70 Hours On Duty

Trucking Truth

(This entry hosted by yours truly)

Presents the new game:

70 in 8™!!

Materials needed:

• 8 small cups. The little cups you get at McBurger to put ketchup in would be great.
• 1 small bowl
• 70 small counters: pennies, paperclips, peanuts, Cornuts - something small you can move around a bit.
• pencil & paper

Set up:

Put the paper down in front of you. On the far side of the paper, line up seven cups, left to right. Put the last cup on the paper in front of you. Put the 70 counters into the bowl, near the single cup.

The row of cups represent the last seven days. The one on the left is the A Week Ago cup. The one on the right is the Yesterday cup.

The single cup in front of you represents today. The bowl simply holds the counters. The 70 counters represent the total hours you get to use in 8 days. BTW, the counters represent both driving and on duty hours - no difference between them.

Play:

Now, put any amount of counters between 0 and 14 into the Today cup. That's how many hours you worked. (Hey, 0 counters means you took a day off!)

Shout "End of shift - midnight!", shift the line of cups to the left so the A Week Ago is pushed to the left and there's room on the right for a new Yesterday cup. Take the Today cup, and since it's past midnight that's the new Yesterday cup. (With counters in it.) The A Week Ago cup had been pushed out and had no more use. Pour any counters from the A Week Ago cup back into your bowl. Place the empty cup down in front of you - it's your new Today cup.

Continue this process for seven "days". Count the counters in the bowl. You can only work that many hours "today", up to 14. If you're already out of counters you get a day off, whether you like it or not.

Look in the current A Week Ago cup. You haven't called "Midnight!" yet, but you can see how many counters you'll get when it is midnight.

Some days you'll drive hard and you can drop 11 or more counters into Today. Some days you are lucky to get a 3 hour short haul.

Play the game. Watch what happens when you try to keep the same number of counters in all the cups. What happens when you bust your butt three days (10-14 counters a day) in a row. How long must you wait to "get those hours back"? Can you plan your day when you can see how many counters you will get after midnight?

Note Taking:

The driver's paper logbook has a column on the right titled "Recap". Starting at the BOTTOM, the numbers run in order from Yesterday back to A Week Ago at the top. The deal there is to total all seven days (not counting Today). If you take that total away from 70, that should equal the number of Counters in your bowl - the number of hours you can work Today. Use your paper & pencil and record in columns the counter counts in each bowl. See if that matches up.

I want that for my birthday.