How Mr. Cellphone got hosed
A millennial driver learns that sometimes the old ways are the best ways
Ilistened to another driver bitching and belly-aching the other day. I didn’t say a word. I think might have been smiling. I know I grinned when his cellphone rang.
Yep. This guy was prepared for the moment. He’s a Millennial big rig driver. Yet he was complaining to all who would listen about price gouging of rig drivers.
I was smiling because lots of memories flooded into my little brain.
Price gouging has been going on almost since the day after the first wheel was set in motion. Charge what the market will bear is an age old proverb that has been applied to any person found in need, and if that need is desperation, and said person will pay just about anything.
This young fellow had apparently ruptured the bottom hose on his radiator while travelling through the back and beyond in Northern California. His cellphone was all charged up, but he was out of range. He didn’t have a spare hose, because in his mind, a cellphone can solve all trucking problems.
Too funny for me not to burst out in side-splitting laughter. It got a few other drivers laughing too, but not Mr. Cellphone. He thinks we old guys are mean and nasty. Maybe we are, because we never had the experience he had, and we feel so sad. Not.
Anyway, back in the wilds of Northern Cal, he started walking to see if he could get in cellphone range, and after about several miles (they still don’t have kilometres down there), he reached a dealership (on his cellphone), which had the required rad hose he needed. When he was told the price, he nearly had a heart attack. Several hundred (U.S.) dollars.
Better still, the dealership refused to deliver it, and told him: “You’re on your own, but maybe you can get a taxi to deliver it.”
Our young hero calmed down and called a cab. They agreed to deliver the rad hose for US$350.
Mr. Cellphone was freaking out, then his phone rang, and the service writer at the dealership said a technician (they used to be called mechanics) was getting off shift and he agreed to run the part up the mountains, but he’d accept only cash. Mr. Cellphone agreed, and asked him to include five jugs of antifreeze and an equal amount of water, and then started the twomile hike back to his disabled, twoyear old rig.
The technician did arrive, handing the driver a long piece of blue silicone hose that wasn’t really the correct custom-fit hose. The driver cut it to length, put on the old hose clamps (because the technician did not bring new ones — nobody asked him to) — added the antifreeze and water, and fired the rig up. No leaks. Then he told us the even funnier part of this story.
The mechanic/technician passed Mr. Cellphone a bill for $190 for the length of radiator hose that wasn’t the correct factory issued one, plus a bill for three-hours labour, even though he didn’t lift a finger, or even pass a screw driver to the driver. Labour costs were in the neighbourhood of $450, so the driver had to dip into his emergency cash fund, pay off the delivery boy, and bite his tongue. The latter had said, as soon as he arrived on the scene with the needed parts, “if you don’t like the price, I can take the hose and antifreeze back with me.”
So the young fellow paid $640 for a piece of radiator hose that he should never have had to buy in the first place.
We older dudes carried our own parts. We carried everything you could think of. We even carried jugs of water, because there were always motorists somewhere who could use that old milk jug full of water for their car radiator, and we never used that water to wash our hand. We had rags for hand cleaning.
Yep. It was a fun 20 minutes. Listening to the tale of woe, and laughing with my older buddies. We never experienced his problem. Not because cellphones hadn’t been invented when we first hit the road, but because would never believe that a cellphone can fix anything.
I’m here to tell you — once again — the old ways are still the best ways.