Profile For Michael C.

I wasn't going to post since I'm not a trucker and Rainy D called you out already for what bothered me, which is that you showed up at a trucking forum to basically insult everyone. As a guest in someone's home you should show a little respect. On the other hand, I do believe you're a truck driver, so you have some legitimacy in doing that.

But as someone who was in education at one point I've got to comment. You know, you're not a teacher not because you voted for Trump or because you're a Christian. I can guarantee you it's because you were a terrible teacher. How do I know that? You come in here bragging that you're lazy and don't want to work hard. You don't think anyone notices that? You only like trucking because you believe you don't do anything but go straight and avoid accidents. Again, you don't think anyone notices this attitude? You're pointing the finger at everyone but yourself. You're not wrong that education's politically sensitive. And if you're obsessed with politics, which you seem to be since you can't stop bringing it up, then trucking may be better suited for you. But I'll tell you that as a former teacher, and now someone who works for a municipality, I come across folks with various political and religious beliefs and it's never, ever a problem. It only is if you make it one. So I guess what happened is that you couldn't hack it and started to blame your personal beliefs for it. And there's really no shame in not being able to hack it in education--like trucking (though not as bad), the turnover's brutal.

I also think it's strange that you equated motor vehicle accidents with hitting a student. That you ever thought of hitting a student at all, frankly. Truckers get in accidents. It happens. Teachers don't hit students. But G-Town pointed out that this story where your friend got into multiple accidents is probably BS.

You really don't know what you're talking about in your posts. I don't know of any PhD students spending 10 years "paying money" to obtain their degrees. I run with a pretty educated crowd, several PhDs, and none of them paid for their degrees and all of them are employed at universities. Not all of them are in tenure-line positions, this is true, but they're all employed full-time and, again, none of them "paid" for their degrees and none of them did it in ten years. If you pay for a PhD then you did it wrong. Those positions are almost always funded. You remember the big debate surrounding the latest tax bill, that the government was going to tax not only stipends but also fellowships and tuition remissions? Enough said. And if your friend (assuming he's real--you have lots of convenient friends to fill gaps in your stories) can't find a job as a math teacher, then he too must be terrible. You can walk into almost any school with a math background and get hired.

It also doesn't make sense to me why you keep comparing teaching to trucking. They are completely different industries. Why would teachers receive bonuses? They're almost always unionized workers. No bonuses, period. And, yes, you have job interviews. That's not unique to education. Let's be real here. Truckers work hard for their money, contrary to what you seem to believe. They have questionable job security and tremendous wage stagnation. You don't seem to understand wage stagnation since you keep claiming that you can make more money now as a trucker than as a beginning teacher or graduate student, as if that would be your pay for the rest of your life (not to mention all of the union benefits that come with teaching). As someone from a blue-collar background who's seen first hand a wide-range of professions, I think it's ludicrous to act like truckers have it better than teachers. What you mean to say, I hope, is that they're very DIFFERENT professions, and they should not really be compared at all, and that you prefer the trucking to the education profession.

With that said, you're right, education's a lot of work. It should be, to keep whiners like you out of the classroom. Why would anyone want you educating his/her child? Once again you admit to having basically no work ethic!

And, yes, I wrote his/her.

IMO, you don't need advice on how to operate a part-time gravy train. You need advice on growing up.

My last reply looks like I'm saying the OP only recently became a safe driver. Not my intention, so let me clarify.

Except for an at-fault accident when I was 18, I drove with a basically spotless driving record for fifteen consecutive years (not a truck driver). According to an insurance actuary, at least, I was a "safe" driver, especially when I got married. Yay for marriage rates.

Upon reflection, though, I wouldn't say I was a particularly "safe" driver. I was a normal driver. My speed limit tended to be "whatever the car in front's going, minus two." I tailgated, though didn't call it that. Slammed my brakes at the last second. Talked on the phone, paying no attention to what went on around me. I had no reason to believe what I did was dangerous or wrong because everyone else did it, too.

The problem is that driving has an unreliable feedback loop. The two primary outcomes of driving are binary: did you get in an accident and did you receive a citation? And these events are rare enough, for most people, that when they DO happen, it's easy to attribute them to luck. Get a citation and blame the cop: biased, jerk, control freak, needs to "fill a quota." Have an accident and divine a thousand reasons for why you're not at fault or that maybe you shoulder some of the blame but certainly not as much as the other driver. Given the rarity of these events, then, it's easy to believe driving's inherently safe and to shelter in statistics--yes, many people die each year in traffic accidents, but look at how many people drive period!

