I work in the wrong country.

This looks fun.  And the PC police can suck it, as far as I'm concerned.  Fun is fun.

Annoyed

And not just by this nonsense...

They didn't get to that part of the deal in that country music version of my day job, did they?

 Yeah, I've been down there to Murfreesboro plenty of times. What we have in terms of road construction, those hillbillies have in terms of rush-hour crashes. At least five a day, every day. Without exception. Somehow you didn't see a whole lot of waiting in traffic on that video, did you?

The crashes haven't been that plentiful around Detroit lately, but our orange barrel season is in full swing. That shit is annoying. Today's brilliant arrangement had them closing three lanes on I-96 to the west of Brighton this afternoon. A quick review of the in-house interactive atlas here at the Fenian Godfather Institute turns up an interesting tidbit. There are only three lanes on I-96 to the west of Brighton. Assholes.

But no, that's not what really annoyed me today. There was something else, as there always is. I was on my way to work this afternoon when I decided to flip on the sports station and see what was the latest chatter about the Tigers. Pretty decent winning streak, finally doing some hitting, poised (maybe?) for a decent second half... let's talk about it. Instead, they were discussing Penn State. Screw that. Change the channel.

After I started working and knocked out my first store, I decided to scroll down to the sports station and see what was what. Jerry Sandusky... for fuck's sake.

I finished the second store on my first load and headed back to the dairy to grab my second run of the day. After enduring that insane traffic jam, I decided to try the sports station one more time. The Tigers were playing in an hour or so, so I thought there might be some pre-game chatter. Nope. Joe Paterno. Come on, man...

I had four stores in the Toledo area for my second run.  I was able to catch bits and pieces of the game when I was between deliveries.  We're losing by three, then we score three in the ninth.  Awesome.  We take the lead in the eleventh, then we blow the lead in the eleventh.  Shitty.  We get the lead in the thirteenth.  Awesome.  We blow the lead and lose in the thirteenth.  Shitty.

By the time I had wrapped up my deliveries, I had a little more than an hour's drive back to the yard.  I was hoping to hear some analysis of the game.  I'm still trying to decide if this is another 2008 or another 2011.  The team spent most of both seasons in the realm of disappointment.  In '08, the supposed World Series contenders were truly awful.  Last year, they made a good run to close out the season and then made it within a couple of games of the World Series.  What will this year's story be?  Time will tell.

I switched over to the sports station.  "Coming up next... we'll dive into the Penn State issue.  Still a hot topic of discussion..."

One of two things is the case here.  Hopefully this is not a hot topic of discussion and these radio people are just misreading the situation.  Because otherwise it actually is a hot topic of discussion.  And that would sadden me.

A pervert molested kids.  Maybe some people who knew about the pervert didn't do enough to stop him.  Sad story all around.  End of discussion.  What is to be gained by keeping this topic alive forever?  Even if I concede that there was some 'awareness' value to the endless discussion of the issue at some step along the way, it's just getting to be sick at this point.  Leave it alone.

I decided to listen for a few minutes and see if there was something new that made the topic worthwhile.  Apparently not.  There was merely an endless sequence of calls, each trying to outdo the others in the anger department.  I'll reveal myself as an outlier here and now.  I'm not outraged by the Sandusky issue.  I don't know Sandusky and I don't know any of the alleged victims.  Right or wrong, I have issues of my own to worry about.  I don't have the energy nor the inclination to be distraught about things involving people that I don't know.

I am a human being, so obviously I don't relish the thought of children being abused.  But something about the whole nationwide tabloid aspect of this thing is just sick to me.  Does anyone think that the victims are being helped by any of this?  'Cause I can clue you in right now - they're not.  Whether you screech about the death penalty for Jerry Sandusky or the NCAA death penalty for Penn State, you're not helping anyone or anything.  You're just satisfying some sick voyeuristic tendency of your own and, quite frankly, it's more than a little creepy.  Let it die.  Do yourselves and the world a great service.

But, knowing what I know about the world, I understand that there must be some kind of demand for this topic.  Otherwise the radio shows wouldn't waste their time on it.  Time is money.  And listeners are money.  Consistent listeners over the course of time are big money. 

So more than a few people are really interested in this topic.  Nobody seems to be interested in any of the more pressing topics, either in a big-picture sense or a sporting sense.  The focus lies on a perverted pedophile and the fallout from his crimes.  That's what drives ratings right now.

And that really leaves me... annoyed.

As the hep cats might say - LOL

I make fun of liberal news outlets every now and then.  It's not so much that they're liberal, but that they're too damned insecure to admit it.  If you liberals out there are right (and I know of a few who stop by here from time time to time), then just admit your leanings and duke it out in the arena of ideas.  But no... we have to look at shit like this and pretend it's journalism.

