I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I love that we can get and post information on an up-to-the-minute basis regarding accident scenes, weather and basic travel information. I love being able to have open conversations with people from across the world about trucking. I love the community we’ve built on our page — there are people we talk to and meet in person that we’d never have been able to without social media.
What ruins the whole thing are the trolls. Trolls are the reason we can’t have nice things on the Facebook. I also really dislike when people read one sentence from a post – usually the opener or “teaser” tag for a blog entry – and write copious, detailed comments about how stupid we are, or how stupid the subject matter is, or that they just dislike me in general because rabbits wear yellow hats. It’s for that reason alone that I don’t usually read the comments on 99 percent of trucking Facebook pages, because I don’t feel like digging through the supertrucker crap to get to pertinent information.
I do read pretty much every comment on the George and Wendy page, mostly because the people who participate and comment there are longtime regulars, who generally don’t say anything unless it’s constructive or adds to the conversation. Also, they’re funny. There are some really hilarious truckers out there, and a lot of them seem to congregate on our page.
“The super truckers are going to kill me on that one. I can just hear it now.”
“Actually that ran two days ago and everyone was fairly supportive of your decision. They commiserate with you. Except for the one who said he’d have run the clock down to the last minute and stopped his truck in the road and put his cones out, so he could tell the DOT to kiss his ass, he was out of hours and couldn’t move his truck.”
“Is that right? Well, I’ll have to remember that, it sounds like the best option, for sure.”
“I think they might have been a supertrucker, or participated in a fan club of sorts.”
“Nah. Just a frustrated newbie. I’ve thought about it before, you mature and get over it.”
“Really? Because someone also said you had a ‘slave mentality’ for following the rules.”
“I thought you said people were nice about the comments?”
“Well, except for those, they were pretty supportive…”
“Watch this. I’m going to start pulling out of this space at 29 and a half minutes, because I’m not going to be made to take a 30-minute break! I’m a rebel, baby! Nobody tells me what to do!”
Sometimes, being a supertrucker is hard.
