Delicate. That’s a word you’d never think of using to describe your average Canadian gear grinder. Rough, tough, maybe. But delicate?

Well, the word may be a bit extreme, but lots of drivers manage a very fine balance between simple frustration and outright anger. The truth is, slipping over that line is easy, and getting easier every day. Deeper traffic jams, more demanding shippers, endless rules and regs managed by bureaucrats who really don’t seem to give a darn.

The potential for boiling over is very, very high. And the consequences? Downright nasty sometimes, almost never good.

Take the case of a driver I heard from recently, his e-mail being what launched me down this particular editorial path. My friend is a good guy from what I know of him, a veteran who’s willing and able to work hard, the kind of fellow who probably still stops to help another trucker in distress.

All of that said, he admits to having the odd problem managing his anger.
So leading up to a tragic event that obliterated the delicate psychological balance that he usually manages to maintain, he’d had a rough couple of weeks. Dispatch has been on his case and he’s been on theirs, the classic source of driver frustration. As he puts it, he “was already bent out of shape.”

And then one night he comes on a bad wreck. A woman and her baby daughter are nailed by a hit-and-run drunk and he’s first on the scene. It’s chaos, of course, and the little girl is dead. The other details don’t matter, except that a few hours later he loses it.

In the yard at the end of his run, he has a meltdown. All the anger and frustration of the previous weeks comes out in one big explosion. He’s seen countless bad accidents over his 20 driving years, but for reasons he can’t fathom, this one gets him. So bad that he goes AWOL for the next two weeks.

When he got back he wrote to tell me this sad tale, at which point he figured he’d lost his job for sure. Didn’t think the boss would even speak to him. But the next morning he confronted the guy and, to his great surprise, found enough sympathy and understanding such that all he lost was top spot on the load board. He’s pretty grateful.

Now, nobody would drive away from such a tragedy — a dead baby on the roadside, her mother hurt nearby — in a state of emotional equilibrium. No way. But dump that on a guy who admits to having a short fuse, a guy who’s been near boiling point for quite a while, and you’re likely going to get one of two things — either an explosion of anger at the first opportunity, or the opposite, a sort of implosion in which his will to continue the routine is at least temporarily toast. In this instance, I guess, we had both.

Is my e-mail friend back on track? Thanks to a very understanding wife and the support of two fellow drivers, not to mention a boss with a generous spirit, he’s getting there. He had a long bull session with his trucker chums, and they compared notes about the driving life. Both of the other two had seen more than a few wrecks and been affected by them in different ways, not necessarily right then and there. That hours-long chat helped a lot, by all accounts, as did many conversations with his better half.

At this point many folks would say professional counselling of some sort would be in order, but I’m not so sure. First off, such a person wouldn’t understand the first thing about trucking, about the particular pressures of the driving life, and that might be frustrating in itself. Maybe a course in anger management could be useful, for many other drivers as well.

In the end, though, the trucking community itself has to recognize those unique pressures and accommodate them. We don’t have the same community we once had, and this new one isn’t very supportive at all, but step number one is to recognize that drivers are human, that they can only take so much.

That was the conclusion my friend drew. And in his words, “sometimes being human hurts too much.”