Bet you didn't even know I was gone. My internet went down yesterday and a tech came out today to see what was up. We figured out that apparently, when the last tech came out here to do an equipment upgrade, he hadn't firmly seated the coax cable into its jack, which resulted in some intermittent problems until yesterday when my daughter must have nudged it with her toe and popped it completely out. Today's tech dude went ahead and added a few tweaks while he was here, most importantly locking my system onto the antenna with the strongest signal.
I found this article somewhat interesting: 10 Most Bizarre Cargo Spills. A couple of times I hauled about 33,000 pounds of masa from Laredo up to a restaurant distribution place on the east side, and I bet that would have made an horrific mess if it had spilled. So now you also have some trivia you'll never need: the most masa you can pack in a 53-foot trailer is right at 33,000 pounds.
Once I was hauling 26,000 pounds of toilet paper (again, the most you can pack in a 53-foot trailer). That was the time I got stuck in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Wyoming for 2 days because of a winter storm. Everyone was sitting there bemoaning getting stuck there (if you're wheels aren't moving, you aren't making money). I broke in on the CB and said, "Well, I'm hauling 26,000 pounds of toilet paper, so if anybody needs some, it's ten dollars a roll." I don't know if anyone thought that was funny or not.
Another load with the potential for a big mess that I hauled was 30,000+ pounds of cat litter. There was another time I had a load of 16,000 pounds of empty cat food cans. Not a big potential for making a mess there, but it seemed funny to me at the time. That was my first trip into L.A, actually an industrial subdivision called Vernon, which I learned truckers often refer to as L.A., L.A.
Then there was the time I had a trailer full of Betty Crocker brownie mix. Cases and cases of it, although I don't recall the weight. One case got torn during unloading, so they said, "This one's yours." None of the individual boxes had been damaged--only the big case box itself. So I brought a whole case of Betty Crocker brownie mix home. I thought we would never eat all that stuff.
Actually I think they use cat litter -- or something very similar -- to clean up spills on the roadways. So if a tanker crashes and starts spilling fuel all over the place, it might be something of a good thing if a kitty litter truck crashes right on top of it.
ReplyDelete