What A Day

My day got off to a bad start. To say the least. Kicked it off by leaving Kings Mountain and heading down the Blacksburg to fuel. My fuel card wouldn't work. So I asked if I could fuel farther down the road, and went on to Gaffney. My fuel card wouldn't work there, either. So I stomped inside to talk to the cashier and found when I came back that I'd locked my keys in the truck (with it sitting in the fuel isle of a truck-stop). Doh!

Well, I called Epes and was told that if they had to send out road service I would be charged for it. Okay, that makes sense. It was my fault. But I wasn't about to pay the bill that someone would submit to a trucking company (that'd be at least 300% higher than it should be). My dispatcher (the weekend guy, Clint, not the Fuck-tard) recommended I try to remove the small view window on the bottom of the passenger side door (which you can see on this image here). Okay, fine. I'd done that on a Peterbilt once. So I gave it a shot.

While I was working on this, another driver came along and offered to help. He said he'd removed those windows “a half dozen times” and that it was no big deal. He offered to show me how. So I stepped aside. He took a screw driver, wiggled it in behind the rubber seal and promptly shattered the glass. Doh!

I didn't even get a proper explosion of glass and noise. The glass spidered into a thousand cracks and just sat there. But it was obvious that the window's service had come to an end. I pushed gently against the glass and it gave beneath my fingers.

“Never seen that before,” my helper said, and vanished.

I spent over an hour trying to rig up the window. First I tried to thread some cardboard into the seal to give it a little rigidity (which didn't work), but wound up just duct-taping the cardboard into place, and then sealing up the hole real good. Finally got to use that advanced degree in duct tape engineering.

Overall, in over three hours I had only gotten 15 miles from Kings Mountain. There went the nap I'd planned on taking later. Luckily the rest of the day was uneventful. I didn't get my fuel in Gaffney, but went on down to Carnesville, Georgia. Hopefully nothing will catch fire on my way to Mobile.