Technology has made it easier to stay in touch both with family and your company. The down side is that it has also made business less personal. People don't seem to communicate as much since so many use a qualcomm rather than the phone to stay in touch with their company. Technology has made it possible to better track shipments, but there also seems to be more of a need to monitor your equipment. It seems to me as though there are more drivers who will abandon their equipment. The work ethic has suffered. We seem to be driven by technology. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that technology is driving us. :?

 

Hell no, I didn't shoot the snake, it was a 6" Western Diamond Back and I was too busy digging out my snake bite suction kit.
I shot the gun an hour later just before I passed out in the freakin desert.

 

Did you survive?

 

Has technology improved the industry? I got to drive a truck today that pretty much confirms that. I was in our shop the other day and saw this horribly ugly (in a tough kind of way) heavy duty Kenworth conventional. I have only seen a couple of these thing through the years and I can't find a pic of one yet either. The hood was up and the non electronic fuel pump caught my eye, I snooped a little more and saw that it an old 400 Cummins. I opened the door to find the manufacturers tag on the door frame. It was a 1985. It was an all spring suspension and had a 5X4 in it! I thought it was really neato! Well today I was rooting around the shop and the mechanic was complaining that a customer needed his truck delivered across town and he did not have a CDL... I jumped at the chance to drive the old beast! It was FUN! But in a roller coaster kind of way. It took me a couple of miles to get back in the swing of the 5X4, and I only had to stop and restart once! ops: I got darned near beat to death on a cross town hop in this thing. I'll not wonder about the technology of power everything, Jake Brakes, Cruise control, ABS brakes, A/C, Electronic low RPM/High Torque engines and above all Air Ride Suspensions!!!! By Monday maybe my kidneys will find their way home!

 

The only technology that changed for me since I first started driving was the Simple Cell phone.

In the past if you had to make a call you had to pull into a truck stop or rest area and stand in line with everybody else trying to make a call to dispatch or whomever.

Cell phones were a Godsend.

 

Oh no, Terry your from the Bill Engvall state, your not allowed to do that. Here's your Sign buddy. :lol:

 

I'm up on my cell contract, and will be hitting the road in 2 weeks.
WHAT COMPANY HAS THE BEST COVERAGE?
I will be in all 48, and don't want to be roaming all the time...
I'm also looking into blackberries, etc...to find a phone that I can email and send/receive pics from.
any good cell companies you've used?

 

Verizon has given me much better coverage than I had with Sprint/Nextel.

 

Cingular/AT&T has the best that I have seen. Yeah they have their problems like all the others but coverage is not much of a problem until you get around the Rockies and Southwest of the US where celltowers are pretty non-existant. East of the Mississippi, your almost guaranteed coverage.

Nextel is mainly Interstate roads where they work best, get away from them and your coverage/service will really drop off.

 

The talk about the old KW with the 5x4 made me realize I should add some other new technology stuff to my list. I started driving in '97, but always drove old equipment. I started off in an '83 Freightshaker, then moved to an '89 Pete (both single axle cabinovers.) Until March of 2006, when I finally got a more modern 2001 conventional, I had never experienced two amazingly helpful things in a truck. Cruise control, and most especially INTERMITTENT, ELECTRICALLY OPERATED WIPERS!!

I still almost never flip on the cruise, just from going the first almost decade without that option, but I don't think I can rant enough about how much I detest air operated windshield wipers, with their two speeds of too fast (low), and not fast enough (high). They completely sucked. Not to mention the constant HISSSsssssHHHHHHHH HISSSssssssHHHHHH of the air in the dash.

Trading those cramped little coffin style sleepers for a cramped stand-up was nice too. At least I could stand up, even if the 54" sleeper on that International was still too small to feel truly homey.

Another piece of helpful modern technology was the air dryer, which I first had on that 2001. I used to have to blow more than a gallon of water out my air tanks, and stand there trying not to breathe in a foetid fog of rusty water, antifreeze, and oil. In spite of the daily purge, and the use of alcohol in winter, I still experienced several episodes of trouble related to water in the airlines mixed with extreme cold temperatures. (Extreme to this ol' southern boy being somewhere around 0 F.)

So in summary, newer trucks really rock!