To Whom It May Concern

Flip Flop Day & Night

Okay, first off, I'm listening folks, so I'm going to stick to one color, seeing how everyone complains about being painfully debilitatingly blinded by my colorchromatic entries here, I hope this works, I'll stick with it.

Now, about two weeks ago or so, my manager came to me and asked if I wanted to take over for a week for the southwest night driver, Dwayne, who works about 4 hours west of Omaha, in Kearney. He was going on vacation. His runs starts in Kearney and goes south and rambles all over, all the way to Benkelman and then back up to Ogallala, and down the interstate to Kearney again, with a bunch of stops along the way. It can add up to 600 miles on the longest nights.

Our general manager offered me basically double my normal pay, and they would put me up in a hotel for 5 days, AND they gave me 300 bucks petty cash to use for food or whatever other expenses might come up. They figured with Belly gone that I would be the best choice to send. Hell, I wish Belly could have gone along, that would have been awesome, she would have had a hotel room with continental breakfast and a pool and well, you know, living it up so to speak. Alas, she is not yet home, so that was not to be. Even so, of course I jumped at the chance to go, if for no other reason, the money was good.

I took my newly purchased 100 lb weight set so I could work out in the room, and my military truck radio 'set up' that I have, basically a cd boom box with ac/dc converter, because the radios in our Sprinter vans blow ass, tinny and worthless with tape decks. I also rented a lap top from Ace Rent to Own (big mistake, more on that later). Headed out Monday the 25th of April and stayed in the Country Inn in Kearney, a nice little 3 star that I picked out with wireless internet and wired high speed access.

The first night I was out from 8 pm till 10:30 the next morning. I expected this though, because only Dwayne, the normal driver who was on vacation, really knows this route. All in all though I did really well, I only had to call him up twice with any questions. It is hard as hell to sleep when the light is out though, so I only got about maybe 5 hours of sleep each day, if that.

I ate one meal a day, unless I got back at the time the continental breakfast was going on, then I would indulge on that (twice). Believe it or not I ate at reasonable places, and ended up with about half of that 300 bucks leftover. Although, I did charge 2 beers on when I went to Old Chicago. If they don't like that, oh well, screw 'em, it's not like I was spending extravagantly and going to steak houses or anything.

Oh yes, the lap top, oh my, what a piece of shit that was. Well, the laptop itself was probably pretty good, except for these two little popups that looked like Microsoft download alerts, but they were suspicious, so I just closed them as I was formatting the computer with some of my own software at home before I left. Well, when I hooked it up to the internet in Kearney, I was working online and as I hit enter one of those popups came up just then and boom started downloading some really horrible virus. Basically the computer just locked up, and when I rebooted, well, what do you know? There is a little white X inside of a red circle, like an error looking thing, but it was some program that was running, and didn't show up in the task manager, and I was unable to remove it using Add/Remove programs.

I left clicked on the icon, thinking I might see what it was, BOOM, Internet Explorer opens up "BIG BLACK COCKS AND WHITE MAMAS". Shit, at this point I knew I was dealing with a virus so I put in our Spy Sweeper disc I had, that didn't work. I mean, it showed viruses, freaking 140 of them!!! And it got rid of the majority of them, but about 35 or so that it would delete would IMMEDIATELY be back up and running again.

So I downloaded CW Shredder, Add Aware SE, Hijack This, about half a dozen other known free spyware eliminators, even Microsoft's own spyware remover, and fiddled with safe mode, unhooked the internet, manually tried to fix the registry, and I got no where. This was really frustrating. I basically gave up and used it 'as is'.

As the week went on, it got worse. I came back from my night run yesterday morning to find 25 (LITERALLY) shortcut icons on the desktop. GAMBLING, BIG BLACK TITS, CHEAP AIR FAIR, RENT A CAR, BLOW JOBS, etc etc. I just shook my head, because, as I figured, I deleted them only to have them come right back up. I called the place I rented it from and told the guy what was going on, and he said "oh, that can't be possible, we use a root disc to redo the hard drive each time someone brings the computer in" and I told him that either someone didn't reboot this computer or their boot disc is infected as all hell, something he needs to look into.

So using the internet was next to impossible, I was able to chat a little bit, that was basically all, trying to upload to my blog was a disaster because I kept losing long posts, it would automatically open that BIG BLACK COCKS site and when I would 'back' to this page, 'poof' nothing. After about 4 times of that I gave up.

I did work out every day, and one day I even got myself down to the treadmill and ran 2 miles. But usually aerobic stuff was just too much, I was far too fatigued. This basically flipped my day upside down, and made me stay up during hours I was normally asleep, and vice versa. That is really hard to do. I even took soda, candy bars, Doritos, etc, along to nibble on, still didn't work that well. So about every night, I stopped and had to take about an hour long nap about 2/3 of the way through the trip to help me make it safely.

Then... last night, wow. I don't know if it was something I ate or just the week catching up with me, but about a half hour into the run I got a splitting headache and got all nasty sweaty feeling. I kept going for about another hour but I finally stopped and took an hour and a half nap. That helped, I felt a lot better, so off I went again. Then, in one town where I have two stops, I was at the first one and broke the key off in the front door. ACK!!! Yah, damn!! Called Dwayne up... turns out, there is no key for this particular stop. Turns out I happened to have a key that was opening the door and shouldn't have been. Worse yet, that key was for my next stop. Talk about an unexpectedly aggravating situation.

I was able to get the old part of the key out of the door it didn't belong in, then off I went to the next stop, where I put that part of the key in the door, and well, didn't get anywhere with it. Then, to make matters worse, I couldn't get it out of the door. Not that it really mattered, with needle nose pliers a person could get that out. I think with my Leatherman I would have been able to get the lock open, using the large screwdriver head that is.

I had to put seven windshields outside leaned up against the building, which was bad, because this particular customer is a real jerkoff about his 'product' being perfect and put in the CORRECT racks when it is delivered. Oh well, fuck him, who really cares, as long as he gets it and it's not scratched, and hopefully it's not. But hey, if it is scratched, we'll just send him more. You can see how concerned I am right? : )

So, after like an hour or more of dicking around with those two stops, I was finally back on the road. Then after another stop, I had to stop and sleep again, I was just exhausted, and the broken key episode only drained me even more, as far as stress and being in the cold and the frustration, plus being the last day, I think I had just let a lot of fatigue build up and regardless of how often I seemed to stop to cat nap I was just as tired, so I just kept driving from that point, yelling, head out the window, throwing my arms all over, whatever it took to stay awake.

So anyways, I made it. Yes, I know, you are all so incredibly happy for me. One thing is for sure, I don't think I would do this again, it just tosses your entire world topsy-turvy, I'm all messed up now sleep wise and I bet it will be a good week of normal schedule before I'm back to my normal routine again. I'm glad it's over. Now, time to focus on a wedding, deployment, getting my baby back home, and ... oh, I need a haircut.

Current Lyrical Ramblings

My hands are tied,
For all I've seen has changed my mind
But still the wars go on as the years go by,
With no love of God or human rights
'Cause all these dreams are swept aside,
by bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide,
And history bears the scars of our civil wars.
- Civil War, Guns N Roses