Allentown, Day One

oooof.

I am, at long last, in the coziness of my beautiful room at the days inn (miraculously it is a single with a very big bed.
typically there would be two people per room as long as the truck company is paying.)
Today was deeply dull. Orientation, they called it and i suppose i was getting 'orientated.'
the morning began, after showering etc. with a drizzly dark morning walk over to the "Spruce Room" a cubical off the main hall way in this motel which feels sort of like a only slightly scaled down public highschool. A typically grizzly crew of drivers had congregated there and soon enough in came a woman, a tall skinny probably not very old but older looking in that highly homely Pennsyllvania sort of way. She had a lists. "Co-drivers sign in here, students over here."
I had no idea what she meant as no one had explained it to me just as no one then explained that I was neither of these things but was in fact going to orientation and that meant i should just get right on the van which i then did and was whisked off to the training. The driver was again typical, an old man, somehow grotesque and needlessly verbose.
he welcomed us to the van and sleepily rumbled through the rules, "no drinking, no eating no smoking, no one sits in the front seat, the seat belt is broken, the way i'm going to take you is the best way, there are other ways and these other guys they'll go the other ways but the way i am going its the way that makes the most sense. there are other shuttles throughout the day and I'll be driving those at 8:45, 9:45, 10:45, 11:45, and 12:45. now that's my last run, you get on t 3 or 4 it'll be someone else but before then, it'll be me. now I don't just do that, I also work security and right now they got me working the allentown fair and thats real nice but i live twenty, twenty two, twenty five miles from here. i come in here at 6:30 and they got me working there til midnight sometimes and it just don't make sense to go 25 miles so i just stay at the hotel.
Well here we are I thank you very much for being so nice, good luck to you all and when you get those trucks be careful there's a lot of crazies out there i seen a bunch of people, guys out there in these four wheelers pullin right in front of a semi on a wet day like today. but thanks for being so nice, you guys were great and good luck to you, by now."
We had all sat perfectly silently and now someone opened the door and out we poured.
The day was so grey. The building was so squat and ugly but there was the Werner Blue Arrow. In we went and to the left down a knotty pined hallway hung with driver recognition plaques. Beautiful.
We sat in the class room. Plastic and metal tables in 5 long rows oriented toward the front of the room where a projector and laptop were set up and ready to be read. All around the room were glossy posters illuminating the finer points of defensive driving. In the back of the room were those carpet covered cubicle dividers which set up an "office" for the instructors. No one came out for a while. 7:00am, the time we were supposed to start, came and went. i could here them back there. What were they doing!
the this guy came in. oh fuck what an obnoxious son of a bitch. He had one of those flat fat retarded looking faces. He had gotten lost on his way that morning. He sat right next to me. He talked incecently and peppered his speech with fuck this and shit that. It seemed he really had an axe to grind but I couldn't quite figure out what it was.
It is a common condition in this industry people who are mad, people who are convinced that people out there are trying to rip them off. Inevitably these people are woefully stupid and this guy was no exception.
"I know how to get anywhere, I drove for CRST for a couple months they were trying to fuck me over, they were only paying me 10 cents a mile! and I was like fuck that I'm outta here this fuckin sucks but I know how to get any where, try me."
Guy on the other side of him: "how about Houston?"
Well you just gotta get on 40 that'll get you to texas, 40 goes through texas...I'm not really familiar with texas. 35 goes through texas right?"
Me (irritated): Well 35 goes through central texas.
Him: yeah Houston.
Me: Houston is more like east texas.
Him: yeah, east central.
Me: (silently gives up)
(actual answer, from Allentown, PA to Houston: I-78 west to Harrisburg, I-81 south to White Pine, Tennessee, I-40 west to Knoxville, I-75 south to Chattanooga, I-59 south to Slidell, LA, I-12 west to Baton Rouge, I-10 west to Houston. Total miles: 1547.)
Finally out they came from behid the burlap curtains.
Jason, one of the 'orientatators' was a small guy of mixed hispanic and african descent and a thick hispanic/new york accent. It occurred to me that Allentown was only 2 hours from Manhattan. He had clearly done this a number of times and just because we were new to it didn't mean that he wanted to make it interesting. He rattled through powerpoint slides monotonously reading directly from them. I felt so taught. (the chinese food has just arrived!)
It went on like this all day, jason reading us things seeming terribly bored we sat being terribly bored, They have found a brilliant way of haveing you not drive but get the same mind numbing exhausting boredom as being on the road all day. For the first half of the morning i sat tighly, miserably until i was finally called to have my physical and drug test. After that i was much relieved, Literally!
We talked about so much. i mean we looked at powerpoints and were read to about so much. It sucked. It sucked terribly. At about 4:00 pm we were set free to complete some CBT (computer based training) watching more poewrpoint and poorly made videos and then answering questions in modules on such fantastic topics as: Pre Trip Inspections! Quallcomm!* Per Diem Pay! and Sexual Harassment! so great.
i got those done in no time despite the retardedness next to me and then went into the driver loung and watched Law and Order: Criminal Intent and sucked on a jolly rancher.
Then I went outside and talked on the phone as I walked around the yard. there were a lot of Nestle trucks, their connection to Werner i have not yet figured out.
Allentown seems an odd nook in the trucking industry. Not really on a main route. Maybe an outpost of NYC, maybe of Philadelphia. perpetually cloudy and full of people who are unsettling at least.
at 7:00 the van arrived to take us back to the motel and we piled in like the japanese subway. it was awfully close.
I came home, to my big single bed and ordered some chinese food which, as you know, arrived. While typing I at it. burning my tongue. i have put some of it on the air conditioner to remain cool enough, i hope to not get overly putrid by tomorrow evening.
Oh the life I have missed.


*the satellite communication computer that looks like some early gaming system made by Tandy or Texas Instruments.