Passiveness...
I had a load for Proctor and Gamble and the deadline to deliver it was in two days. I had to stop for a day to catch up on my DOT hours so I sent them a message and said it will be delivered on time, blah blah blah.... Well, they wanted me to send a 'macro' as they call it, from my Qualcomm (it's big brother in the truck) to say that I was going to be late. I responded and said, "no, it'll be on time. I'm stopped for the night and it will be delivered no problem"... So this vagina-saurus rex recoded the delivery so I was already 'late' and I had to send in this macro... Apparently they try to kiss P&G's ass because the guy that came knocking on my truck at 3 o'clock in the damn morning to swap trailers mentioned that their bonuses are tied closely to these accounts... Funny, because the drivers don't get shit extra for it...anyways... Enough of that...
So I'm at this Pilot truck stop where I purchased a month subscription of roaming Internet access. It sucks balls. Called the customer support line and 'there's nothing they can do about it...' Seriously? Well, whatever. I worked on my résumé a bit and I was able to get my utilities scheduled for my new apartment... And I pushed refresh about a zillion times on my computer hoping one fucking page would load completely.
The long intro to my topic of choice tonight is about being passive. I've found myself in this strangely familiar predicament again. Sitting. Waiting. Stressing about how I'm going to take care of my life on my own. All the while, I'm being used as a pawn by these dispatchers in which they could care less about the fact that I'm sitting once again at a truck stop wasting my time not making money. Meh.
I admittedly don't do confrontation much. Mainly because I don't have someone that has my back. For example, selling the restaurant. I would have loved to play hardball and called bluff on the assholes that bought the place, but there was no one behind me. And truthfully, there was nothing for me to gain by speaking up. I'm paying the consequences but I still believe in karma. I've decided to walk away from so many things in my life. It's not a bad thing though. I simply decided enough is enough and I want something better for myself. My trouble is that I find myself in situations where I'm at someone else's mercy.
I'm in the middle of a personal process right now in which I'm trying to recover what I gave up after leaving the military. Moving back to Washington when I got out changed me immediately. It was like night and day. I didn't fully realize it until one day in the kitchen of my restaurant. (See 'consumption'). Money isn't what I lost. What took me two combat deployments and four years in the Army to gain, was lost in the blink of an eye. I simply let life ass-rape me. I was no longer in any sort of control. The truck driving, the flight school, the tree climbing, the move to California, the school again... It's what I need to do for myself. My experience at flight school was really a dumb part of my life, but I did in fact get my pilots license. Cool right? Money of course has always been a factor in my decisions to do things but as hard as it gets, I feel much better knowing that wherever I lay my head at night is because I'm relying on myself and no one else.
I'm passive because I know the full consequences of spouting my mouth off to people that ultimately don't give a rats ass. If I bitch and complain about sitting at truck stops too much, the delightful dispatcher will very discreetly put my name at the bottom of the list because well, you get the point. I spoke up to my family about how I feel and why I feel it and guess what? They read it the way they wanted to and behold I'm the fucking black sheep again. If I bitch about my Taco Bell Burrito being nasty and demand another one, I don't suppose they'd put in a little extra 'care' would they?
My goal one day isn't just to be wealthy enough to sustain a good life, but to be good enough at anything so that when I speak up, people might actually listen. The only way I know of in my heart is to create something. Or the plural of... I want to have the kind of clout where if some snot nosed graduate student asks me who the hell I think I am, I can grab him by the shoulder and turn him to the side and point to what it was I created and say, 'that's who the hell I am...' Guess I gotta get busy huh?