Your scariest moment as a truck driver

Dude, been there, felt that. It always happens when you're tired, for me it seems the worst is when the truck next to you pulls out, my sleepy mind always goes haywire!

Ahh yes, Optimized Idle, one of Det diesel's more annying inventions. That stupid setup took me a while to get used to as well.

What really gets me scared lately, is if it's really windy out(while I'm trying to sleep), I will invariably have a nightmare in which my truck is about to head-on another truck; must be something to do with the truck rocking and all the wind noise? Or maybe I need to lay off that late night milkshake before bed?

 

My scariest moment was going down donners pass my first trip out west in an ice storm When I first started trucking out of school. That is somthing I will never forget.

 

I actually think it was the snow. The brain sometimes has problems adjusting to that many objects moving against each other. The snowflakes in the air (the big fluffy ones) where creating a pattern that was moving and then the trailer ahead started moving away to the left just made my brain asplode!

I experienced close to the same feeling once scuba diving.. The water was ROUGH.. so under the water was really moving. we we're swaying, the kelp on the bottom was swaying and under the kelp, the sand was not.. It was really close to making me motion sick.

 

Ditto on that one lol! I hate that feeling. And it was funny reading your post about the scenery changing. I can't even imagine, although what's scary is knowing I could have easily done the same thing

 

All kinds of close calls people cuttin you off thats just another day.
One day while i was adjusting the trailer brakes I walked bac up to the cab and released the trailer brakes and had forget to set the tactor breaks figured it out when i was walking bac to the trailer luckily it didnt roll to fast i ran bac to the trck jumped in and set the brakes eww close call. HMM mayb i should of used a chock

 

Many years ago I was driving a cab over day cab and stopped at a rest area up in Ohio to grab an hours sleep leaning over the steering wheel, I had pulled in line behind the next truck and fell off to sleep real fast. I slept nice and comfy for about an hour when another driver from our company spotted me sleeping and pulled up beside me and hit his air horn. When I woke all I saw was the backend of the truck and I slammned so hard on the brakes that I pulled a muscle in my leg. I really thought I had fell asleep driving and it was all over with. The other driver along with everyone else in the rest area had a real good laugh out of it.

Oh yeah I never did that agin. Thank God there were not digital cameras back then or that look on my face would be on the net today.

 

Here's a couple...

Running the 94 E out of the Twin Cities. 9700 Cornbinder with a 53 loaded with air freight cans. Load weight totalled about 800 pounds. It's the usual winter in the Northland, ie; snow and ice and all that other fine stuff.

As I cross into WI, I notice a whole mess of 4 wheelers in the ditch on both sides. Oh, boy...this is not going to be a pleasant run. Looking ahead, I notice a truck in front of me backing way down. I start backing down too, although there's no evidence of any hazard.

Suddenly, my cab snaps to the side, hard. It felt like 90 degrees, though it was probably about 45 or so. Then to the other side, and back...here I am, my first year driving, in the middle of a jackknife from hell. Amazingly enough, I managed to do everything right and get the beast back under control, after which I proceeded at 25mph to the nearest safe place to park and told dispatch that this load wasn't moving until morning.



Another time, another company...I was doing rolloff for a little family outfit, and that day, I'd wound up with the oldest junker in the fleet. No power, overgeared, brakes-what's-that...something that I should have just flat-out refused to drive(newbies take note--you can and should do this). Had a 40-yard box on this POS Ford 9000 and I don't even want to know how overweight I was. I was entering the 494 on the mile-long entrance ramp from the 5 in Eden Prairie, grinding my way up to a blistering 40mph.

Now, when you're going down a long entrance ramp, and the ramp meter light has turned green about 10 times with no one else in front of you, what do you do? You figure that one of those greens was yours, and you go ahead. That may not be the letter of the law, but it's common-law--it's what everyone does. Except for the jackhole in the convertible in front of me(on his cell phone, natch), who dynamites his brakes to wait on his own personal green. He's ###### lucky that it was a two-lane ramp, because there was no blessed way that I was going to stop. Missed him by a molecule.

It wasn't long after this that I changed jobs.

 

A two fatality head on accident (no way my fault) where a van flew up in the air traveling in the same direction and shaved the side of my aluminum trailer tank loaded with gasoline. I was driving a truck and trailer and the van hit my rear tank. There was no leaks but it killed the driver when he passed me on a two lane road and hit the on coming car killing that driver too. I was on the shoulder as far as I could go and the on coming car went over to the shoulder also. Everything would have been fine but the on coming car went into the gravel and lost control. When his front tire grabbed the road it shot the car right in front of the van and in a matter of seconds two lives were lost and I live with the memory.

 

Not the kind of memory I would want to live with I'm glad you're "ok." I'm honestly not sure how I would handle something like that at all. I pray I never have to find out.