January 1999 I graduated from truck driving school and we out with another student who just got done with his trainer; this is what we call, the Dumb and Dumber program. Fortunately or unfortunately I was not Dumber… Our first trip was to Hell; no Canada, nut it was like Hell. In the middle of the winter, we are headed up I15 from Salt Lake City. On the way up to Canada, while passing through Montana; Dumber was driving. We are going down a snowy, icy grade and I am sitting in the passenger seat when all of a sudden I notice the trailer coming around on my side of the truck. Dumber froze, didn’t know what to do; so I yelled for him to accelerate! It took a second for him to snap out of it, but he accelerated and pulled out of it. I about shit my pants that trip! Oh, that’s not all!!!
OK, so we make it to the Canadian border… They find out that we are new; new to driving truck, new to Canada, new to each other, new and vulnerable. So I think they decided to have a hey day with us. The only thing either of us did wrong was that I had a butterfly knife and I did not know it was illegal in Canada, no one told me till it was already too late. They had both of us soo freaked out, we thought we were going to be locked up in Canadian jail for God knows how long. They threatened me with two years and interrogated my co-driver about me and what was our business together in Canada. We were so scared, we just wanted to go home at this point. They ended up letting us go, but they kept the knife. Oh, but that’s not all!
While in Canada, after we delivered our load and got back to the truck stop; we herd a Lot Lizard on the C B radio… Dumber was intrigued; he wanted me to call her over to us. I asked him if he was for real, he said he never tried it and was curious… I didn’t think he would go through with it, so I called her over; I guess I am the one who was Dumber. He asked how much, she said $20; he was serious. So I got my herbology books together and went inside, I no more then got settle in to start my reading and dumber came walking in. I was like; “wow, that was fast”. He was like, “shhhh”. lol. When I got back to the truck; I burned like a half dozen incense or so and after that, even though it was illegal, I would not sleep on the bottom bus as long as we were in that truck together. No, but that’s not all…
Even though that was most the excitement there, while in Canada he decided he knew trucking better then anyone else and decided NOT to fallow the truck routing even though he has never been to Canada before and he didn’t know diddly squat what he was doing hardly. Yep, you guessed it… LOW BRIDGES! After we finally made it out of Canada, he smoked the breaks coming down Eisenhower so bad I thought they were going to catch on fire. I was so glad when our month together was over! I tell you what, I did learn a lot from that experience. I don’t recall any of the mistakes I made that month besides the butterfly knife, but I am sure they were minor compared to his. I did make plenty of my own rookie mistake later on though.
New York City!