Whats the most tired you have ever been?

The most tired? Right now. I just drove 11 hours from Portland to NorCal to get home.

 

Randy Travis and meatloaf in a movie together....there is no possible way for that not to be pure cinematic gold! Lol.

 

Haha!! It’s been a looong time since I’ve seen it but I think that’s the premise, truckers get super tired and hallucinate a black dog. As far as trucking movies go it’s no Smokey and the Bandit, but then again what could possibly compare?

 

One bad night I dropped inside the trailer. The reality did not have any meaning. Forklift man got out built a chair out of pallets and stuck me in there and said set tight, help coming.

Hosptial put me into a private room set a IV in place and said you are going to go to sleep and we will deal with your body until you get rested.

That took two days in ICU monitoring and staffing etc. Including chemical support on IV in exchange of actual food. (Funny how that goes. Feeding a trucker like me with liquid this and that in IV) Rested for another day. Ran some tests then handed me some real food to eat.

By evening I was feeling my oats and wanted OUT of there.

They let me out on the 4th day. Payphone called dispatch. There you area you littke (Bad word) wtf is going on with you.

Hung up and quit on the spot. Took a week before I stopped being angry with them. Unemployment was awarded after I produced hospital records, logs and so on.

That episode was not over. Sittng down to eat a good meal and you felt the heart turn over like a delicate glass waiting to break and it was about 2 months before i got my life and energy back. 165 pounds and a infant could whip me bad with a spoon.

The loads leading up to that final collapse in the trailer can only be described as load morning by hand, unload at dinner, Reload 1 hour later to be somewhere else by morning repeat.

I did nine days and eight nights prior to the body breaking along with the mind in a internal chemistry problem.

I know the hospital took a great deal of blood. A box of needle, IV and started filling 30 vials. fill fill fill. Bleed me dry. When I started having not quite enough red cells they stopped pulling blood and had the information they were after.

I promised myself I will never run that way again. I don't care who is in dispatch asking. That would be one of the very first demands I made of a employer when they ask what can we do to accomodate (ADA) you. I told them you get me in writing a signed paper that I will not on daily load and unloads with driving day and night. Because I will absolutely quit.

I was more professional after that, not necessarily a quitter. And the company did better and so I stick around a while with loyalty.

There is one thought that haunts me to this day.

Burning that candle at both ends between the lumping labors and the driving back and forth across the GWB so hard as I did, I feel confident in saying that my life span is probably shorten by 15 year or so. However, when I quit trucking itself. My wife watched me sleep in 2009 at home and it was about 6 months plus 3 of physical therapy related to hot wet towels on major muscle groups that had locked on me. Two years of uncle sam paid therapy gave me back my muscles.

I hope all of the rest I got in the last decade will have erased that burning the candle at both ends.

And the worst part? I call it a month without a memory. When you are past tired and dangerously fatigued, your memory function in the brain is kaput. If you pushed it anymore there was a real possible out side of that falling down in the trailer some form of serious mental illness or collapse that would have me institutionalized at Springfield in Maryland. I have about 8 classmates who were committed to that place from the deaf school. They would be comfortable, but medicated as necessary and fed well as well as plenty of TV. But are deliberately not given any project or hobbies that can be converted to a weapon in that place. It is not a place anyone needs to go.

I talked too much in this post, I thank you for the patience.

When you are tired, get yourself rested. And it's not necessarily about that 1000 miles you did today. There are other forms of tired. When I get that bad I go to the Tidewater and Chesapeake and just decompress for a month.

Then I can motivate to get into that truck and run the same tired loads before. If you over did it, you will learn to hate the truck, then hate the loads and work your way over towards hating the people pushing you.

I ask you this. Why have you not quit and gone home yet? Are you some glutton for self abuse and so on? What will it take to save you from a situation where your value as a trucker has gone away once serious mental illnesses from your overdoing hard work for very long has set in. In some cases it can ruin your future with the wife and children. They will have to come visit you.

No thanks. I will never be that tired again short of all out war with our Nation in the future.

 

The most tired I can remember being was a few years ago up in Minnesota. I had driven all night through a whiteout in North Dakota because all the lots were full and the shoulder was NOT a safe place to stop. I made my first drop and headed north on 35 doing fine, so I thought, but there were cars spinning out in front of me and as soon as I let up on the accelerator they'd go away.... Fine, it's just hallucinations, I can do this. When the spinning cars started colliding with one another, I had had enough. The book says rest area 2mi up, I can do that but *%@$ it's full! Screw it, park on shoulder in broad daylight with hazards on...in 30sec I'm asleep...until Mr. State patrolman wakes me up and asks for logbook. Warning for parking on shoulder and told to 'fix' logbook "once I get off the road.
I got off extremely easy that day and haven't repeated that scenario again.

 

I was a spotter for a small company moving about 5-10 trailers per hour with a regular daycab. We had 3 spotters running 8 hour shifts each. One guy was on vacation so we were doing 2 shifts 12 hours each. I was almost done my shift and the other guy called out twice in a row. So I worked my 12, his 12, my 12, his 12 again, my 12, and was finally able to go home. I was so tired it wasn’t even funny.

Once I was rounding the corner of the building and caught the reflective tape of the orange cone in side mirror and thought it was a zombie construction worker out to kill me.

Prior to that a few years earlier I did like a 3 day video gaming session with some buddies.

 

It was years ago, while listening to an ex-girlfriend rant....psycho