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This is a story about a guy I’ll call Mack. That’s not his real name of course. It is November 11, 2007 as I write this and Mack is my current co-driver at a trucking company that I work for. Mack and I team drive with a set of doubles up to a drop point. We then break down the doubles and each of us takes a trailer and runs a short, delivery route. We then meet back at the drop point, hook the doubles back up again and drive back to our home terminal. It’s really not a bad run. I sleep up to the drop point and drive back after we’ve completed our routes and Mack does the opposite. We like it that way. I’m usually tired when I come into work and Mack is usually tired when he has completed his route. But we don’t always sleep the whole time up or back and sometimes we sit with each other and talk.
Mack is a good driver and he has a little more experience than me and a lot more experience hauling doubles. He showed me how to hook up the trailers and told me how to drive them. There’s a little more to it than hauling just a single trailer and there are some safety issues that you have to be aware of. But I’m doing alright and each of us feels confident enough about the other’s ability that we are able to sleep soundly behind each other.
But like I said, we sometimes sit with each other and talk, and when that happens good stories happen.
My first impression of Mack was that he was smart and very street wise. He really knows how to work the bosses to get things that we need, including extra pay, When someone needed our dolly (the thing that hooks the two trailers together) and we had to run our routes solo, I was thinking that we were going to have to take a $125 a week pay cut. But Mack got on the horn with the big boss and told him it wasn’t right that we should have to lose money on a situation that was out of our control. It wasn’t our fault that we had to run the routes solo. He got our boss to agree and they paid us like we were running team for the duration of our dollylessness. I think I owe Mack a dinner for that one.
Given Mack’s intelligence and street smarts I was therefore surprised one day when he told me that he did not graduate high school nor did he have his GED. When he was 16 years old he got his girlfriend pregnant. He went to his father to ask for help and the old man kicked him out of the house. So there he was with a kid on the way at 16, homeless, and jobless. He had $500 together and he went to his grandma on his dad’s side for help. She loaned him $2000 so he could get a car and a place to live with the agreement that he’d pay it back at $60 per month. Mack then got a full time job on top of his part time job to make ends meet and tried to go to school at the same time. It was an exhausting schedule and he couldn’t do it for long. Something had to give and it was his schooling. Mack also came upon some lean months and was unable to pay is grandma one month. She took him to court over it demanding all of the money at once in repayment. He didn’t say what happened in court, but the end result of the whole situation was that his father and his grandma had basically disowned him.
Despite his troubles early in life things have turned out pretty well for Mack. He now has a nice home, a good marriage, and three kids including a son that his girlfriend had when he was 17. There aren’t many places where Mack could make good money given that he is a high school drop out. I’m glad things have worked out for him in trucking and I’m proud to have him as a co-driver.
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