From: chance wolf (chance_wolf@shaw.ca)
Date: Tue Apr 27 2004 - 16:19:55 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "J. Wiehe" <j.wiehe@sympatico.ca>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:17 PM
Subject: Re: [MV] M1009 tires + M211 and trailers
> And the ground guides favourite directions:
>
> " Go ahead, back up. Go ahead, back up. "
>
> Then they walk up to the cab and ask why do you keep
> driving forward when I'm telling you to back up ?
>
> Once you get used to doing the " small " trailers a nice
> big 48' or 53 footer will be a piece of cake.
We had one guy on a recent film set - some high seniority Teamster - whose
idea of ground guiding was to make lazy, ambiguous circling motions with the
hand that *wasn't* holding the cigarette while continuously muttering some
mantra completely lost in the whine of the 1D's turbo. He also seemed to
think telepathy took over when he strayed outside the range of our mirrors,
and made it a point to yell at the drivers when they "didn't follow (his)
directions" and wound up off their marks. We had a few ex-military drivers
with us on that show, so despite "Union rules" (*cough*), we just had one of
our lot go and ground-guide whenever one of our deuces was backing up before
Messr. Lazy Circles got his oar in. Problem solved. :)
(He was actually an okay guy, and apparently he uses that style with some
success with his own work truck jockeys. Having witnessed them at work, I
think the missing component is the fact that the whole swearing
back-and-forth thing that the Teamsters do was something we were never
taught on our own Safe Backing Course, and there must be some directional
component to it all which escapes the untrained eye.)
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