The Cellar - Want to see what Pam sees every day?

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Want to see what Pam sees every day?

Yep, yep, yep.

All of that, and then some. I have been meaning to edit some of my dashcam footage and post the result to youtube but I keep getting too lazy, and I misplaced the little adapter thingie so my laptop can read a micro SD card.

That video appears to be at more than double speed. Is that correct? If so, it makes some of those things seem much worse.

A lot to shake your head at. Bad drivers abound.

One thing that's not a bad driver but that pisses me off is at the 2:19 mark, where another truck has what appears to be a retread tire delaminate and spew huge strips of tread all over the road. I've seen way too much of that in person. It's the worst when youre driving along at speed and the car in front of you swerves to another lane and you see what looks like a tire just lying in the middle of your lane. You swerve too, and as you go by, you see it's a fucking tread just lying there. If I were dictator, I'd regulate that stuff out of existence.

I have had a tire blow out like that and leave a 'gator' (the tread) on the road but I went back and dragged it off to the side. Should be a littering fine if you don't.

The driver should be responsible for removing the tread from the road and the road repair guy should haul it way with the casing.

This one time, at band camp, for one of my extra-money-making schemes, I came up with the bright idea of getting a truck (I was gonna use a grain truck with a dump bed) and picking up those re-tread flyoffs on the interstate between two exits near home, and collect them in my spare time til I had a truck load. I even had the bright idea of using local jail inmates to do the picking up. Free labor! We even had a tire recycling operation right here in town at the time. No traveling to deliver.

So I goes to the recycler. I says to him, I says "How much do scrap rubber bring?".

Six cents per ton.:neutral:

But Officer, I didn't know that. :headshake

Been there, done that.

Squashed a Grand Am up on State Street @ Bridge in NE Philly once upon a time.

Doofus thought he could ignore five turn signals and a big sign warning of wide right turns and get away with it.

He didn't.

But nobody told him the blinky things weren't party lights. :facepalm:

just before attempted traffic maneuver, thought bubble reads: "doesn't apply to me"

Saudi truckers are a leeeetle bit forgetful:

That'll wake you up in the morning...

Liquid Aluminum of the Autobahn. :eyebrow:

Liquid aluminum...in a moving vehicle...what could possibly go wrong?

Shake a tail feather...

http://cellar.org/2015/shabba-5.gif

Shoulda backed out of that. No WAY there was enough room to turn around.

So there is no qualified trucker who can haul that .... whatever that is gear.

Looks like a big ass liquid pump, for irrigation, oil, or maybe its a fracking pump.
Regardless, there's plenty of qualified drivers, they just happened to not pick one. :haha:

I assumed that the truck jackknifed while trying to avoid something stupid being done by somebody else. And that moderately high speeds were involved.

The only flaw I see in my assumption is the lack of skid marks and disturbed vegetation on the edges of the road.

Half an hour of searching. Shouldn't have spent so much time on this, but I did find some more pictures.

Looks like he was trying to turn around

Yes, definitely trying to turn around, that's why Pam said, should've backed out.

Here is an idea of what might have happened.

And this one is just for giggles.

That's what it looked like. He can only pull that off when there's plenty of room behind the trailer, not in a concrete canyon. :facepalm:

Want to see what Pam sees every day?

...or, rather, doesn't see?

Attachment 53825

My Grandfather told me. "When you pass a truck, don't pull over till you can see the drivers face in the window."

We pulled up to a toll booth in a little hatchback once and a truck slowly pulled in behind us, and when the gate rose for us, the truck behind us started moving before we did, and it rear ended us very slowly. No damage. Nobody hurt. Bumper not even scratched. But I'm convinced that the driver forgot that he pulled in behind us and then couldn't see us and when the gate rose and the light turned green he just pulled forward on autopilot. My dad was driving, and that probably explains why we were slow to start. It's kind of scary that you can be in front of a truck and invisible.

