BIG RIG RESIDENT

I'm beginning to perceive a Studs Terkel sort of aspect to this gig. Before Second Life, I'd never met an F-15 bomber pilot-- and for that matter, I'd never met a big rig truck driver, either.

"Black ice", says Jaxiam Slate, "keeps the heart racing. [It's] when the water freezes on the ground into clear ice patches so only the reflection of light shows [on] it (since you can see the blacktop through it). That's black ice. Hard to see, easy to crash." And Jaxiam was behind the wheel of an 18 wheeler, when he hit a patch of it, and things got dicey.

Jaxiam flew by my office in Shipley, because he owns property nearby, and he's looking to sell some of it, while he goes on an imminent hiatus for some months. He tells me he'll be driving his company rig too often to log in, so in the interim, he'll parcel off some of his property, and let friends use the rest, while he's gone.

Anyway, back to the black ice:

"I skidded," says Jaxiam, "the brakes locked trying to find traction, the engine shut off, and I kept it in [the] lane honking 'til the traffic on the left opened up and I could move it over off the ice. Then to the shoulder, and started it up again."

"Stuff like that is how we usually read about some truck going up in flames and wrecking 10-20 cars, yeah?"

"Yeah," Jaxiam answers, "if they start trying to swerve or power out of it. If you move too fast you keep going, and the trailer will go [in] the direction you were going, jack-knifing the trailer. And then you have no chance of getting out of it. If you just go with the flow, stay straight and steady and keep the movements minimal, just enough to keep the trailer behind you, you can ride your way out. Unless traffic ahead of you locks itself up."

"Then you're screwed!" I suggest.

"Yep," he says, "screwed big time... 90% of all truck related accidents happen because of the cars around the trucker, not the trucker."

"I always wondered how truckers could have the [guts] to drive something so huge, so cumbersome, and (if you make a single mistake) so destructive," I say.

Jaxiam now drives a Freightliner Autoshift Daycab, but before that, a Volvo autoshift with sleeper. "Well," he tells me, "let's take the Volvo. Driving that rig-- I've driven luxury cars that rode about the same. It's not super responsive, but pretty darn responsive. It's just getting used to judging how much room you're going to need, and being able to do that instantly. When I started," he laughs, "I was very very careful. I still am, but I know my truck and trailer length now, so I can do things I wouldnt have done. Judge a hole in traffic, and take advantage of it if I must."

Jaxiam wasn't always a truck driver. He's even worked in the computer game industry as a tester.

"I was a network adminstator for years. Then gave it up to move out from Nevada to Atlanta. Found out that a self-taught computer guru wasn't desired out here. Too many being pumped out by the various colleges/ tech schools. Couldnt even get a job in tech support unless I wanted to go from 40K a year down to $7.00 an hour. So I bumbled around at different things 'til my stepfather (trucker of 20 years) suggested I give it a try." After a year of driving in LA, and some other jobs, he now drives out of Atlanta, making runs to Georgia, South and North Carolina.

"Supposedly 'til I can finish up my degree and go back in the computer field," he adds.
"But when I work like I do-- college has to wait awhile. It's not a lifestyle I want to keep for the rest of my working career, but it pays the bills, isn't too stressful, and has lots of security in this bad economy."

"You like being out on the road for long hauls?"

"No," he says, laughing, "that's why I went regional/local. Home every night." But now he's going into a busy season, "So I work more-- more live unloads, which takes the drive time plus the time to unload (3-6 hours, depending) instead of straight drops. So it makes the days much longer. And my time to relax much shorter... something had to be sacrificed." He has thought of logging into Second Life while on the road, though. "But then [I] remembered that SL wouldn't run real well on a cellular connection... if they gave broadband levels of connection cellularly I'd do it," he says, laughing. "Nothing like sitting for 5 hours with nothing to do to make ya wish ya had a good connection."