Capítulo 2: I Am Angry
Chapter 1
I am angry
"Oh, hell no! Why are you idiots in my way?!" The sound of his own impotent rage rang in his truck. "Jesus CHRIST! MOVE!"
In a fine aid to his mood, the traffic continued its never-ending dance of stupidity. Cars that could move with the nimbleness of gold medal winning gymnasts on the parallel bars, jerked from lane to lane. Alone in his forty-ton truck, Nom could only maneuver with the grace and skill of an American Republican denouncing Nazis. Again and again, it was his hard-won skill that kept countless morons off morgue slabs. For some demented reason, they seemed to think the few feet of space in front of him was an invitation to cut him off, rather than the minimum distance he needed to react.
Nom had been in a foul mood most of the day. He had woken up with a song in his heart, a rather unusual feat for the usually dour, moody, and overweight truck driver. Life however, had managed her usual feat. She took that song, dipped it in scalding acid, rolled it in sand for texture, and then shoved it up his ass without lube.
A consummate loner, Nom had finally managed to ditch Tripp, his last co-driver, a week before. He didn't have anything against the man, it was just that he was alive and in his space. Now Nom was alone and in the perfect job. He listened to audio books and pod casts all day. He only spoke to people over a cell phone, which would, conveniently, be accused of dropping calls in the event of irritation or boredom. Security guards, shipping clerks, yard dogs, fuel depot attendants, these were his only in-person contacts. They simply wanted to see him leave so that they could see the next person leave in turn. Nom was in paradise.
Then Life payed him a visit after his week in paradise. He had been assigned a nice long haul load. This meant that he would be left to himself for four days over the weekend. Pick up the load Thursday night, deliver Monday morning. In the meantime, see no one, hear no one, speak to no one. Or so he thought.
When the blue light on his QUALCOMM lit up indicating a new email from his manager, Nom felt his dread rising. What would Fate do to destroy his perfect weekend? Nom pulled over at the next rest stop so that the computer would let him read the message. If the truck was in motion, the computer automatically locked the screen. The message instructed him to pick up the same co-driver he had ditched a week before.
The sound of many fucks being hurled with the rapidity and force of an A-10 Warthog's autocannon, seemed to shock the family parked next to his truck in an RV. Nom would usually have found the look of shock and horror on the mother's face a delicacy. This time he found it infuriating that she dared to take offence.
With a nod and a smile, he said: "Salaam Alaikum." He had noticed the "John 3:16" shirt she was wearing. Nom was an atheist, but he was in bigoted, Republican, conservative, Texas; manners were important here. "When in Rome, do as the Roman's do." When in Texas, be an utter ass. Nom rolled up the window, and proceed to curse his lungs out.
This turn of events was simply intolerable. His ex-co-driver, Tripp, was a fine human being; unfortunately, he was also young and a terrible driver. He came with the perks of being quiet, and largely staying out of Nom's way. At the same time, he refused to meet his daily mile quota, making them late for deliveries. There was always an excuse: a traffic jam, an accident, bad weather, the GPS failing, etcetera. It seemed as if every other shift, that quota would not be met; a quota that determined their pay rate. For some strange reason, and despite all the trials Tripp endured every night shift, the truck would stop at multiple truck stops during the night. Tripp was also reluctant to help with keeping the truck clean, a crime that Nom was barely able to tolerate. But, above all else, there was one single flaw that no amount of maturing could ever fix, he was a living being in Nom's space.
The cab of the truck, even though it had a built-in sleeper unit, was only an eight by ten-foot box. A privacy curtain blocked the sleeper bay off from the driving compartment. Nom could not see Tripp during his shift, or when he slept at night, but he knew that another human was present. Sounds, scents, the feel of the truck shifting when Tripp adjusted himself in the sleeping birth, it all added up to a recipe for a rage that Nom could barely contain. Why would he want another human to intrude on his sacred and blessed solitude? Surrounded by multitudes of people every day on the highways and byways of America, he was now eternally alone, and in a state of bliss for it.
As the stream of cursing died away into course laughs of sub-psychotic rage, Nom left the truck to clear his head with a stroll.
"Twat!" he cursed. "That Goddamn sow is screwing me again!" Nom's driver manager was a rather incompetent middle age woman. Or so he assumed: they had never met, and had only spoken over the phone. In theory Kim should have been interested in moving freight as quickly as possible. After all, most of her pay came from the commissions she earned from her fleet completing trips on time. Over the last several weeks, Kim had displayed an astounding ability to keep her fleet idle.
For years, federal regulations had limited drivers to fourteen hours of work a day, with only eleven hours of actual driving. The company had installed computers in their trucks to monitor what drivers did; there was no way to fool them. Kim would arrange for a driver to go pick up a load from a shipper that was notorious for taking half a day to finish a job. She would then schedule that driver to make an eleven-hour drive afterword. Normally this would be fine, assuming that the driver had a co-driver to take over once their clock ran out. During the week that he had been solo, Kim had assigned Nom four short run loads to occupy his time. Each one inevitably ran into problems that a basic understanding of arithmetic would have resolved: Eleven hours driving, plus five hours waiting equals…
Finally, he had a load that her stupidity could not destroy. He had oodles of spare time to complete it. He was off, on his own and free, or had been. Now all of the driving he had done today would be gratis. The company paid by the trip not by the actual miles driven. The bitch had ordered him to pick up his co-driver. The slag had rescinded his travel orders and then issued new ones. These had the same end pay, only with him and the co-driver splitting the take. By the time he turned around to Dallas, got his co-driver aboard, and got rolling, he could arrive in Illinois. If he had driven solo that is. Now he would get paid half as much.