'tis very true. Small cars can vanish if I am not watching carefully. I have run more than one off the road because they sneaked into my blind spot on my right and I couldn't see them.

And then there is this.

And it took three days to get the grin off Ben's face. :haha:

I'd like to know what happend to the driver of the truck.

Nothing. No harm, no foul. He truly didn't know he had a passenger. His company bought the chair guy new tires and they all had a good laugh.......much later.

That's one hellofa wheelchair to survive all that.

Whatever the brand of chair, think of the advertising they could do !

From Johnnypayphone

Quote:

Mines are dangerous places, and it’s not like the olden days- mining companies care about safety. Injuries hurt the bottom line.
In order to get onto a mine site, you have to have three days of MSHA training. Then the operator itself is going to want to send you through a day’s training. Then you have individual training days for parts of the mine- like if you need to go into the pit. Going underground requires a 40 hour safety course. This isn’t how the company trains its employees, this is just what it takes for a guy like me to drive in and unload a truck.

So today I had to deliver a light plant (like a lamp and generator on a trailer) to a drilling contractor working at a gold mine, and bring the dead one back. I couldn’t load before 8 AM. The mine was 4 hours away, then I had to re-load and bring another piece back to a place that closed at 6. So that gave me ten hours to load, drive four hours, unload, reload, drive four hours, and unload. Doable, but only if things went smooth on site. That means I get up at six AM, do a pre-trip inspection, warm up the truck and charge its air tanks, make sure I’m at the load site by 7:45, and hopefully I’m grabbin gears by 8:30-9 AM.

The light plant has an eye on the top for the crane to hook onto. But here’s the thing, the mine had decided to go above and beyond MSHA safety requirements. In order to be on the back of a truck, you needed to have fall protection. The step-deck flatbed sits about three and a half feet above the ground. The crane operator can’t really swing his hook in there and catch the eye, so someone has to climb up on the truck and slip the hook through the eye. To do it according to regulations, they’d have to get into a fall protection harness, tie off a lanyard to both sides of the trailer (preventing you from falling off), and then put the hook through the eye.

If the contractor is caught just jumping up there and doing it, they could lose a million-dollar contract and be kicked off the site. But my company might bill $600 gross for this job. So they asked me to do it. If I refused, they’d think I was an asshole and my company wouldn’t get any more work from them. If I got caught, my company would be banned from the site. Bear in mind that I’ve entered a mine and driven 30 miles inside to the unload site, they’re big. Still, ever since MSHA became self-funded, they’re greedy for fines. They might fine the operator $10,000 for such an offense. The operator, and the contractor, are probably losing thousands of dollars a minute waiting for this job to get done. You have a crane, a crane operator, a drill crew of 8 or so, a trucker, and a truck. Time is money.
They were probably drilling a $2 million dollar hole in the ground. So I did it.

Trucking is full of moments like these. You’re constantly under pressure to break the rules, or the law. If you put your foot down, not only do you get labeled as a troublemaker, but you also lose money. If I show up and my truck’s not legal (a single burnt out bulb could make it illegal), I have to decide whether to shut it down or get the job done. If it’s a safety issue, I’ll usually shut it down at my own expense. Let some other jackass kill himself for the company. If I can fix it myself, I will. But often, you just have to run outlaw, in tiny little ways.
Maybe you drive for 12 hours one day. Maybe one of the eighteen tires on the truck has less than 4/32nd of an inch of tread just one spot, and the company doesn’t want to buy a $300 tire just because of that spot. Maybe a mud flap’s too high off the ground, or there’s condensation in a tail light. Some things a highway patrolman can spot from a mile away, and he’ll pull you over.

Other things are only going to show up if you go through a weigh station and the DOT decides to give you an inspection. Some things will just get flagged, other things will get you shut down. You constantly have to balance this complex system of regulations (height, weight, and length restrictions vary by state) against the thing that makes money, which is delivering your cargo to the destination. All those signs that say like “maximum length 48 feet kingpin to axle” that you normally ignore? Driving a truck, you have to pay attention to all of them.

