[311] Screed City

[311]

01/10/2025 Friday. Desk upon desk. Room 214. Hampton Inn, Gadsden, Alabama.

When I tell you I am tweaked, I mean I am tweaked. Yesterday was brutal, somehow today was brutaler. I think what happened was that yesterday morning was pretty rough, but the biggest hurdle was loading the truck and then getting the beast out of the Compound, up the driveway. Loading the truck was what was to be expected. It was snowing and maybe 5F. All the heavy stuff made it on the truck via a tractor with fork lift forks. The medium heavy stuff we had to carry on up a ramp. What I was hoping would be a one hour job, took three hours, the amount of time Scott figured it would take. The driveway had been sanded, so that was good, the best $165 spent on this job so far. By just after noon we were in Hancock driving towards Rutland.

After that it was essentially just driving. We stopped a few times. Once to get magnetic signage from a place called Awesome Printing in Rutland. We stopped in Queensbury at the BMI shop to get something called a DMX/CAT. Which does what, I do not know. We stopped to get gas at some point, maybe twice. Meat pucks et cetera. And then in Columbia, Pennsylvania we stopped to buy a broken amplifier from some sketchy guy smoking cigarettes down a poorly lit street that could have easily been selling us drugs. After that we drove another fifty miles to the hotel. Got there around 11p and were on the road again by 7a.

Today was just driving. But there was no relief involved. No actual progress made aside from distance travelled. Eight states, I think Scott said altogether, including yesterday. Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama. That's eight, right? Only once was the driving interesting. Somewhere between West Virginia and Virginia there is a swath of land that is very uniquely American. I couldn't even tell you how. Mountains in the distance and farms and factories and giant American flags and plenty of open space and sunshine. That lasted maybe an hour and then it was right back to trees and gas station signs.

Half the day was spent in very good weather. We knew we were heading into a major storm but there was nothing we could do about it. Scott drove until half an hour past noon. We stopped for meat pucks and I got in the drivers seat. A spicy chicken sandwich in hand, a bag of sour cream and cheddar potato chips, an egg roll and a bottle of chocolate milk in the seat next to me. Scott got two cheeseburgers and a can of Coca Cola. A few minutes into the driving I dropped my spicy chicken sandwich on the floor. I was starving so I picked it up and brushed it off on my filthy pants, reapplied the bun and continued to eat it. Scott was like, "Uhhh." and I was like, "Yum! Tastes like shoe!"

For hours I drove with not a thought in my pretty little head. That is the thing with long driving; there is no urgency. You can literally only do what you can do. The truck has a governor that prevents it from going over 70mph. Therefore, 70mph is how fast you go. I didn't even realize I was driving until the snow started coming down around 4p or so.

At first it was nothing. Tiny little shards of ice that didn't accumulate. Then the road went up into some mountains and the shards became large flakes. The snow started collecting on the road, so I hit the brakes to turn the cruise control off and slowed down, getting into the right lane to move slowly with traffic.

Oddly, the windshield wipers on the rental truck were junk. Old, needing to be replaced. We had this same problem with the truck in Florida. I really don't understand this feature. Maybe they want you to crash their vehicles? Its not hard to replace the things. I am a car idiot and I can do it. You don't even need tools, just a simple understanding of how machines work and what buttons to press. Its a little like starting a fight with a woman. Just get in there and start doing stupid shit, eventually you are holding the thing you need to function properly in your hand and you have no idea how to fix it.

As the snow started falling thicker and heavier and wetter, the wipers functioned less and less. Specifically the tops of them. Maybe you know box trucks, maybe you don't, but they have this pneumatic seat that can go up pretty high for long legs and can go down pretty low for short legs. I like to raise the seat high for fun times, it makes me feel like I am driving a big rig, but I also feel like I am a kid sitting down at a dinner table trying to pretend I can use the adult chair. I don't know, driving is very boring. It's good to have a mess about sometimes. But as the wipers got worse and worse, I had to lower the seat, lower and lower. Eventually I was a granny looking through the steering wheel. At this point Scott quipped that we needed to get new wipers. I agreed, considering it was snowing like crazy and I couldn't see shit, it was a very prudent observation.

Soon enough I was taking an exit and getting off the interstate. Soon I was turning right and driving towards a auto parts store. At that moment Scott had a meeting via phone with work people. At that very moment. It was not an ideal time to have a phone call is what I am saying. It is an important detail. Is what I am saying. Also, another important detail is that when we stopped to get gas yesterday that gas cap was not replaced afterwards. Neither of us noticed until this morning when we stopped to get gas. I had noticed that the chain was broken. Yet, because filling a gas tank that big takes forever, both Scott and I had run into the gas station to use the facilities and somewhere in between neither of us put the cap back on. The solution, naturally, was to shove a bunch of paper towels into the hole thereby creating a movable Molotov Cocktail.

