[rescue] truck drivers (fixed topic)

[Magnus]

Sandwich Maker wrote:
> the long haul truckers are by far the best, most considerate drivers
> in my neighborhood.  the -local- truckers who drive 18 wheelers and
> various other big rigs are not.
They drive me absolutely batty and make me pine for the glory days of 
the railroad industry.

I hate these guys in the big rigs that fly past me going downhill, cut 
over with very little warning (if any) or room for error, and then slow 
down below my own cruise control speed once the road levels out so I 
have to pass them.  This leapfrog continues every time they get a little 
bit of downhill road length.

Or you see them driving in a line, nose to tail, with no room to get 
between them.  This becomes extremely dangerous when one has to exit the 
highway and cannot get in because of the truck drivers driving in such 
close proximity to one another.

The teenage jerks in their rice racers are annoying but rarely cause 
fatal pileups.  These truck drivers though are downright deadly.  Oh but 
to be a state trooper... I'd love to pull over every one I see 
tailgating, "pushing" cars that they are driving behind, cutting people 
off, the lot of them.

Then there is the truck driver who was talking on his cell phone while 
driving.  He hit a bump and dropped his phone on the floor.  Going 80MPH 
down Interstate 85 in a construction zone in Durham, North Carolina, he 
bent over to pick up his phone off the floor and in doing so veered 
across all of the lanes of traffic on his side of the road, across the 
median, and head-on into my brother-in-law who was driving the opposite 
direction and never even had time to tap his brakes (according to 
eyewitnesses driving behind him).

I'll have to dig up a picture of my brother-in-law's Ford Contour as 
photographed by a helicopter crew that went to the scene.  It was 
basically an ash tray.

Yes, my BIL lived and escaped with much lighter injuries than one would 
expect (but he is a real hoot at airport metal detectors now... "let me 
remove my leg and go through again").  His girlfriend lived but barely.  
I was with her in the emergency room.  From about the pelvis on down she 
was turned into hamburger and will never walk right or be able to have 
kids again.

 From what I hear, the truck driver managed to find work again after all 
that.