We’ve had oversize loads where the trailer had to legally have four axles on the ground in Utah, but then when you hit the state line, you have to raise one of your axles to make it legal. Don’t ask me why, I don’t make the rules. I just try and follow them the best that I can, and try and get the load to its destination, even if those two things are often in conflict.

I remember having a DOT guy check my bucket truck. He told me "See all these lights on your chip box?" "Yeah?" "Fix them, or remove them." "Really?" "I can park you if you like..."

I spent the rest of the day removing lights.

They have the power, you can't argue, whine or appeal.

All true.

I have been to a mine. Yes to the safety stuff and silly training video. All of it. I even had to go and put on my steel toed boots to not leave my cab.

DOT can be real a-holes sometimes. Sometimes not. It truly depends on whom you are facing and what kind of day they are having.

Interesting take on driving in Esquire...

Trucking as an occupation is hard. It's not just a job, usually, it's a whole lifestyle.

There are many reasons for the driver turnover situation, which is probably worse than that report says. Low wages, crap miles, thoughtless dispatchers, aggressive police, insane traffic and shippers/consignees who have no respect for you or your time. And those are only the easy ones.

Most new drivers only stay for a year or two, until they find something better. We call em "meat in a seat". (Yes, we like rhymes)

Autonomous driving trucks will not replace a skilled driver. There are just too many variables to consider for a computer to do the job. And I'd like to see one find a parking spot and back in! only THEN will computers replace drivers.

Pam

There's a lot more than shifting and steering, anticipation, that sixth sense to know when the shit might hit the fan, and what to do about it.
I can see autonomous trucks traveling superhighways between special terminals like some places did with the tandem trailers, but in congested areas with unpredictable people doing crazy shit, nope. Gotta have some poor bastard to blame so the company can wash their hands.

I can see them maybe working on a superhighway if and only if they are running in a dedicated, protected lane. No cars allowed. Volvo is experimenting with "platooning". Platooning reduces aerodynamic drag by grouping vehicles together and safely decreasing the distance between them via electronic coupling, which allows multiple vehicles to accelerate or brake simultaneously.

Link to more info on platooning here

Backing into a complicated spot is one of the easiest things a computerized vehicle can do.

You know what it can't do to save its life? Pick the spot. It can't take directions from the warehouse traffic manager on which bay to back into. It probably can't handle it if you tell it to wait 15 minutes for something to open up. It can't follow hand-waving directions at all. It can't make on-the-spot decisions. Its main way of dealing with anything confusing will be to stop. An open parking lot is like the worst possible scenario. Do we follow the lines? Can we see the lines?

That's what I imagine anyway just from reading a little bit about it I'm no expert

Quote:

Originally Posted by Undertoad (Post 948109)

I think that little knob on the dash board would just confuse me. And make it harder to maneuver.

Watch the view from the side-mirror, and out the windows in V's first Ford truck video.

I'm not totally convinced that truck is moving when it's 'sposed to be backing up.

That's because his yap flappin' take much longer than trailer backin'. ;)

Not really in the same vein as the thread, but...

Attachment 55180

:cool:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gravdigr (Post 953230)

Not really in the same vein as the thread, but...

Sure it is, shit Pam sees, and I'm sure this is part of the scenery.

I do NOT run behind 62 mph Swift trucks!!!

I can make 70 and I pass those rolling roadblocks!

I thought that Swift had to speed up their trucks about 10 years ago.

The driver forgot to set the trailer brakes. The tractor brakes were set, but only for the back wheels. The steering wheels are not affected by the parking brake. This is to allow you to steer in the event of loss of air pressure while driving, thus locking up the driving wheels.

What a maroon!

I thought maybe the driver didn't set any brake, and just left the truck in gear, and, then, when the crane and trailer lifted the drive axle...off she went.

Well not everyday, but occasionally, rolling roadblocks.