I guess I'll admit it now, it's been long enough...
When I was 16 about 100 years ago, I was driving a DM 600 Mack for this cheapskate that paid us 3 employees a whopping $4.00 an hour each for driving, and he wanted those 10 loads from the quarry to his plant every day.
He was a little sawed off Italian fella that screamed, not spoke at you no matter what he was saying. A real meatball of a guy.
The trucks were all junk, no brakes, and gigantic steel bodies that we'd load to the gunnels every load with shot rock from Tilcon in North Branford, Ct., and haul to his old dilapidated crusher in Hamden, about a 10 mile one way run. The levers for the PTO and the dump pump were between the seats, and they were really long so the PTO would jump in gear on you when you least expected it.
I just got onto I-91 empty and was pouring the coals to that powerhouse of a 237, and slid her into the biggest cog it had in that quadbox, when another truck came flying up alongside me and was pointing, waving, going about nuts. I'm thinking, "what's wrong with this fool" to myself, when all of a sudden...KAAABAAANGGG!!!I look in the mirror and see pieces of the exit 7 sign streaming all over the highway, aluminum shrapnel everywhere, and my body's straight up in the air. I mowed the exit sign completely off it's perches with the cab protector. I jumped on the pump lever to let the body down, but it didn't come down because it had one of those old style cam-over hoist systems that if it went past the point of no return, you had to slam the brakes on to get it to spring forward past the cam. So here I am now, sweat beading off my forehead, slamming the brakes on repeatedly on the interstate of all places, and finally get the body down. Unfortunately though, the cab protector was bent up 90 degrees like a wind deflector, or "polish snowplow" as the old timers often referred to them as. The corner welds were torn, so I'm going down the road with this enormous steel billboard flopping in the breeze.
I never heard a single word to this day about the damage to the sign on the highway, but boy did I hear from old Mr. Esposito about having to fix the cab guard. It cost him about an hour with his loader holding it down and about 6 welding rods that night, but he wasn't happy unless he was screaming at somebody for something.:drinkup
Had that been a bridge instead of that highway sign, it wouldn't have been so pretty.
About a month later, I had to wheel into a gas station to use the restroom in a bad way...I mean I went in there backwards.
I parked the truck so all I did was dove out of the seat and into the mens room. There was no maxi brakes, just a trolley brake lever on the steering column. No wheel chocks either.
I open the restroom door a few minutes later expecting to just leap back up into the saddle, but there's no truck. I look left, no truck. I look right and hoo boy...there it is. Parked half way on top of a Country Squire station wagon's hood. That was a tough one to explain. The trolley brakes specifically say right on the levers themselves "NOT FOR PARKING"...I rationalized my way out of it by saying I really wasn't PARKING per say... I was just at a temporary standstill. Kind of a Bill Clinton deal.
I still didn't get fired though. Guess it's tough to find good 4 dollar an hour help, even back then, eh?
