8/28/10

Background story #1 - In sixth grade, I won the spelling bee at my elementary school.  I then went to the district-wide competition.  I made it to the final round.  I received my word and stepped to the microphone.  A•U•X•I•L•L•A•R•Y.  Bzzzzzzz!  Wrong!  And thus I learned a lesson that I've never forgotten to this day - how to spell auxiliary.

Background story #2 - I can't accurately convey to you just how badly I hate country music.  The whiny voices, the shitty guitar playing, the generic and boring stories... it makes my teeth grind.  Just so you know.

Can we tie these two background stories together with a tale from the road.  By golly, I think we can.

When I got to the terminal on Friday morning and checked in with the overnight dispatcher, she asked which truck I was going to take.  I hadn't looked to see which ones were outside yet, so I told her that I would let her know once I picked one.  She suggested that I take the truck with the sleeper cab on it, since it doesn't get used much on weekends.  This would leave the day cabs for the guys delivering milk while I was rolling down to Tennessee and back.  No worries, I assured her.  The sleeper it is.

The truck itself is quite nice.  The bunk appears never to have been used and everything is squeaky clean inside.  Aside from that and the fact that the forward cab area is carpeted, the setup is essentially the same as that of our day cabs.  Automatic transmission, governed at 62mph, not a lot of horsepower, and so forth.  The radio is different though.  On the Macks that I usually drive, you can hit 'menu' and then the green button on the right to enter 'scan' mode.  Then, once you hear a song or station that you like, you hit the green button again to stop scanning.  After far too much tinkering, I never was able to figure out how to scan the stations with the radio in the sleeper truck.

Since I would have to flip through the stations manually, I was a little annoyed from the outset.  I decided to find a sports channel on AM or something to help pass the time for a while.  One more groovy thing about that radio - it doesn't pick up any AM stations.  Excellent.  Do you know what you get on FM while you roll down through the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee?  You get country music.  Lots and lots of country music.  Brutal.

After making the turn in Murfreesboro and getting through the demolition derby that was Nashville on Friday afternoon, I checked into the Super 8 in Franklin for my ten hour break.  The thought of another morning of country music was weighing heavily on my mind.  What can I say?  I don't have most of the stresses that normal people encounter.  Shit like this is pretty disturbing to me though.

I grabbed my overnight bag and started going through the little zipper pockets at the end.  This was the bag that I would take to the numerous Corleone family estates on Saturdays during football season back when I was out on the road.  Perhaps I would find something useful in there.  I had packed my clothes in haste after the cookout on Thursday, so I didn't really have a mental inventory of what else was already in the bag.

I found a little 3.5mm extension cable that I used to employ from time to time.  I would plug one end into my mp3 player or pocket radio and then plug the other end into the line-in jack on my computer.  It basically allowed the electronic devices to use my computer's speakers in place of headphones if I felt like listening to something that way.  This reminded me that there was one more thing that was different about the radio in the sleeper truck.  It had an AM function (that didn't work).  It had an FM function.  It had a CD player.  And it also had an AUX function.  You know what AUX stands for, of course.  So I was able to use the Pandora and Iheartradio apps on my cell phone to stream some tolerable music or radio stations, then pipe it into the truck's auxiliary jack via the 3.5mm cord that I found in my overnight bag.  Crisis averted.  No need to drive into a tree after all.

The remaining question would be how well my data service might hold up as I drove back through the hills.  It was surprisingly reliable.  There would be a hiccup every now and then, but the music just kept coming for the most part. 

This knowledge will come in handy once football season rolls around next week.  An ironic twist to this 'home daily' business is that I won't be able to watch much football.  Out on the road I had a chance to see nearly every game.  Now I work on most Saturday afternoons.  Rather than flip through the local AM stations and try to find a given town's local Notre Dame affiliate, I can just dial up a station on that Iheartradio application and listen through my headphones.  I get 3G data through most of southeastern Michigan, so I'm guessing that I'll be able to keep listening even while I unload my trailers.  That'll have to do, at least until I move up the list a bit and get to bid a different schedule.  I really don't care which days I work.  I don't care which shifts I work.  I don't care how much or how little money I make (within certain parameters, obviously).  I just like to be able to watch television for three or four hours on Saturdays, twelve weekends a year.  As Michael Corleone once said to Vito - "We'll get there, Pop.  We'll get there."

Now I'm back in the unfortunate position of having taken a long nap tonight and needing to get to the gym.  Tomorrow's pull time is 11:30am so I guess I had better try and get back to bed before too many hours go by the wayside.  Only one trailer tomorrow, but it does take me back out to Midland and Mount Pleasant so I'll probably be working for eight or nine hours once all is said and done.