Professional Drivers

I keep hearing all these "professional" drivers whinging, bleating and moaning about the 4 wheelers. It seems that, according to these "professionals", they (the cars) dunno what they are doing, they get in the way, they do stupid things and so forth. Apparantly, they haven't any "common sense".

So? If you truly are the professional, then you will make allowances for the limitations of the car drivers. In any case, a true professional will have already read the traffic flows, understood that in all probability at least one of the car drivers will make a blunder. In short, if you're truly professional, you will be continually making risk assessments and value judgements!

Let us examine this a little closer.

• "Common sense". There is no such thing as common sense in the way most people enterpret it. Humans (with the exception of the likes of Einstein (how did he spell his name?) are incapable of making quantum leaps of either faith or logic. Everything they do is based on prior experience, knowledge, learning and training. By the very definition, you, as the professional, are supposed to have all of the above and (because car drivers are not professional, they could reasonably be assumed to have limited amounts of the same. Therefore, it is your responsibility, as the trained one (with the common sense - if you like) to protect them, not the other way around. This doesn't give car drivers any excuse for being dickheads, it just means you need to compensate for them if they are!

• If I were to take you out of your nice truck cabin and put you behind the wheel of a scalpel, threw you into an operating theatre and let you loose at brain surgery (without first adequately training you), how good a job do you think you would do of it? The reality, in Australia at least, the levels of training and knowledge of the average car driver is absolutely abysmal. You cannot blame them for it because the system has let them and us down badly, as it allows people who are abjectly incompetent to retain a drivers licence, be behind the wheel of a lethal weapon (a vehicle) and travel around with gay abandom with few restrictions and little supervision. Any wonder some of them make silly errors for they are often truly ignorant in the truest sense of the word!!

• So you're a truck driver and you're a good, courteous driver, eh? Wrong!!! Just because you hold a truck licence doesn't mean Jack Schitt! How you perform your task decrees your level of competence - just the same as the car drivers.

• Instead of going crook at them, why not quietly (without going off tap) educate them? Seems simple to me.

I have some really bad news for you.

1. Laws are made by politicians in response to what they perceive are the wishes of the public (who vote them in or out), not necessarily because they are needed (the laws, I mean - hell - maybe the politicians as well!!!) or because they are desirable, or right and proper. Politicians are a pragmatic lot and realise that if they get the public in their area off side, then they can expect to lose their cushy job doing ................... never mind.
2. 99.9999% of the public are ordinary motorists. (Read voters)
3. 0.0001% of the public are in the road transport industry. (Read insignificant amount)
4. 70% of the motorists who are voters are terrified of trucks. It doesn't matter why - they just are!
5. A handful of dickheads who drive big jiggers, behaving like prized clowns scare the pants off the public who, understandably, don't remember the 99% of good operators they have encountered that day and cry to ..... guess who? Their local member who is a .................. you guessed it - politician.
6. Thus a few behaving badly bring the dogs upon us all and end up having the most illiogical and draconian legislation jammed into us. Good one, idiot!
   

I know some of you are ill equipped to actually think, but try and struggle as much as you can and remember that the reason we are all copping all the shit these days is largely because a few behave irresponsibly and petrify the public.

Don't!

I have been here for 30 years and I intend to be here a fair while longer. I have an absolutely clean slate on my licence. I achieve a good income without incidents. The chances are that I will still be here, in this industry, tomorrow. Chances are that you, if you behave like a dickhead, will not.

Don't leave me and the rest of us out here your legacy of stupidity.