Someday I should write about this...really

No one would believe the stories about my days with the small trucking company.

We hired this driver from Russia who was over 6 ft. 6 inches and weighed more than 300 lbs., complete with grizzled beard and thick accent. His name was Victor. One day, he brought his truck back and was very indignant. When one of the girls asked him what happened, he told her "Tis man drive behind me and keep honking. When he stop at red light, I open his door and punch him in face!" Needless to say, he didn't last long.

One woman had a badly chipped tooth that she would superglue back in place when it fell apart.

One time, a thousand pound forklift rolled off the 6-foot-high dock and burst into flames. Oh, sorry, make that two times.

Another time, we hired an accountant and found out he did work on the side for a group of revolutionaries (he was proud to show me his business card).

One guy, Earl, who we all knew was mentally unstable, picked (another) fight with another employee. We had to run him off. When we tried to follow up with him to bring him back, we were told he had been killed. Earl was always pulling stunts, so we didn't exactly break out the black clothing--sure enough, we confirmed with his dad that he wasn't truly dead, but just wanted attention since he was unemployed at the moment. We ended up bringing him back--two years later he was indeed killed in a bar fight.

I got called in the middle of the night to drive to the scene of an accident--one of our drivers had fallen asleep and flipped his 18-wheeler over in the road. Another driver (later, we found out he was letting his son-in-law drive his rig) plowed right through the middle of the trailer (he couldn't see it because the highway was dark). They came out covered in...prune juice. But they really thought it was blood and were completely freaked out.

We were always pretty desperate for drivers. One day, a guy came in who had exactly the same first, middle, and last name as my brother, Don. I figured we couldn't go wrong. We got him trained, and 3 days later, on his first delivery, he turned around, went 20 miles in the wrong direction, sped up to 50 miles per hour, and plowed into a huge brick mailbox, sending bricks flying for 100 yards and totalling our truck. It was a scam he had worked out with a lawyer to collect worker's compensation insurance (in a twist of fate, our company had an alternative coverage that was immune to their scam). The mailbox's owner? The president of a competitor trucking company.

The Air Conditioning was wired very funny--the detector for the thermostat was actually located in a different part of the building that was conditioned by another unit and heater--it belonged to a different company, and was always off--sometimes the heater would kick on in the summer. The office was either literally over 90 degrees in the summer, or in the '40's and '50's in the winter. It was the only place where I saw people quit their office jobs because of the temperature of the office, but it was pretty unbearable.

One manager stole 20,000 gallons of fuel, selling it to another company and pocketing the cash.

One customer asked me for a kickback, which completely offended me. Then I talked to the president and found out that we actually did it all the time, including arranging for "female companionship" for one apparently lonely customer (before I worked there). There was a group of people called "freight whores" that were always shamelessly available to provide work to small companies in exchange for bribes.

I solved a mystery! One of our drivers, after getting his paycheck one Friday, took off in our truck and never came back. A week went by...nobody had seen him. We called his mom and she told us that he liked to hang out at one of the interstate truck stops on the outskirts of Dallas. Apparently, it's a technicality that he did not actually steal the truck since we handed the keys over to him (foolishly trusting he would work all day and bring it back that evening). For a few days, I checked his hangout and saw nothing. Then one afternoon, I thought I would check again and I found the truck! Then I thought--what am I going to do if this PCP's out truck driver comes back (I was waiting for someone to bring me a set of keys)? I jumped up in the driver's seat and locked the door--figuring that he wouldn't come back. Did the driver come back? No. Did prostitutes roam through the parking lot? Yes--it was kind of scary. But that was my one Columbo moment in life.

For a few of the years I worked there, I got to work with my best buddy and former college roommate Gar and my wife's best friend since middle school, Nancy. I got them into it--partly just to keep myself from going crazy and partly just to have witnesses to the mayhem (Gar and Nancy ended up married to each other).

Seriously, I could tell dozens more stories about this place--if I wrote a sitcom about the misadventures of this crazy company, people would call it totally unbelievable. It was almost 10 years ago that I started there, and over 5 years since I left, and today I was thinking about some of those funny times and missing it--just a little. Although it drove me crazy and maybe even lowered my IQ a little, the unpredictability and sheer lawlessness of the place was fresh and made me feel alive--made me live in the moment. But when I seriously consider reality, I'm glad it's over.