C.B., or not C.B.? That Is The Question!

I recently re-established contact with an old friend after a six or seven year absence. She was unaware of our new profession, and in the process of catching up, she asked, "Do truckers still have CB's?"

My experience with CB radio started, like most people, in the 1970's. I got one around 1975, and since I was driving a VW Rabbit, my handle was "Bugs Bunny." Of course, the song "Convoy" and the movie "Smokey and the Bandit" reflected the explosion of popularity of the things, and I enjoyed having it in the car for a couple of years, learning the lingo and such.

But then, along with the rest of the country, my infatuation died, and it went back to be mainly the domain of the trucking industry. And a major shift occured when the government deregulated the airwaves. Which meant you didn't have to have a license to operate a radio and there was carte blanche on what you could say on the air.

Donna and I got into trucking in March of 2005. We did without a CB for nearly two years. I kept thinking it would be good to have one, but kept putting it off. Then we got our new truck in December of 2006, and a little later I took the plunge. So I hooked up the radio while at home and we took off across the top end perimeter of Atlanta to go to a pickup, and I flipped the switch for the first time in thiry years. Immediately a highly irritated southern voice came screetching over the air. "That G.D M.F.'n Gordon cut off Junior yesterday and cost Junior the G.D.M.F.'n race!" Whoa! This language was illegal thirty years ago. Gotta love deregulation! This rampage lasted several more minutes and I turned it off. I came to find out that no one used the old "10" codes anymore, and if anyone used "good buddy" it was to refer to a man of, shall we say, an alternative lifestyle. And thats pretty much how it was for the next two years. It was helpful when there were weather and traffic issues, but the polite friendly voices that I heard in my teenaged years were replaced by racist, misogynistic, ignorant, right wing, gun lovin' nut jobs with giant amps that could, and did, blast anyone with dissenting opinions off the air.

And the guys who do stay on the air continually resent those who pop in when there are traffic problems. We got caught in a bumper to bumper jam in Virginia once and pulled off to get fuel. I left the radio on and listened to one guy roar at every driver who came on the air asking what the problem was, "Go back to yer XM and let IT tell you what the problem is you #$#%%^^$#@^***!!!! And this went on for at least half an hour, at least fifteen or twenty times.

I went about three weeks once without turning it on at all. I decided to see what was going on out there, and was greeted immediately, the very second I turned on the radio, by someone announcing this jewel: "Yeah, I even sucked my own d*** one time!" Well, nothing had changed, I thought, as I reached up and flipped it off again.

So when my friend asked the question, "do truckers still have CB's?", the above was the story I related to her. And I immediately began to think about blogging the story about the death of civility on CB radio, indeed the demise of civilization itself,

and then....

A couple of weeks ago Donna and I were on a run where we had to drive 75 miles of twisting, turning, Pennsylvania two lane blacktop through a National Forest in a snowstorm in the middle of the night to get to a delivery. Our GPS instructed us that we had arrived at our location, but it wasn't there (another blog about technology for another day). What WAS there was a PA DOT station where they were loading salt and sand into trucks, one of which had its headlights on, facing into the roadway. We went creeping slowly by, looking for anything close to a factory, and I heard a voice, "Whatcha doin' big truck?" I had left the CB on, squelched low, and had forgotten about it. Donna and I looked at each other. "Is he talking to us?" Donna asked. "Whatcha lookin' for, big truck?" came over the air again. I grabbed the mic and told him the name of the company we were trying to find. "You got about five or six more miles to go, it'll be up on the left next to the railroad tracks, just pull into the first dock you see. You carryin' powder?" Obviously a local. Well we chatted a couple of more minutes and he wished us well and we thanked him and we continued on our way.

And so then I had to re-think this blog entry. Where I was poised to bury CB radio, I must now praise. Like nearly everything in life, it is a mixture of good and evil. And all groups have that mixture: Black and white, rich and poor, republican and democrat. The problem is that the evil tends to be the loud ones, the ones with "giant amps" blowing everyone else away, the ones that get all the attention (usually thanks to the media) and who we point to when condemning that group. The truth, however, is that no one group or person is all good or all evil, and our eyes must remain open to the possibility of good in any and all situations and peoples, no matter what our predjudices and prior learning experiences lead us to believe.