That piece of crap, micromanaging, putrescence was stealing from him. No, she was breaking a contract. Kim had issued a travel order, and he had accepted it. It was a deal. Now she was changing it to his detriment, and without his consent.
Having made three circles around the rest area, Nom remounted his cab, started his engine, and proceeded out to the road. The futile attempts of the woman in the RV to confront him when he returned, went in one ear, and out the other. Vaguely, Nom noticed that his left hand rose above his shoulder and extended its middle finger. The gesture was autonomous and certainly not something he consciously intended. His mind was far too occupied with fantasies of disemboweling or immolating his boss, to trifle with such trivialities as an evangelical Texas house frau.
Nom reprogramed his GPS for the new destination, or target as he preferred to think of them. He began to make his way from Paradise to the depths of the Inferno. There were almost two-hundred-fifty miles, or five hours, to contemplate just how much he loathed other people. That is before his personal space would be violated again.
Computer programmers for example. Nom loathed them with a passion that was just shy of his hatred for mosquitos. From his perspective, both were inevitable, sucked blood from him, and gave him a nasty irritation. Not to say that Nom was a luddite, far from it. Nom preferred to live in an online world, only coming back to reality to refresh his mortal coil long enough to enable him to return to what he saw as the real world. The problem was that most computer programmers were either incompetent or simply out for the money.
Take the vile swine that had programed his QUALCOMM unit, the computer micro managing his truck. For some demented reason, they had made it so that he could not read messages while the truck was in motion. It constantly flashed irritating lights. Worst of all, the bane of his existence constantly told him in a: disembodied, feminine, monotone voice from the bowels of Hades; that messages were waiting for him to read them. Did she read them to him so that he could keep driving? No. She simply told him that they awaited his attention. If he pulled over every ten minutes, he might manage to read a message each time the harpy demanded his attention, but pulling a big rig off of the road was no trifling matter. Each time the stop had to be planned in advance to ensure that not only it was legal to exit, since many roads prohibited trucks, but that there was a safe and legal place to park. Parking the rig could take almost a half hour to accomplish depending on the facility, and getting back out could take another five to ten minutes.
The rest of the time, that satanic voice was telling him that he had managed to not follow some moronic direction it had given through its GPS app. The problem was that the programmers had failed to set the unit up to update its maps adequately. Overpasses that had been demolished years before were a particular favorite of the QUALCOMM. It seemed to think that Nom's truck was capable of flight, therefore it should drive over nonexistent viaducts. When he failed to comply, it would order him in that gratingly bland, yet synthetic feminine voice, to turn around and resume the route.
One day in St. Louis, she ordered him to do this on I-55. When Nom chose not to see if the gravitational constant in the area was still nine point eight meters per second squared, the computer began to berate him. Cursing at the piece of shit did no good, but it did keep Nom's blood pressure below the level necessary to launch his eyes from their sockets. Unlike most modern devices that would automatically generate a new route when the commanded route was missed, the QUALCOMM continued to yell.
It did, fortunately, offer a reroute button. Once pressed this button would send the unit to sleep for five minutes, to "request a route." It would still display his progress, but it was silent. When it came back on, it avoided its usual shtick. Normally, it would demand that he turn around on a one-way freeway to take the newly generated route that it had. A path which was now miles behind him, but after the original one. This time it offered a route in front of him. Being a sap, Nom proceeded to follow it.
The route told him to exit in one point four miles. He complied and followed the route to a T. In fifteen miles he found himself having made a circle and approaching the same non-existent bridge. Once again, he was being instructed to see if the local gravitational well was functioning properly. His left eye was twitching from the effort involved in not smashing the QUALCOMM into a thousand pieces. Nom broke the cardinal rule of trucking and brought up the Google navigation on his phone.
Without a doubt, Google's navigation app was the best available. It was so up to date that it even included current traffic slowdowns, offering detours to get around gridlock. It also was designed for cars. A seventy-three-foot truck, weighing in at forty tons, and thirteen feet six inches tall, could not go to the same places that a car could. As a result, it was generally preached in the trucking industry that only a fool would rely on Google Maps Navigation.
Well, common knowledge aside, it did offer the advantage of being up to date at all times over the vile QUALCOMM. Passing the nonexistent bridge, Nom pressed the voice command button on his blue tooth. When the AI answered, he instructed her to Google nav to his target. In seconds he had an open map showing him the way to the promise land. She knew that the bridge was out, and, four miles later she instructed a turn… into a section of St. Louis that had been clearly designed for horse and buggy transportation.
"Google, you conniving slag, you led me down here on purpose!" He shouted, knowing that the AI had done nothing of the sort. Deep down he knew that his ire was towards the Google software engineers that had failed to release a truck driving app. An app that would have been the most popular truck app on the market in a matter of seconds after its release. If only the blasted software would take into account the restrictions of truck driving.
After five minutes he had managed to back his way back onto the off ramp, and back onto the freeway. This time he simply took the next freeway interchange that headed east. He would let QUALCOMM and Google sort it out later.
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