So when I suggest OP might not have been paying attention to cautious driving, I mean he might've been like me and driving like everyone else. "Normal" driving works for almost every circumstance--that's what obviously makes it "normal." If it didn't work, then it would've been weeded out long ago and replaced by other behaviors. But clearly in some circumstances the normal driver will be at a disadvantage--too close to brake safely, too fast to swerve, whatever. It's when the excellent drivers on this forum and out on the road, few and far between they may be, might avoid an accident that a "normal" driver wouldn't. That's the problem of the largely results-oriented way to interpret driving. The people here don't do that. When you get in a near-miss, it probably haunts you and you consider what went wrong, what you could've done differently, so on and so forth.

Now, when I stopped driving normally and instead safely, I started annoying people. As a normal driver, I drove like most everyone else so it was rare to bother anyone. It happened, but very rarely. Now I notice wild gesticulations, obscene gestures, and whatever else satisfies the childish whims of road ragers at a much greater frequency. Don't get me wrong: it's not common. It's not like every time I hit the road I'm getting flipped off. But it happens more. Going the speed limit is obviously the number one offender, since every motorist behind me has a chance to get upset (unlike following distance, which really only happens when we're in heavy congestion and drivers want to get up to the next car asap because, well, because I suppose they want to exercise some control over the helpless situation and it FEELS better to ride a bumper than a car length back in stop-n-go). Most motorists don't get upset at my observing the limit. But some do, even on the highway when there's ample opportunity for them to pass. It happens.

When you start ACTIVELY driving safely--as you MUST do to operate a tractor trailer--you annoy people. It's the burden of safe driving. OP, I don't know if you were like me. Maybe you've always driven cautiously. If you're now noticing the impatient behavior, though, it might be the case that, like me, you didn't always drive so cautiously and now must come to grips with the fact that people will get upset with you for being in their way.

You're the good driver, they're not. It's a general rule of thumb that the masses do everything terribly and don't appreciate that they're doing everything terribly. Driving's no different. You just learn to ignore it.

Think about that last sentence....

Ignoring an impatient driver is not a safe or professional practice. Depending on the nature of their hurried behavior, you may need to take evasive action to avoid an accident. Maintain an increased level of caution whenever in heavy traffic, when turning, when someone is merging onto the interstate or approaching to pass.

You're right--I meant "ignore" more as a state of mind, not an actionable way of driving. Of course you should never ignore information on the road, and someone's aggression/impatience is useful information. That's a good reminder: the way to handle impatient drivers is to account for their impatience.

The OP was wondering, though, about how to not let aggressive drivers get to him. And I'd say outside of meditation or some trancelike state, hopefully not drug-induced, the way to cope is through experience. ****ing people off is unavoidable, especially, it seems, when deviating from the norm (i.e. driving too aggressively or too cautiously). There's no way around this. It's fairly common that someone gets upset with me for observing safe following distance. I mean, it doesn't happen every day, or every week, but it does happen several times throughout the year. Eventually it doesn't bother you anymore. I'm going to guess that OP has started driving safely relatively recently, as part of his trucking education, and that's why it's sticking out.

You're the good driver, they're not. It's a general rule of thumb that the masses do everything terribly and don't appreciate that they're doing everything terribly. Driving's no different. You just learn to ignore it.

If you're not doing anything wrong, and there's nothing wrong with your truck, then it may be a way to alert you that they're passing. I live in New England and haven't noticed it (as a four-wheeler), but when I visited Delhi a few years ago, where everyone drives--well, there's no sugarcoating it, terribly--my cab drivers would ALWAYS flash their lights when passing trucks. They would semi-auto press the beams as fast as they could like they were playing a video game. I asked one driver why he did that and he said so the truck knew he was passing.

Another Lurker comes out of the shadows with a really great post!

Welcome aboard Michael - I'm hoping we hear more from you. It's nice to hear from a sane four wheeler!

Not much else I can add unfortunately. Maybe stories from my dad of driving a rig through downtown Boston in an ice storm. I probably know that story by heart, at this point.

Thank you for that post, Michael. A professional driver will be paying attention and doing whatever is possible to operate that vehicle safely in the interest of protecting not only themselves, but other "less than stellar drivers" on the roadways with them.

Are there boneheaded truck drivers who need their CDL revoked? Absolutely, but luckily there are more conscientious commercial drivers, in my opinion anyway, than there are boneheads. Sadly the boneheads just stand out more giving us all a bad rep.

