04/28/2023
When was the first time all of you drove a truck?" I still vividly remember the first time I drove a truck. I was 15 years old and my dad had never shown me how to shift a 13-speed truck before. He owned a milk processing plant and several semi-trucks were used to deliver the milk around the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming. One day, while helping my dad at work, he asked me to accompany him to pick up a truck from the shop. I assumed he would drive the semi-truck and I would drive his pickup truck back to the plant, but to my surprise, he asked me to drive the semi-truck. I was taken aback as I didn't know how to shift the truck and I thought my dad would follow me back in his own vehicle. However, he left me to it and drove away. Luckily, having observed the shifting pattern while riding in semis before, I had a general idea of how to shift. Nonetheless, I struggled to flow shift without using the clutch every time. Despite this, I managed to drive pretty well for my first time, except for one incident at a 4-way stop intersection, where I killed the engine because I forgot to put the splitter into low gear. I am thankful to my dad for teaching me the value of hard work and for trusting me enough to figure out my way back to the milk plant in that moment.