It was snowing like crazy and the roads were slippery and people were driving very carefully and slow and the parking lot of the auto parts store was busy with motorists, like us, who were just discovering that our wipers were not functioning properly. I parked the truck and left it running. Meanwhile, Scott was talking on the phone. I got out and climbed onto the hood and removed the driver's side wiper and carried it into to store picking and scraping the accumulated ice off of it so I could hopefully read the information I was certain was printed on the wiper. As I walked into the store there were three different people replacing their wipers. One woman, who reminded me of Professor Curly's sister, scowled at some poor worker showing her how to replace the wiper. She didn't want a wiper lesson, she just wanted to get the wiper replaced. Or so it seemed.

I walked around the store looking for gas caps while also trying to read any information on the wiper. I could see none. I also couldn't find the gas caps. I decided to ask for help and was invited to get help from a very mature woman who looked harried because the snow storm was causing quite the influx of customers.

I walked up to the register and said, "I don't know what wiper this is, I am driving a rental truck," I pointed outside, "and I don't know any details about it." She didn't look outside. She took the wiper and sighed. She said she needed a tape measure and limped into the back. She limped pretty far away and then disappeared. I saw her again limping down an aisle about forty feet away. Then I saw her limp back and turn around and limp in another direction. Finally, I saw her limp towards a stack of boxes rest for a while. When she regained her strength, she limped to what looked like she found the tape measure and then a few moments later she returned, out of breath, cramming some small plastic black nuggets into a long and slender plastic tube with must have been the replacement wiper.

Meanwhile, I am thinking I want to have a look-see at the gas caps and would also like to get the other wiper, which, in my experience, there is two different kinds per every windshield. A left and a right. The right being smaller than the left because of geometry. But because she seemed so put out by what I asked her to do, I didn't have it in me to ask her to do two more things. Not that she asked if I needed anything else, she didn't, instead she rang up the one wiper and said, "You're grand total is twenty one aught five." I thought she would have asked for my phone number because I definitely have an account on record with this store. But she did not. I said it was really coming down. She said, "Not so much anymore, it was earlier, but not now." And that did it. All of my social abilities were gone. I could not ask her for more. Also, I was expecting the wiper to cost sixty dollars. It was a wiper for a rental truck. How was I going to get that money back? Had Scott come in with me he could have paid for it and they would have reimbursed him. For me, I wasn't so sure. Not that they wouldn't pay me back, but what did that look like? I wasn't just being cheap, I was being self-protective and cheap, and feeling bad for this woman and really, if I thought about it, the wiper on the passenger side wasn't so important, what does that side of the truck need to see? Nothing that I know of.

I took the wiper out to the truck. It was still snowing heavily, despite what the woman who sold me the wiper thought. Scott was still on the phone. I climbed onto the hood and spent some moments figuring out what buttons to push and eventually the new wiper was in place. I got into the truck, tested the wiper, saw that it worked real good and got back onto the interstate.

Now, you might think I am an idiot, which is partially true, and you might think I am a jerk, which is mostly true, but it took me very little time to realize that should not have left that store without two wipers. One for the left side and one for the right. But by that time, which was seconds, it was already too late. We were back on the interstate and my side of the windshield was clear and clean and immaculate and pristine. On the right side, Scott's side. the wiper was not working so good. In fact it was just scratching a giant icicle back and forth with snow building up and smut and debris. I tried to ignore how bad it was, but it was bad.

Scott finished his phone call and looked at the windshield. He looked at my side, he looked at his side. I could see his lips purse out of the corner of my eyes. Then his hands went up, pointing at the windshield. Then they went down. Then he cocked his head. Then he was going to say something and then he didn't, then he was going to say something and then he paused to think. It really was a scene from a Chris Farley movie. He could not believe what I just did. I almost said, "I can't believe they sold us a useless wiper! I am turning this truck right around and am going to give them a piece of my mind! Look at that! Can you believe it?" Scott eventually said:

"Did you really just only get one wiper?" I played pretty dumb.

"It's complicated." He thought for a second. Baffled by my brilliance.

"How complicated?"

"I don't know, the woman was old and it was busy, I felt bad asking her to get two."

"But its her job!"

I won't lie, it was a pretty dumb maneuver on my part, but I now understand why buddy comedies work, especially if one is the straight man and the other is an idiot. I mean, things are funny in general about such situations, but this one in particular, where I was driving and could see clear as day and Scott was in the passenger side with a dirty, frozen wand smearing salt and soot back and forth on the windshield, I mean, classic. So classic, in fact, that just a little while later, in true straight man style he said:

"This is wiper situation is stressing me out. I can't micro-manage your driving."

I don't know, maybe I am giddy from twenty four hours of driving and thirty five straight consecutive days of work, but it was a pretty hilarious moment.

[insert rolled over tractor trailer photo]