By the way, what you are doing.. situational awareness, always leaving yourself an out, looking well ahead for potential hazards, etc.. that's good driving and what is commonly referred to as "The Smith System". I was taught that as a part of driver's education back when I was 15 getting my drivers permit back in the dinosaur age lol. Many CDL schools and trucking companies teach that even now. It was "developed" back in the 1950's I believe.

Yeah...that term's vaguely familiar. This excellent post on the site really captures the sentiment, I think, with "forecast driving":

https://www.truckingtruth.com/trucking_blogs/Article-3035/trying-to-teach-proper-driver-forecasting

Maybe it's odd to write this here, but I've lurked on this forum for a while and I wanted to just write some words of appreciation.

A few years ago I got into hypermiling. Not drafting or anything dangerous. Basically knowing how to drive efficiently and safely: obeying speed limits, observing following distance as well as topography and, most importantly, paying attention to everything on the road--you know, predicting other drivers' behavior. So I suppose I'm not really a hypermiler--I leave the ice vests at home, thank you very much--but I like the term for its economy (of language). Much easier to write "hypermiler" than "fuel efficient driver," even with its uneasy connotations.

Anyhow, after hypermiling for a sustained period of time, I began to appreciate something I'd ignored in over a decade of commuting: that no one, and I mean no one, knew how to drive. To be fair, I hadn't known how to drive either. In my pre-hypermiling days, I was the jackass barreling down 95 as fast as possible and hopping lanes, your typical gas-pedal-gas-pedal impatient nutjob. Yet now I noticed, for perhaps the first time, that ordinary driving was DANGEROUS--and I'd been in two serious accidents before. Those accidents, I realized, were not what I'd originally interpreted them to be: anomalous, freak, once-in-a-lifetime events. They were the casual yet brutal result of poor situational awareness. It felt like I had woken up to a nightmare where distracted and drunk drivers were out to kill me. It suddenly seemed miraculous that motorists made it to the grocery store without rolling over.

But one class of drivers, I steadily realized, knew what it was doing: truck drivers. In fact, truck drivers were so demonstrably better than everyone else on the road that I started gravitating toward them, and, no, not to draft. To stay safe. Truckers were engaging in the sort of behavior that I had recently discovered to effectuate safe driving. Without question they are a cut above "four wheelers" and consequently I always feel safer around them. When they're behind me in traffic jams they stay at a safe distance. When they're in front of me they don't slam on their brakes. So on and so forth. Obviously some truck drivers are maniacs, just like everyone else, and I get out of their way asap. But the "maniac rate per x thousand drivers" is clearly way, way, way lower than it is with the general masses.

I've found the best "strategy" of safe driving is to predict what other drivers do. For example, some time ago I was in the middle lane passing someone, as I usually drive in the right-most lane around or slightly-below the posted speed limit. I noticed about a mile back some hotshot behind me trying to break the sonic barrier. The left lane was clogged with cars only going, I don't know, 85 mph, clearly not fast enough for his liking. I eased my foot off the gas, figuring that he was the type of driver who'd shoot into the right lane to try and weave between me and the car I was already passing--and sure enough that's exactly what he did. My passenger understood the sin I had committed and asked, "Why did you slow down and let that [insert vulgar term here] pass you? I would've sped up and cut him off." Of course you would have. Anyway, I present this anecdote because I feel like no one pays attention to anything and, when they do, it's to act like my passenger--an [insert vulgar term here]. When riding alongside family and friends they're straight tunnel visioning, at best examining mirrors when crossing lanes; my dad's an exception, but he was not only a lifelong commuter but a truck mechanic who once had a CDL, so I can't really count him. I stopped driving with an old friend in college because he once cut a semi off. Mortified, I asked if he had suffered a traumatic brain injury without my knowledge, and he shrugged it off with typical motorist logic: "If he slams into me, it's his fault." Right. Anyway, this forum contains considerable evidence of truck drivers exhibiting heightened levels of situational awareness. Post after post of drivers holding themselves to a high standard and always trying to figure out, in case of an accident, what they did wrong or could've done better. It's inspiring.

I've developed a great respect for you guys and gals over the years as a conscious driver/hypermiler. So I just wanted to say thanks. Not all of us four wheelers are distracted, drunk, or stupid. Some of us appreciate what you do and how you keep idiots safe from themselves. I shake my head whenever some fool cuts off a semi, as if the truck couldn't smash his SUV into smithereens. Then I remember that he's playing with professionals and they'll keep him safe, even if he doesn't know it.

In closing I'll echo what's been said here many times: that it's not only absurd but disgraceful that you're classified as "unskilled" workers. For those of you going into trucking, understand that it's an incredibly important job and we in this country do a miserable job appreciating it. Well. I appreciate it. Thanks.