrying two consignments of Christmas decorations for superstores in Ontario; my instructions tell me to take it to the Penner yard in Mississauga.
____ Mississauga on a Saturday morning and another trailer swap. This time  it is a load going to Oklahoma City, 1900 kilometres south-west. Going straight back into the US without having a log-book hours reset can make things tricky but I cannot refuse the load as I do have enough driving hours to legally make the delivery. Problems could come afterwards. But first the load has to have customs clearance. Twice faxing the paperwork for an extortionate cost of $64 and a five hour wait make for a miserable Saturday afternoon. The clock runs out on the driving time before I get the go-ahead.
____ An early start from London, Ontario, gets me to the normally very busy Ambassador Bridge before the Sunday rush. Windsor to Detroit with only 30 seconds at the customs booth must be a record but that was all after I hit a deer. An eight-point white-tail buck on Highway 401. It came out into the slow lane just after a bridge; I didn't get on the brake pedal before I hit it at 100 kph in cruise control. I swear that at the last second, it turned towards the truck and lowered it's head; as if engaging in deer to deer combat. That action probably saved the truck from a lot of damage; the moose bar took the full impact. Normally if a truck hits a big animal; it hits the legs and body comes over the bar and onto the hood. The only damage was a broken lens on a fog-light.

Hefty front-end protection by Herd.

____ The day finished on the outskirts of St. Louis, half-done. The load was due to be delivered on the Tuesday afternoon but I was in the Petro at Oklahoma City by 2 o'clock Monday and that was  after a leisurely look-round in the Petro at Joplin. The driving hours were now getting critical, just three hours for Tuesday; the delivery was done ok but getting to the reload was out of the question. The despatch office knew the situation and booked a late loading time for the next day in Kansas City.

1989 Mack Superliner

____ There is a ball game going on. Kansas City Royals are at home to the New York Mets in the second game of the World Series. The place is buzzing. Strange how I have just come down from Ontario; where the Royals beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the semi-final. I still don't understand some of the finer points of the game but was disappointed that the Blue Jays didn't go all the way. There are three Canadian trucks on the bays waiting to be loaded. I am first away but with limited hours coming back to from the previous weeks driving; I am last one back to the yard. Noon on Friday before I get back to the workshop and tell the guys about the fog-light lens. We all agree that moose-bars are a good investment and that the "Herd" brand is probably the strongest. Shame about the deer but at least it was quick.

On sale in the Petro at Joplin, Missouri, The hard-hat cowboy hat.

Maps From The First Trips At Penner International.

Just an easy short trip to start with. Pre-loaded trailer from Winkler; down to Maple Grove for a Monday morning delivery. They had a load of empty crates to go back to Winkler; then run back to Steinbach.

Took an empty trailer to Dryden. Swapped that for a loaded one and delivered that to Jackson, Missouri. Then ran to Lebanon, Indiana, and changed trailers again. This time taking a load to Mississauga and dropping it in Penner's yard. Out of there; I took a pre-loaded trailer back to Winnipeg.

Empty trailer to Dryden again and then the same delivery down to Jackson. This time the reload was at Arcadia, Wisconsin; another swap with a pre-loaded trailer. I dropped that in Winnipeg and bob-tailed home.

For the third time; empty to Dryden and swap trailers for a load to Jackson, Missouri. Then down to Olive Branch, near Memphis, for a live-load [loaded same trailer]. That went back to the Penner yard in Winnipeg.

Something different. Take an empty trailer to load at Richer. Then down to Millstadt before popping across to Effingham to pick up a load for Winnipeg. 

____ So far, so good. Penners do seem to have plenty of work from a lot of regular clients. There are a lot of trailers dotted about at different customers, all over North America. Swapping trailers sure beats all the hassle of waiting to get loaded. Also they don't expect you to rush about and with trailer swaps; you don't need to.

Is There Anything Good About This Job?

____ I was born too late to be conscripted into the British Armed Forces; so never had to do "National Service." But after five days of orientation at Penner International, I now know what 6 weeks of basic training must have been like for those poor squaddies. Sergeant-Major Rick was in command of our subterranean boot camp and he certainly knew his stuff. You could not fault his facts and figures but he had the misfortune to present all his messages in the style of an old know-it-all trucker, holding court at the counter of a truckstop diner. I had been given the heads-up on his abrasive teaching methods; so pre-conditioned myself, for the week, by pretending to be conscientious Captain Cautious. If he said "Slow"; I said "Slower."

____ We were a quartet that quickly dwindled to a trio. But I'm pretty sure Rick would have emptied a complete classroom of driving-school rookies in less than two days. Any novice would have abandoned the transport industry and returned to a safe career of burger flipping after the brow-beatings received by Adolf, Bob and myself. Adolf from Kazakhstan seemed to take it all in his stride. Maybe it was similar to his Red Army training. He looked the sort of guy who could still knock-down and re-build an AK 47 in under a minute. He also showed a good command of the English language and passed every end-of-day written test. There was homework too!

____ Bob from Gimli had chosen truck-driving as a retirement job after twenty years of running his own metal fabrication company. He was looking forward to a life of relaxed driving; poodling around North America without the stress of finding work for 22 employees and the day-to-day running of a business. He had jumped in at the deep-end as an owner/operator by buying a six year-old Mack tractor-unit and putting it on with Penners. Orientation by Rick was a big wake-up call. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday he was exclaiming, "Is there anything good about this job?"

____ I told him that it was him and his truck against the rest of the World, same as it always was; same as it always would be. Rick pretty much agreed. Later, I tried to cheer-up Bob with stories of Winter week-ends in Florida and nights-out in Nashville but I could see he was being over-come by a great sense of foreboding. There was a relentless onslaught of lessons to be learned and how to do things the "Penner Way." Compliance to all regulations, all aspects of transport industry safety, hazardous goods, log-books, cross-border Customs procedures and advanced driving techniques: all new to Bob and real eye-openers.

____ I can't remember if I learned anything new but stuck it out for the whole five days. I found out later that a certain group of people were having bets as to when I would throw in the towel and walk out. There is a thin line between forcefully presenting your company's ideology and bullying in the workplace. Maybe Penners only want the type of driver that is willing to endure that method of orientation and it separates the wheat from the chaff. But I came home every evening feeling like a toddler who had been severely told-off for shitting in his first-ever pair of underpants; after forty carefree years of wearing nappies.