Semi (hah) relevant anecdote: Decades ago, my brother worked at a job where one of his tasks was auditing the truck drivers’ logbooks.
A fellow came in with his log, and remarked “I was in Phoenix this morning and I just flew in!” (note: distance involved would have been > 2,000 miles).
My brother, interpreting this to mean “I drove like a bat outta hell to get here” paused, then said “Oh hell, it’s Christmas Eve, I’m gonna forget you said that!”.
The driver laughed and said “No, really, the company flew me home for the holidays, I have to go back out there in a couple days”.
More on-topic: I’ve generally found truck drivers to be fairly courteous - this is with many miles spent on heavily-travelled East Coast interstates. I-81 has a bad reputation but the times I’ve driven it through Virginia, while there may be a lot of trucks, I’ve never noticed any problem there either. I think most experienced truck drivers have learned some basic facts of physics, such as long stopping times.
Probably the worst I can recall was 30+ years ago, driving along I-40 through New Mexico. Large stretches of it were down to single-lanes. Pretty much every such stretch, we got tailgated by trucks. The drivers all seemed to think this would get them there faster - when we were basically tailgating the car in front of us as well, and had no way of speeding up or getting out of the truck’s way.
I knew a guy who drove a truck in order to help pay bills that farming didn’t cover. He was a scrappy little dude with a crewcut, cowboy boots, and a generally conservative outlook. He worked damn hard.
One year he was driving during severe weather. He had pulled over, climbed atop his load to better secure things, when the wind blew him off. He broke his collar bone and a tibia.
He couldn’t afford to let his rig sit, so he convinced his nephew to drive for him. On his first trip, the nephew took an exit too fast and rolled the rig over on its side, just like on the warning signs. The police show up and realize his license is a phony (that the truck’s owner had gotten for him) and find the cocaine (that the truck’s owner had gotten for him).
The truck driver/farmer lost his truck over the situation. He told me that there was no way he could have driven all the miles he had without nose candy, which he thought was a benign drug possibly related to cocaine, but not cocaine.
I believe you and Czarcasm are talking past each other. You’re saying a trucker can slow for a few seconds, and that delay, by itself, isn’t significant. This is true.
I think Czarcasm is saying that a trucker that arrives just a few seconds too late to catch the last available dock can lose hours of time waiting to unload. This is also true.
And I would say that there’s something fundamentally wrong with a system that justifies anybody being a gigantic rude asshole because a few seconds changes his life materially.
The driver in this incident was charged with reckless driving. I do remember it causing hell on the local roads - I had trouble even getting out of our neighborhood. It was a combination of the driver going far too fast (as I recall) and a truly nasty interchange that has since been improved somewhat. The DC area is well known for bad traffic but this occasion was the single worst I’d ever seen.
On the other side of things, careless CAR drivers can cause the laws of physics and large trucks to interact rather badly. We dropped our kids off at summer camp on the DelMarVa peninsula the day this happened. The people at the camp asked which route we’d taken as they were getting a lot of calls from families saying they would be late due to the snarl (we had gone south through Virginia then crossed the bay near Norfolk). That article doesn’t say, but the accident was caused by the driver of one of the cars involved.
Unless the truck they are trying to pass is the one that they are trying to beat to the dock, this is a very, very, very remote possibility. Hence my characterization of this as a fairytale.
Does it happen that a trucker arrives 30 seconds later and is pipped for something that causes a delay of hours. Of course. The same way that if I am going to catch a ferry, I could be delayed by hours even days if I am a few seconds late. If I decide that justifies driving through the village at 75mph, I belong in jail.
I just got back from a doctor’s visit and was a bit delayed because a trucker was blocking the street trying to back up into the driveway (he had to back in because I could see there was a loading dock at the back of the lot). I waited a bit while they were trying to line up the truck. Both guys in the truck got out after a couple of tries, then got back in the truck and pulled back out into the street and pulled over as far as they could.
The other truck and about five other cars waiting got through. No honking!
Nope, I absolutely understand that to be a possibility. But those couple seconds can be caused by far more than being slightly more courteous to those on the road, and those things are far more regular - having to fuel up at the furthest pump, the company card being dodgy, the pump being dodgy, internet at the pump being slow, waiting to cross to the restrooms as another truck pulls in to the pump that’s now magically empty, fingers slipping off the seat belt as your getting out, having to wipe a second time after a massive shit, a line at the teller on the rare occasion the trucker needs something inside.
And that’s not even considering things that happen on the road. To follow the logic, I don’t know why truckers should be required to stop at stoplights - that could be several minutes, and now lil’ Timmy will never see Daddy again.
But EVERYONE wants to get out of work early, if possible. Not all of us are rude assholes to others routinely during the working day to achieve that noble goal.
Sure, but very few of us non-truck-drivers run any risk of having to wait hours to leave work just because one or a few of our co-workers managed to get out the door seconds ahead of us at quitting time.
If we did, I bet you’d be seeing a lot more routine working-day assholery as people scramble desperately to claw back a few crucial seconds in their execution of their assigned tasks.
In other words, you yourself seem to be conceding that a delay of hours on account of a few seconds’ lateness does happen for truckers. Maybe it doesn’t happen all that frequently, but it’s a realistic possibility, not a “fairy tale”.
I’m just pointing out that for most of us in our workday routine, the prospect of a delay of hours in getting off work because somebody got to the door a few seconds ahead of you isn’t even a realistic possibility. Nothing about my work situation makes it conceivable that I would ever have to hang around for hours just because my co-worker got out the door just ahead of me.
If that was a realistic possibility, I would probably be a lot more proactive about making sure I was the one who got to the door first.
