It's Halloween Again

Halloween is a great time to enjoy costumes, haunted houses, candy, and friends.  My truck stays parked on the night of the 31st.  It's also a great time to get hit with a pumpkin off an overpass while driving.  All over the country semi trucks get hit with pumpkins.  Kids throw them off overpasses and do tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage or more.  Sometimes they even kill people.  Kids!  Gotta love those kids!  

When a pumpkin or large object hits a windshield, it sprays glass all over the person sitting in the cab.  If you're lucky enough to avoid getting glass in your eyes, you'll then have to regain control of your truck as fast as you can, while looking around to see if anyone else on the road was hit.  

Once you've determined that everything's ok, you've got a couple of seconds to decide where to pull over and call the police.  Assuming you're under a load, you have to get the truck fixed as fast as possible.  Depending on which truck you drive, you might have to call the customer and reschedule:  My old 1997 Freightliner FLD120 had a pop out windshield that could be replaced in 15 minutes, but the new Freightliner Coronado's glass takes a couple of hours to fix.  It takes special tools and liquid weatherstripping that's hard to find.  If this were to happen to me today, it would most likely put me out of service for a few hours to a day.

The best practice is to stay off the road on Halloween night.  You can park the truck and start driving again early in the next morning, but usually between dusk and midnight is the worst time to be driving.