CHAPTER 24
(HGH or HHG?)
A skinny dude in his thirties was sure to bombard the orientation leaders with questions he should already know the answer to. Just dumb stuff to prolong our orientation like "where do we park?" "Who pays for the parking?" The other drivers in the class were constantly telling the skinny guy from Jersey to shut up. I was a veteran to this orientation shit. I knew what it was.
Throughout the orientation I had many questions myself but opted not to ask them as it would only prolong this painful process of them blowing smoke up our ass about how we would be paid. It made no sense for me to pepper them with questions as I darn well knew it wasn't going to change the "Here and Now". Celadon had kidnapped me once again. A driver in hand was worth more than two peeing in between trailers. There of course Was one thing I already knew beforehand that would require my utmost attention. The payment contract. Everything came down to that one sided one paged payment contract.
Celadon will always be known for being sneaky. When they fired me in 2014 they were were very clever about it and I never saw it coming. I always knew they were a sneaky company from the myriad bad reviews previous drivers had always left before. In 2014 when they had a staff three times bigger I had snuck off down the street and was able to make a copy of the payment agreement for myself as I was learning not to trust people. Especially since that skinny witch had terminated me for hopping a curb which clearly wasn't my fault because the contract workers were getting saucy and coerced me to vamoose.
Celadon waited near the end of orientation to dole out the payment contracts that required our signatures because they knew we would be worn out and brainwashed from all the previous testing. I'll never forget how passing out those payment contracts on January 31st 2018 turned into a giant game of truth or dare. So who got stuck with the dare? Why the youngest one of course Lauren. She was younger than the rest of the witches in there and could therefore snatch those contracts up at a lightning speed before anybody would get an adequate chance to read them.
I noticed when Lauren accosted me with the payment contract she was super fast about laying it in front of me for me to sign. The very first thing I looked for obviously was numbers. The style format was a facsimile of the 2014 payment contract except that the wording seemed slightly different. I couldn't help but be curious why the wording would have changed from the 2014 payment contract. The orientation team was in a big hurry to collect the payment contracts but I thought I noticed some sort of abbreviation with the letters HGH. Human Growth Hormone? I was very much confused. Lauren and the other witches were snatching those things up before our very tired and worn out orientation class could read and fully assimilate them. This of course would not provide me with a chance to ask to go down the street and make a copy.
When Lauren sensed I was squinting my eyes in confusion at the payment contract she skipped a row and snatched up mine literally the moment after I signed it.
"Can I have a copy of that for my records?" She smiled as if she had gotten one over on me. "I'll see what I can do."
Even though four years had passed I knew not to trust Celadon. Not to trust ANY trucking company for that matter. What was ironic was watching how the rest of the class had literally no interest in fully reading the payment contracts. They were in the same boat as me. A driver in hand is worth more than two peeing between a trailer What else could we do if the Celadon witches were in a hurry to snatch those things up? Was our hometown gonna pay our way home and provide us with a better job?
Lauren looked a lot like the young blond from Stan Koch and Sons trucking that kept me up to speed that I was no longer making the "short news" but rather the very "LONG" news at Stan Koch and Sons Trucking. I remember the blond in her twenties out there in Minnesota had thrown me such a curveball I later had to ask my sister what she in fact was implying. Back then while the ousting team was utilizing their "very fine comb" the girl that loved hockey accosted me and kept me up to speed. I can still remember her verbatim words. She was all wound up like a coo coo clock and I had no idea conversations were going on about me behind closed doors.
"Hey Steidler, you and I were fighting, you and I"
I was utterly confused by her words as I was quite certain she hadn't caught me staring at her butt crack when she bent over and therefore had no reason to have me on her shit list. I had been incarcerated for almost five years with the Feds. They charge inmates for wreck less eyeballing they call it. I had honed up better peripheral vision than the Easter Bunny. There was no way this hockey lover had caught me looking.
I remember the hockey girl from Minnesota still trying to claim her notch in the Kochy Monster's totem pole at her very young age compared to the sour puss witches that dictated in there. I was merely filling out paper work and answering honestly to the best of my ability.
Before hockey girl had walked away from my student desk she had one more thing to say to me that shocked me.
"Oh and Steidler, they had a very LONG conversation about you yesterday."
I remember giggling back in late April of 2016. Did she just say LONG conversation? I thought google had listed me as making the short news?
The food was always good at Celadon just as it was in 2014. Unlike the other trucking companies that had to order from outside vendors, Celadon had its own cafeterias that even the fortunate office employees could eat at. I contemplated escaping from the boring trucking life quite often and found myself eyeing up the jobs of the office people that were always smart enough to show off their Under Armor polo shirts to fool outsiders into believing they were educated. I was quite certain a good majority of the staff were only high school graduates at best. Sure maybe some went to a community college but wouldn't an Ivy Leaguer get bored by a place like this? I couldn't help but wonder how nice it would be to go directly to work and have breakfast prepared right there for you prior to staring your shift. Everybody knew the importance of breakfast yet it was always hard for the average blue collar worker to figure out how to get it. Nobody ever had that spare hour to stop off at a diner and hot dogs and those nasty churros at gas stations were just flat out unhealthy and awful. There was just one thing I could never figure out about a place like this. If the amenities were so nice for the staff with their hot meals and comfy swivel chairs then why did a good bunch of them make it uncomfortable for the drivers?
Orientation was over for the day and it wasn't very long before we created a very short line in the cafeteria. I didn't know what had happened at Celadon that diminished the size of their new hires. It all seemed so much different from 2014 when it was basically a glorified day care center. I clearly remember how amusing it was for me to finally meet the husband of the woman that resided in the dorm room next to me. It was so stinking hilarious and the look she had given me when I stood in line behind them one day to sign paperwork. I knew that short brown haired woman HAD to of known I knew how many big black well endowed students had slipped into her dorm room in the middle of the night. All that thumping and slurping noises had kept me up many a nights. When her sucker of a guy husband had came to pick her up at the school I had never gaped like that in all my life. The woman was prolly in her late thirties or early forties and not really all that attractive but simply knowing I was literally the only one left at Celadon that hadn't pounded her out left me feeling left out and it only made her appear more attractive as I was curious why her door got knocked on all night long. But not knowing she secretly had a husband and then meeting him in person? Priceless moment. Her secret was fine with me. If his sleuthing skills were really that terrible than he deserved to lick up all that leftover mess.
I smiled as I knew my free meal was right on its way. It was an empty house at Celadon but that was good for a schizophrenic like me. I don't bode very well in large crowds were there's that many more people to monitor my thoughts. Big crowds for me can potentially evoke unwanted tics and off the hook hysteria eruptions. Funerals and weddings can be hard for me if a voice crawls inside of me and starts cracking jokes. But what was I to think about my neighbor's husband shaking my hand like everything was hunky dory and now that the wifey had that CDL they could go team?
"TEAM" LOL. It's funny when you think about what the employment experts try to tell you "TEAM" actually stands for . TOGETHER EVERYONE ACHIEVES MORE. My neighbor lady had helped the entire Celadon Tag team achieve many things!