Truck 15.
He was telling me about how they only send truck 15 on routes where the temperature gets to be as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. July 4th weekend was coming up and my supervisor decided I was the best fit for a route up in Needles, California...a small town near the tri-state junction of Arizona, California, and Nevada.
During the 4th of July weekend, people from all over the country like to come here and stay near the Colorado river. They ride their Jet Skis and WaveRunners and motor boats and all the while The Department of Boating and Waterways does its best to keep people informed about boat safety. This is where Street Blimps comes in.
Lake Havasu, Laughlin, Bullhead City...these are all river-side communities and I'd like to think most of the people who "live there" are staying in summer homes or renting out houses. The idea that a person could live in this part of the country blows my fuckin' mind. I was convinced that I had experienced the worst heat this country has to offer when I lived in Las Vegas for three months, but I completely changed my mind about this after my stay in Needles for only three days.
Truck 15 is an old, diesel engine Mitsubishi with automatic transmission and roughly 215,000 miles on it. All of the Street Blimps have a cab that sits on top of the engine - so to run maintenance on anything internal you have to literally lift the entire cab and tilt it forward:
The drive from Compton to Needles was no easy task. Unfortunately the truck is so old that it struggles to shift gears automatically. Apparently, once you've reached about 48mph, you either have to be on a negative grade or you have to have enough built up acceleration to get the truck to shift to the next highest gear and break 50mph. The accelerator is roughly half an inch off the floor, so no matter how hard you press down on it with your foot, the truck WILL NOT go any fucking faster than 68mph on a flat surface (of which there pretty much aren't any between LA and Needles).
To make a potentially longer story short, I drove through LA traffic from Compton to Needles averaging about 50mph. It took me roughly seven hours and twenty minutes to get to the hotel, a distance I could have covered in roughly four and a half hours with my Eclipse. HAHA, AT LEAST I GOT PAID FOR IT, RIGHT? Yeah...you say that shit now.
Anyway, a fifteen minute truck check is necessary every single day, especially when you're driving an old ass truck over 100 miles into another state. I suppose this is alright if your route is in a place like Seattle or anywhere farther north during the summer. But in Needles, during 4th of July weekend, at 8 o' clock in the morning it's already about 100 degrees outside.
Truck 15 had what the guys in the shop liked to call a "conehead" cab. This means the roof of the cab narrows and runs all the way up to the top of the poster board...turning it into sort of a tear-drop shape...or a "conehead" if you will. Normally, for me, this feature would be of no consequence...except for the fact that access to checking the engine fluids is only possible by tilting the entire cab forward, and doing so with a conehead requires lifting an extra 5 feet worth of metal. This may sound like a piece of cake, but with two people it's fucking hard...so if you're on a route by yourself with a conehead, it fucking isn't a piece of cake.
To say my weekend in Needles was the worst experience I ever had would be quite an exaggeration. However, I distinctly remember driving past a large sign in Bullhead city on the second day of my route. It said the temperature outside was 123 degrees. Truck 15 DOES have air conditioning, but this doesn't change the fact that I still had to get out of the truck occasionally to put diesel in it or take pictures of it for Street Blimps corporate.
If you've never experienced this kind of weather, allow me to draw a simple analogy for those of you who have played Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When you finally get inside the caldera at the top of Death Mountain for the first time, the game gives you one minute and fifteen seconds to do shit before you start dying from the heat:
This is pretty much what it was like every time I had to get out of the truck in Lake Havasu, Laughlin and Bullhead City. After one minute of being exposed to the heat I would start dying.
Aside from the outrageous heat, the fact that I had to figure out the routes on my own, had no form of transportation at the end of the day, was staying in a hotel that had no microwave, had to pay three dollars a night for an internet connection and spent all of 4th of July weekend by myself...I had a great time.
On Independence Day, I made a stop at the Denny's next to the Motel 6 and ate at a table by myself. I texted people who were spending time with friends at the beach, watching fireworks and getting drunk. I talked to my parents on the phone. I did not eat one hot dog.
I went back to the room and went to bed at around 9pm. I never saw one firework.
I spent six years of my life studying physics in school...a subject that has been advertised numerous times throughout my life as a key to finding careers in various private industries such as aerospace, computer science, defense, financing, etc...
I stopped taking physics seriously after three years of college because I realized that it's not cool, no one cares about it, and everyone makes fun of people who study it. I spent so many years of my life trying to prove to the world that I wasn't stupid, and all of a sudden I realized I had gone too far...I just wanted people to go back to thinking I was "stupid" again.
I now have a master's degree in physics...and on Independence Day I felt like I had really fucked up my life.
