Chapter Four - The Tire Man

Chapter Four - The Tire Man

I guess it was about the third day at the house when I had decided I needed to move a little.  I was getting sore from just sitting around, so I figured it was time the living room walls needed painting.  So, off to the lumber store I go to pick up supplies.  I needed things to do the job right, and the wife was glad to see me up and moving.  I guess working on the house got me to thinking why we decided to buy it in the first place.  We wanted a place to call our own, but more importantly, it was security for our old age.   Like the house, after I had gone through the first back injury, we decided to find a trucking company that would provide us with insurance and a good retirement plan.  Of course by this time I was well on my way to running legal.

So I started my gas hauling career.  I was hauling ninety-two hundred gallons of liquid explosive in the Atlanta, Georgia area, and I was not afraid of it.  What I was afraid of was what people did around it, especially when the truck was empty.  You see, gas does not burn.  It's the vapors that burn.  I cannot count the number of times that someone would pass me and then flip their cigarette out the window in front of me.  Owners of stations would come out to talk while they would smoke a cigarette as I was dropping the fuel, spewing vapors all over the place, and praying that the world did not explode in the next few minutes.  Once, a couple of teenagers walked up and sat under the vapor pipes and just starting flicking their cigarette lighters over and over again. It was as if they wanted to blow up.  No, the gas itself was never the problem.  It was always the people around the gas that scared me.

But, I stuck with it.  It was good pay and good benefits, and I was home every night.  It was all the things a man could want in a job that kept him close to home.  Things went pretty good for the first year.  Then it happened.  The owner of the company decided to retire, and the son decided to take over.  It was rumored that in the first year the son had the company; eighty percent of the office staff was replaced.  So far, up to this point, the drivers were left alone.  That was soon to change though.  As the company was changing, it finally came down to the shipping department.  We had a great lady that was over us.  She could do things that no man I had ever seen could do.  It was like the more she had on her plate, the better she did.  So five or six things at a time, and the next catastrophe was not even so much as a bump in the road for her.  She would just work right through one problem, and on to the next.  She would be on the phone to the house, hold a conversation with a driver in the office, and be working on paper work at the same time, and never miss a beat.  She was truly amazing if you ask me.

Her downfall, I think, was the fact that she treated her drivers like humans.  If they had a problem customer, she was right there to take charge of the situation.  She ordered top notch trucks for us to drive and only the best hoses and connections for us to work with.  We had a mechanic that came to our shop and did repairs as the drivers that drove the trucks said repairs needed to be done.  As everything went, we had the sharpest trucks driven by the best drivers in the area.  If you had a problem, you could just pick up the phone, and there would be ten drivers within seconds with the solution or on their way to help.  Never to this day, have I worked for a better person, and I miss her greatly.

All of that did not do a whole lot for a company that was now profit driven. It costs money to run such an operation, and the direction of the company had changed with the changing of the guard.  Now we were a company that was more interested in keeping as much of its profits as it could.  It no longer mattered how pretty the trucks were or how professional the drivers were, or how safe either was.  The word of the day was to cut costs and increase profits.  So out the door the best dispatcher I ever knew went.  And in came “Him”. I'm going to call him “Him” for the simple reason that my mother would not approve of any other name I would call him.  It was in our first drivers meeting with Him, when he spoke the words that would stick with him throughout his short tenure with us.  Standing up in front of the room, he first introduces himself.  Then he goes on to explain the new change of management.  Then, he gets into the new standards of operations, and (you're going to love this) he says, "Drivers are a dime a dozen.  Anyone not on board is welcome to find themselves a new job."

Half of everything Him just said was totally illegal or completely unsafe.  If we did not like it, we were free to leave.  Talk about a fired up bunch of drivers.  But, we settled down and tried to give Him a chance.  The first few weeks were not too bad.  The third week, things were starting to change.  I had come in and needed a tire replaced, and was informed of two things.  We no longer had the authority to have bad tires changed.  We needed to get approval from Him.  The second was that no tires would be changed until the new tire vendor was able to deliver the bulk shipment of tires that would be at least two weeks in the coming.  Him had shopped around and found a great deal on tires, and he was not about to waste a dime replacing what he thought would last until the new ones came in.  Nope, no sir, not Him; and if you did not like it, well, it was a well known fact around the company by now, that drivers were a dime a dozen.

By the time we finally received the new tires, I needed three changed on my truck alone.  The man simply would not change any tire, regardless of its condition, unless it just went flat on the road.  Then he would call out road service and grill the driver to find out why he had destroyed company property.  I had a steer tire that was so bad, I was riding on the steel belts and he still would not fix it.  So I did the only thing I could think of and keep my job.  I took a small piece of two by four with a nail in it to work with me.  Would you believe that when I arrived at my first stop, there was a nail right in the middle of that parking lot?  Go figure?  I mean, think about it, eighty thousand pounds of truck and load, ninety two hundred gallons of explosive gas riding around in down town Atlanta.  This man was putting not only my life at stake, but the life of any one that even got close to me on the roads, and for what? A freaking three hundred dollar tire out of over a million dollars a year in company profits.  The day the tires finally did come, one truck had seventeen out of eighteen tires replaced.  God only knows why the cheap bastard did not go ahead and replace the last one and save it for a spare while the truck was in the shop.  I mean after all, it was only two thirds the way worn out already.

Him reminded me of another company I used to work for years before.  At that time, I was still quite the renegade.  They had me in a cab-over Kenworth with a big four hundred horse power engine.  I remember one trip when the fuel pump went out on Two Eighty Five around Atlanta on a Friday afternoon. The governor in the fuel pump had broken and that left nothing to stop the engine from running faster and faster until it blew up.  Anything over twenty one hundred RPM's and you might start slinging parts through the block.  This, in my opinion, is never a good thing.  I thought, for sure, that they would have sent a tow truck.  Instead, they had me bring it in myself.  I would put it in gear, crank it up, the engine would run away.  When it was time to shift to a higher gear, I would turn the engine off, swap my gear, then crank the engine back up.  Fifty miles back to the shop, every gear has a chance to blow a ten thousand dollar engine apart.  Who am I to complain though? It was their truck, not mine.   When the mechanic put it back together, he called the boss out to check out the gauges he had on the pump.  Back in those days a man could do wonders with a button and spring.  About the time the boss said alright and walked away, my mechanic friend opened the fuel pump back up and set me up right nice.  I could sit at the bottom of Jellico Mountain in Tennessee at a dead stop, and with eighty thousand pounds of frozen chickens in the box; I could top the mountain at seventy miles an hour.  Man that truck would fly.

Ok, back to the point. This particular company was in love with "May Pops", as they are commonly called.  May Pops are cheap recaps on second or third time around casings.  That means the casings have been recapped and ran on the highway for well over a million miles some times.  We called them "May Pops" because you never knew just when they may pop.  But you always knew they would pop.  I told the boss one day, after the second time that I had two May Pops blow on the trailer side by side, laying the axle on the ground at seventy plus miles per hour.  He seemed to be getting a little aggravated at the lost tires and cost of time and road calls.  Anyway, he asked me, what was the deal on me blowing so many tires?  I simply told him that if he insisted on running fifty mile per hour tires on a truck he was dispatching at eighty miles per hour, he could expect to pop a few tires.  Two things kept happening after that.  One was  that he kept buying May Pops and the second thing was that I never got paid a dime for all the time I spent on the side of the road getting those May Pops replaced.