He actually screeched and went silent for a moment, huddled against the cab door.
I finally tried the old "make a sudden movement/noise" trick to scare him, which did the trick. So I told him about an absolutely horrible accident I'd witnessed several years back, going into extremely gory details - he kept giving me strange looks but didn't seem all that distracted yet. I figured if he got his mind out of the gutter, we could have regular conversation per my goal. I wasn't worried about him attacking me - I'd have broken him like a stick. I decided I'd try to freak and/or gross him out just to get his mind off of. Still, I kept outwardly calm, though my mind was racing. There was only one reason I could think of that he was hitting on me - and the reason really pissed me off worse than I'd already been. To my astonishment (you'll know why later), the creep sounded like he was going to start making advances at me! Maybe it was just my state of mind at the time, but he kept making innocuous-enough sounding small talk and ending with annoying little laughs. What the hell, any conversation was good enough to help keep me going, so I got back up to speed and waited to see what his story was.
My best guess was that he'd been cruising the area and kept the stick as a (lame, granted) excuse - better to be busted for hiking than soliciting - and that he'd either had no luck or was just finished for the night. He was also carrying a ludicrously stereotypical "hobo stick" with a towel tied on the end as a pouch for carrying stuff. He was clean and well-dressed in a fussily precise manner, with delicate though nervous movements of his hands, and was wearing a fairly obvious amount of makeup. I pulled over easily enough on the clear shoulder, and the hiker climbed in quickly. (rarely) sometimes we're just being good samaritans, but don't count on that - mileage is literally our money, and time deadlines are controlled by federal law (being early/late on a run can have legal consequences for the driver).Īnyway, given how it was so dark and so little traffic, I decided to take a chance per 1) and the first part of 2)a. companionship - either/or to help keep us awake with conversation or maybe, hopefully, something more if you're our type.Ĭ. Our rigs take quite a while to brake from highway speeds and we're not usually willing to wait for a hiker to run a quarter-mile or more to where we finally stopped, nor are we going to back up for you!Ī. You are at the top of a hill or otherwise in an area where we are at our lowest speeds (truck stop, on-ramp to a freeway, etc.).
Protips: It's illegal for truckers to pick up hitchhikers in the U.S., but we'll sometimes take a chance providing any of the following are true: I was actually glad to see a hiker just over the hill. There was little chatter on the CB, nor much traffic, to help keep my mind on the road. I was in a pretty pissy mood by the time I reached the top of the hill. I was running slow enough as it was due to the pea-souper, but matters were worsened by being on a 10-percent grade, further forcing me to stay with the lower gears and being unable to take advantage of any breaks in the fog to speed up. Cheesy as it sounds, it really was a dark and VERY foggy night. I was dead-heading a rig on I-10 eastbound in California (just outside Cabazon if you care) towards Palm Springs. I'll have to go back a ways for this one, to the mid-eighties. If you want it so damn bad, spoiler at the end of the post - if you don't read the post first, though, the joke is ruined