Three cheers for old drivers. Hip! Hip! Ouch.
Really, let’s hear it for old drivers. But no wheezing, OK?
CCJ, a fleet management magazine and newsletter, recently posted an interesting piece called “Tips for adopting technology among aging driver populations.”
The article says that some companies “still have drivers in their 70s, and maybe even older, who are part of the electromechanical and analog generations that grew up with things like electric mixers and toasters and were later introduced to radios and microwaves.”
They don’t know half of what we were introduced to or what we had to know.
Sure, kid drivers are better at typing with their thumbs. So what? We’re much better at dealing with new stuff than young drivers. We’ve been at it a lot longer.
No, I don’t drive anymore, but I did back in the day. I started driving in a previous century, and I have dealt with a lot of technology in my lifetime.
The first company I worked for had just traded in their 2-horsepower vehicles for snappy new Macks. You think ELDs are tough? Try switching from reins to a steering wheel. And it wasn’t easy getting used to exhaust that spewed into the air instead of plopping onto the highway.
Back then, you had to do a lot of shifting. When I was driving, we had more gears than today’s young drivers could even count. Heck, there were half a dozen shift levers and four or five pedals on the floor. Plus, you had to keep your eye on the steam gauge and coal level at all times.
Driving a truck was far more challenging then. Dispatch wanted to hear from you almost every damned day, and it could be tough to find a telegraph office.
Then someone invented pay phones. You think cellphones are challenging? Back then we’d be walking around with so much change for the phones that the weight could rip the pockets right off our pants. We had dropped calls, too. If we didn’t insert the coins fast enough, BAM! Call over!
Speaking of ELDs, we had to fill out old-time logbooks. Even some of you youngsters may remember those.
But yours were easy compared to what we had to deal with. We had to fill them out in duplicate, but carbon paper hadn’t been discovered yet. We had to make each log entry twice – one for the company and one for ourselves to show to the cops. That was bad enough, but if you hit the brakes too hard or took a curve too fast, your inkwell would slosh over.
At least the cops couldn’t stick their heads into our windows because of those funky, tall constable hats.
We had calculators, too, and they didn’t need electrical outlets. Enter your number, pull down the handle, and voila! There was our total. Yes, we had handheld calculators, too. They were truly advanced. The beads didn’t even require batteries.
Computers? We had them. I remember my first one was gas powered with a hand crank on the side. But wow, could that mother compute! And talk about high-tech, it turned out the best, most advanced navigation guides ever. It took some advanced training to use them. They didn’t talk to us while we were trying to drive, and they never told us to turn onto dead-end residential streets or car-only parkways.
They were called maps.
Talk about a learning curve. LL