At the moment of an embarrassing or compromising crisis, if it’s happening to you, they are laughing at you. Hopefully, we all have a good enough sense of humor to look back at the situation and laugh at ourselves. In order to get past it, you pretty much have to laugh; otherwise you might go crazy. That’s pretty much how my day went a few months ago. Everyone was laughing but me.

You see, I drive a semi for a living. I was getting my trailer ready for my route, when I was informed I would be taking a forklift on my trailer. I had already loaded 18 pallets for one store in the front of the trailer and had 3 other pallets for 3 different stores to yet load on. I put the forklift on first, thinking the pallets of liquid laundry detergent would help brace it in. Each one of those pallets had 100 bottles of detergent on it, 2 to a case. I put my load bar on (a load bar is a metal adjustable bar made to brace the last 2 pallets in the trailer) and set out on my route.

Just 5 miles down the highway, my truck started to feel like the brakes were grabbing. Every time I slowed down I felt a push. I first called my boss to tell him I was stopping at the mechanics shop to have him look it over. I then called the mechanic and he said to bring it right over and he would adjust the brakes to see if that would help. I pulled in 15 minutes later, all the while knowing something wasn’t right. The mechanic came out, adjusted the brakes even though he said he couldn’t see anything wrong, and told me to continue on my way to see if it helped. I then asked what if it continues, and he said to bring it back.

Pulling out of their driveway, I didn’t immediately feel the problem again. But as soon as I turned the corner to get back onto the highway, the trouble started again. I had to go through a residential neighborhood in order to get back to the mechanics shop as quickly as possible. I had to go halfway through a roundabout also, but made it no problem. Looking into my mirrors as I was pulling away from the stoplight, I saw the most horrific sight! About 80 or so of the laundry detergent bottles were spread across the road! I thought my doors popped open, but couldn’t see them in my mirrors. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t stop exactly right where I was because I was in the middle of the intersection. I pulled a bit further ahead and pulled to the left side of the road.

As I was preparing to get out of my truck, the sky decided right then to break open and pour rain down in sheets. I grabbed my raincoat and cell phone, got out of the truck and put a call in to my boss as I walked along side of my trailer. Unfortunately, I just got his voice mail, but left a message anyway in hopes of getting reinforcements. There were a lot of bottles to get off the road. The rain was coming down so hard that it was bouncing back up as soon as it hit the ground. Within seconds I was soaked to the bone. As I rounded the back of the truck, the first thing I saw was my doors. They literally looked like a giant took a hold of the bottom of them and tried to pry them open while still being shut and locked. There were bottles of detergent ready to fall out through the opening. These are steel doors yet they looked aluminum by the way they were crumpled open.

My first thought was that I had to get the detergent off the road. As I was running to the area where most of the bottles fell out, I noticed that not only my load bar was on the ground but the 80 pound wood pallet was also. My load bar which was usually a perfectly straight steel bar now looked like a pretzel. To this day, I still have a problem wrapping my mind around that one. I bent down and started flinging the bottles, full or empty, to the side of the road. No easy task, I might add, since there were 2 left turn only lanes on my left and 2 lanes that ran forward and 1 right turn lane on my right. Traffic was heavy, which made it even more difficult. Further ahead, where my pallet had fell, I noticed 2 men and a woman with pickup trucks and a van helping me by loading bottles into their vehicles. I started towards them, not only to thank them, but to also move the pallet to the side of the road. It wasn’t very easy going considering most of the bottles broke open in the fall from my trailer, and I just about fell on my behind from the soap and the rain mixing together. Later, the song, “Slip-Sliding Away”, came to mind.

As I was a few yards away from the people helping me, still whipping bottles to the median, they all started getting in their vehicles; the light had turned green. I figured they were heading to my truck to unload the ten or so bottles they each picked up for me. Boy was I surprised when they all kept going past my truck. I couldn’t believe it! They stole them! I had no time to worry about that because the next thing I know, I’m seeing a fire truck and a police car pulling up with their lights on. At the same time, four guys that were working on a remodel of our East Madison store, pulled up with two vehicles. It had finally stopped down pouring, but was still sprinkling. Most of the detergent bottles were off the road by this time, but as I looked around, there was a large area that had a foot of suds that had formed. It will be the cleanest stretch of highway for miles.

As we were loading broken bottles into a pickup one of the guys had brought, a police officer came over and asked, “Which one of you is the driver of the semi?”

Uh oh, here it comes, I thought. “I am, Officer.”

He looked at me in such a way that told me he didn’t immediately believe me. I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it to him. He asked me to tell him what happened, and as I was, the fire department had their hoses spraying the highway. It didn’t look like a very easy task getting the soap to move to the side of the road. I felt so embarrassed!

I briefly explained to him what had transpired; including the way I had thought people were helping me. I laughed out loud when he asked if I had gotten any of the plate numbers of the vehicles. “First of all, I was too busy throwing half full, broken bottles to the side of the road and secondly I really thought they were helping me, until it was too late.” You have got to be kidding! I thought. How could I have possibly gotten license plate numbers! I could barely see through the rain and my running mascara.

Handing me back my license, the officer said, “Well, I suppose I should figure out what to give you a ticket for.”

“Why would you have to give me a ticket? My load was secure, there’s my load bar on the side of the road. I wasn’t speeding and I got all the debris off the road before you even got here.” I was adamant about not getting a ticket. What could I have possibly done to avoid this? I thought to myself.

“I guess you’re right. I can’t think of anything you did wrong to give you a ticket for.” He said with a smile. “But, I still have to get all the information off your truck, just for a report. Where were you planning to go with your truck and trailer?”

With the trailer doors the way they were, bent like a tin can, I knew I couldn’t go far. Plus, I had to get them bent back a little to at least be road worthy. Thank God, I was only a mile away from one of our stores. “Would you follow me back to East, and take the information there? We are doing a remodel of our store and have a lot of construction workers there that can help me get the doors unbent enough to travel.”

So, that’s what he did. I got a police escort back to the store, where he too down the plate numbers off my truck and trailer.
A couple of the construction guys and the warehouse manager came out of the warehouse. They looked at the back of the trailer, and then looked at me with disbelief and amusement in their eyes. “How in God’s name did you do that and how are we going to bend them back?” The warehouse manager asked me, shaking his head, looking at the ground. Then there was a flurry of activity. A front loader pulled up behind me and the guys were hooking chains to the trailer doors and to the steel brace of the front loader bucket. They eventually got the doors open and lo and behold, I found out why I was losing bottles of detergent. The forklift was NOT in the same place that I had parked it. Now I understood why it felt like my brakes were grabbing. The weight of the forklift shifting back and forth pushed the pallet of laundry detergent against the inside of the trailer doors. At least 1,000 pounds of product on a 100 pound pallet was being pushed by an 8,000 pound piece of machinery. Since I don’t have a tanker endorsement on my CDL, I have never felt a load shifting as it would if I were hauling liquid in a tanker.

To think back and talk about this now, I laugh. Obviously at the time there was no way I could laugh, or even smile. It is now a very hilarious situation to me. I can only imagine someone else looking at the whole set of circumstances and picture them rolling on the floor laughing at me. At least now I can laugh about this, and that feels good to me.