A while back, during my brief foray as a milk hauler after decades of door swingin', I had a tank of organic milk bound for a small cheese manufacturer in rural Wisconsin. Still a diehard fan of human directions and a downright devotee of the civility that is embodied in small-town Wisconsin, I phoned the cheese plant and asked the nice young lady what might be the best way to get to her facility.
"We are located at 123 Main Street, [name withheld], Wisconsin," she said matter-of-factly.
"So what would be the best way to get in there out of Madison?"
She answered in that young hipster kind of way, with the upper inflection at the end of the sentence -- like she was asking a question while making a statement.
"Actually … we … don't give directions to our facility? Most of our drivers just use their GPS? Do you not have a GPS?"
For just a second I contemplated the unalloyed satisfaction it would give me to flip the raving old trucker lunatic switch and go completely unhinged. Something like: "I've been out here 37 years and you are the first person who has not had the common decency ... !" etc. There's nothing quite like a scolding prefaced by how long one has been "out here."
[Related: Call me 'Long Haul' no more ...]
