Help please college student who works at a truck stop.

My own family do not understand me as a trucker. The ones who have never had contact with any. And suddenly they have a trucker who goes out and stays out for months or almost a year then comes back as one comes back from war. I need a few days to hibernate and learn how to be a kid, son, brother or uncle etc whatever it may be to that side of the family.

Trucking is a journey in life. Not just a job. Many people would secretly want to drive a big rig and thats ok, but only a few will still be driving them after a certain amount of years. All the rest have been whittled down by death, disability, prison, DAC's out, etc.

And by the same token Trucking is not easily reduced to say a survey. I see it as based on a story to be told. Depending on the lesson one would like to teach if possible. In a form a non trucker can understand.

I remember one encounter at our local grocery where two people were pretty much giving the produce a really hard time. Either they were picky and wanted pristine fresh or cannot be bothered to wait on the stock boy to come around with his pallets to restock with fresh and buy at that time.

I asked them a pardon for a moment and let me see the stickers on the food. I found one from Yakima WA, in this case Apples. I told them I used to haul these exact apples from that specific shipper up there in trucking and explained what happens and how these are hauled from there to here. (Arkansas) and ultimately in front of them.

They got a lesson that day, they never knew. Now they do.

 

OP asked for H-E-L-P.

If OP had put forth effort, YES by all means help. Posting a link on a trucking forum is NOT putting forth effort. OP didn't even check for grammatical errors. ZERO effort. You don't do someone else' homework for them. You do not wipe the arse of someone whose asking for help just because he doesn't want his own fingers to stink. You do not do someone else' work because they are too lazy to do it themselves YET expect to get paid.

 

You forgot he only needs 15 responses. My friend's 7th grader has a statistical survey class project. The kid needs 100 responses. Why 100? Because anything less is statistically insignificant.

If a college class accepts a project based on 15 data points, then then that class is a waste of time.

Maybe I'm cranky and need some cookies and a nap but helping some one do a half hearted effort on a half baked task is just going to result in more guys coming thru my truck that can't figure out if we are going downhill or uphill.

 

Huh? What are you talking about? He only asked for participation in a survey, we don't know what other work has to be done with this project. It took 5 min to answer the questions. It was nothing harmful, if you opted to not participate then ok..... I don't know why this has to be bigger than "yes I'll participate" or "no thank you."

 

I'd probably do both and compare the results. It might be fun to listen to the in-person comments at the lunch counter, though.

 

A little bit of cognitive thinking and understanding of our industry will show you which stories are lunch counter.

Example.

Point to the lawman quietly eating his coffee and drinking lunch in his own booth. Tell the counter that he just finished inspecting you back at such a such a scale. The pile of tickets valued in excess of the entire asset value of your Boss's company, you have been placed OOS for everything under the sun. And so forth so on. Embellishing this that and other as you go in story telling. //lunch counter

Anyone who is a trucker long enough will instantly know that previous paragraph is full of BS on so many levels. For example if that Officer had put me OOS, I would not be there at the truckstop any time soon. I would have to stay where I am OOS until a certain period of time passed.

Thats partly being creative when people tell stories the way they do sometimes at the counter. Almost as if they are trying to relive the crazy ghost stories from Scout camp or something.

Another problem with the counter is when you get 10 drivers lined up you are going to get 10 different answers to whatever it is that is the question for the day.

Maybe a nice survey would do the trick in this particular case. =)

 

We, you and I, would go all in...a trucking version of Herman Melville.

 

You may disagree, but I did actually try to help him.

 

Maybe so, In over fifty years of trucking I've picked up a few stories. I try not to inflict them on other people though.

 

Guys, may I ask a favor? Every time the word survey is used in a post the post goes directly to the moderation file and doesn't get posted until somebody on staff finds it and moves it to the thread. We could possibly miss some good posts that way and they get posted out of order.
Is there another word we could use? Or maybe just put ##### instead of the actual word?
This is a good thread and I'd hate to see anything come up missing.