I used to drive a flatbed semi across the US and Canada. It was fun for a while, then it was less fun, then it stopped being any sort of fun at all. Then I quit.
For a time, I was driving on what they call the regional fleet, and spent a fair bit of time rolling with another driver on that same fleet. He was some sort of cool cowboy type, but young, and with an element of skaterboi to him. He was a driver trainer, so he always had a trainee on board, which was useful, because the trainee would help him secure his load or roll up his tarps, and then would come over and help me with my load and tarps.
Anyway, this guy would always regale us with stories of horrible injuries he had suffered in one way or another: automobile crash; motorcycle accident (I think he actually raced them at one point); falling off a cliff; diving into a creek that was only eighteen inches deep; what have you. He had pins in his bones holding them together and could turn one of his fingers around on the bone and pull his nose away from his face. These are the things that constitute hours of entertainment when you are waiting for a load of scrap metal from a recycling yard in Calgary.
One day he was telling me a story about how he sliced himself open somehow while loading his rig, a huge gash down the side of his ribs. It was a suitably grisly tale and I won't relate all of it here.
"So, how did you get to the hospital?" I asked.
"Man, I didn't go to no hospital," he sneered. "Squirted some Super Glue on it and wrapped an Ace bandage around my ribs. Got a wild scar out of it."
That was when it hit me: Hey, I thought to myself, this guy is kind of an idiot.
It wasn't too long before he fell off the side of a trailer and went on light duty for several months. I never really dealt with him much after that.
It's not really a cautionary tale, as such; just a reminder that sometimes, someone will be talking, and that voice in the back of your head will finally get your full attention, and you'll realize that spending time with this person could very well lessen your sanity, or your life span, or both.
It's kind of important, when that happens, to flee.
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