4-Wheeler Mistakes

You are right about that, don't ever put yourself at risk, If you have to have an accident make sure you always take a piece of them, other wise it would be hard to prove that someone caused you to roll over when all the authorities see is a truck rolled over in the ditch with no one else around.

 

Unless you do like I used to... set up the video camera on a tripod in the passenger seat.

I used to have all kinds of footage from my travels, although most of it is lost now. One thing that I discovered when I first started doing it was that I cuss and talk to myself... A LOT. My favorite saying when driving around the Chicago area was, "Stupid #%$#ing idiot..." Not in an angry sort of way... more or less a rolling commentary of what I thought about their IQ. Like when a guy in an 8 series Beemer passed me on the right shoulder of a merge ramp... between my truck and a concrete divider with just inches to spare... Stupid #%$#ing idiot.

I still have the tape from the massive snow storm of '93. One of these days I'm gonna make an MPEG out of it and post it on the net. That one was awesome!

 

Ooohhh, that would be so cool! Do it, Lilillill... and please let us know where to find it. I wanna see it!

 

Hey, that's a good idea! If you could do a setup where it'll continually record and just re-record over the old stuff when it's out of space, it'll be kinda like airplane's black box! Probably save a lot of grief when you got into an accident not of your own fault and get in trouble for it!

I wonder if any of the camcorders out there can do this already... if not, for those tapeless (hard disk based) camcorder, this ought to be easy to implement....

 

Not sure what you mean by direct. Do you mean stepping out of the cab and having a face to face? Or them flipping us off as they are cutting in front? It would be pretty rare to have a face to face confrontation. We can't/don't just whip to the side of the road, park and step out as much as we would wish to sometimes.

I read in the news about the lady that chased down the driver and tried to block him with her body at a scale. Was that Maine or VT? The driver couldn't see her and ran over her, killing her. I'm sure as he was crossing the scale he was watching his mirrors not expecting someone to through their body in front of his grill. I feel bad for her family, but it's the lack of commonsense on the road that is the most frustrating to us. It endangers us and innocents.

I firmly believe that all drivers should try to get a state and plate # and start calling 911 more often. Most professional drivers are more than happy to call back a plate number of a reckless driver. Remember to get the state that issued the plate as quite often the reckless driver is from a neighboring state (don't care if they are pissing in the neighbor's yard).

Good luck, stay safe.

 

I've seen more than my share of idiot 4-wheelers before I came off the road to dispatch- bad merges, cutting off, etc- everything already mentioned before- I've always loved the race-the-truck-to-the-offramp-and-cut-2-lanes-to-get-off-the-highway run as well...

I will add something for the 4-wheelers out there, since I've experienced it more than a few times as well. I've had to have discussions with a couple of our drivers who in their impatience yank a hard left and slide their truck into a traffic opening in the passing lane 2' longer than their truck. One of them happened to the president of our company, with our truck cutting him off- that went well.

Also, I never passed on what I knew to be a long uphill grade if my truck was set at 70MPH (maxed out) and the truck I was passing was running 68-69MPH because I knew it would result in something dumb coming out of the 4-wheeler when I passed the truck, and he passed me. I just avoid the issue by not passing until I know I can do it without really pissing everyone off- just not worth the hassle.

Best one I ever saw was a Honda Civic trying to race a truck onto the highway and the truck was to his rear trailer tandems past him, but the moron in the Honda decided that he needed to get in front of the truck instead, so he floors it, stupid rear wing and all, made it to the fuel tanks when he ran out of road, slammed on his brakes and put 'er into the concrete barrier.

If everyone would just take some time, the roads would be so much nicer...

Bad idea...

 

yeah, but don't you know... your time is worth 14 quadrillion dollars per second, you can't AFFORD to take time!

people used to be courteous, because they believed in the 'do unto others' lesson... today it's more like 'screw unto others' because four seconds of your life is too dang important!

i get mad at people who drive 45 in a 30 mph residential street by my house. 9 times out of 10, i roll up to the red light they're stopped at before it changes... did that extra 15 mph, which would maybe be the difference between putting someone in a wheelchair or in a grave, really amount to much?

 

Well this post looks to be three weeks old oh well, I just have a gripe about an SUV yesterday on highway 70 eastbound in st louis. Well it was raining and it seems this person didnt wanna look where she was goin, yanno, talkin on her cell phone and all, cant distract her conversation, but she dang near made me cut into a Maverick flatbed after she wanted over in my lane. I had to back off quick but thank god she got back into her lane qiuck after seein me there. the thing is that this flatbedder was wanting into my lane at the same time and I was backing off to give him plenty of room to get over. If I had a choice Id prefer to be dry roadkill rather than wet lol.