On a semi-related note, there's a two-hour debate where some Spanish dude rhetorically smacks Paul Krugman around for a while.  I'm not putting it here because I don't speak Spanish and quite a bit of the back-and-forth was in Spanish.  Before I get too excited about the Spanish dude's points (delivered largely in English), I want to get the full context of the discussion.  I haven't had time to do so yet.  The only people mentioning it are right-wing bloggers and they're obviously focused on the parts where Krugman looks like the disingenuous hack that he is.  But anyhow, if you want to find it, you'll find it.  If I'm able to dig a little deeper, there may be a post forthcoming on the topic.

For now, we'll stick with Mitchell...

That is pretty awesome.

Apparently we're famous now.

I've never heard of Danny Gokey. Apparently he's a country music dude, which explains why I've never heard of him.

I've never heard of GAC.  Apparently it's a country music channel, which explains why I've never heard of it.

At a recent shareholders' meeting, we were informed that there's a GAC show about country singers who perform regular jobs or something.  It turns out that this Gokey fella used to be a truck driver.  So, for the TV show, he became a truck driver again.  And he worked for my employer.

The episode was based at our Murfreesboro location.  I've been down there a time or two.  It has been quite a while, but I used to head down with a load of empty milk cases once a month or so.

I met Kevin Moore (who appears in the video) one time.  There were no empty trailers at the dairy, so I had to drive over to the Quickway terminal and get an empty trailer to bring home.  "Y'all them boys from Michigan that need some empties," he observed.  (There were two of us on this particular trip.)  Yep.  We's them boys.  So he gave us the numbers of a couple of empty trailers and we were on our way.

Other than that, I don't know.  They played the video at the meeting, so we all watched it.  Pretty cool to be famous for a minute, I suppose...

You would have no way of knowing this from the video, but the job is quite a bit harder than they made it out to be.  I'm sure it was no accident, but they arranged it so this character could work in stores with nice big receiving areas, and people who answer the door when you arrive, and pallet jacks that function properly, and loading docks that are reasonably accessible, and so on and so forth.  For those of us in the daily grind, days like the one experienced by Mr. Gokey are a rare treat.

And just for good measure [a little inside baseball here], you'll note that he had an odd number of pallets when he loaded the empties at the second store. That's why the one pallet was placed in the center of the trailer. You can do that when there's no milk in the trailer. Empty cases don't provide a lot of inertia. When you have milk in the trailer, it's a different story. That shit will slosh around and cause all kinds of trouble. So you have to keep the pallets to an even number, meaning that they're side-by-side from front to back and can be secured reasonably well. So not only did this dude get easy stores and an easy run, he got a two-stop easy run. The only thing better than a two-stop run is a one-stop run, for obvious reasons.

Amidst the Great Recovery™ of 2010 2011 2012, I seem to get anywhere from 4-6 stops on damned near every trailer. Stores that order 8 pallets during good times will only order 3 pallets when business sucks. So more orders can be squeezed onto one trailer. So the driver - I - will have to work a LOT harder for a LITTLE more money. By the time you get to the second or third store, you have to figure out a way to get the empties rotated to the nose of the trailer and the milk rotated to the back. It's not difficult when there's enough space in the stock room, as pictured in the video there. It's almost impossible when you get a sequence of stores with no extra space at all. In what was surely a coincidence, Mr. Hoppy and his trainee didn't face the prospect of rotating a trailer in a tiny stockroom with a pallet jack that stops at random, while the Pepsi guy keeps putting pallets of Sierra Mist in the way and the store manager decides to call every department to the back door for a trash run, taking away any hope of getting the milk delivered in a reasonable time.

(Think that one may have happened yesterday? Hint: It did. Pissed me right off.)

And they sure as hell didn't face last Saturday, when the bastards at the dairy loaded my trailer with the load bars in the wrong position.  I wound up stacking 1,148 cases of milk by hand after the entire load tipped over against the nose of the trailer.  It was like a wicked dangerous Jenga puzzle.  Every time I would move one case, five more would fall.  Luckily I didn't break an ankle in the process.  Yeah, that one pissed me right off as well.

Anyhow, that video is probably the closest I'll ever come to giving you folks a taste of what it's like to haul milk to your local Kroger store... on a good day.

(If I wasn't supposed to use this footage and my video gets zapped or whatever, they have a flash version at quickwaycarriers.com, toward the bottom of the page. That one has no embed option so I had to upload my own version here.  No harm is intended to whoever created the content and so on.  Just trying to share a video.)