Life Is A Highway…

My dad’s coworker was being bullied.

He had come to my dad to vent. He was pissed. They would not leave him alone and he had had it.

It started with the name calling.

He was a grown man… he could take it.

But then they started following him around, just non stop heckling the guy trying to work… how was he supposed to deliver packages on his route when a group of unruly teenagers were constantly harassing him?

What could he even do? He had asked my father.

My dad had no advice to give him… ignore it?

Except then they started throwing empty cans at him which quickly escalated to jumping on his truck.

The poor guy was just trying to work and these teenage jerks were not only harassing him but now jumping on the back of his truck and riding around the neighborhood, risking his livelihood.

The guy had had enough.

He dreaded going to work. Each day he’d come to that neighborhood and the teens would be there waiting… and now that they were using his work-truck as a personal taxi service to the far end of town, their numbers were increasing exponentially.

They’d shout obscenities at him, toss a couple cans at his head as he scampered into his truck, there were too many of them for him to disperse and then they’d clamber up onto the rear of the truck, laughing and yelling as they rode through town.

He had five stop lights and one stop sign between them and his last stop before he’d hop back onto the highway and head home to the truck yard. During this time the unruly teenagers would hop off and on the truck at one of the five stop lights or the final stop sign before the on ramp.

Then he’d have a fifteen minute ride on the expressway to fume and fester over the little shits threatening him and his job.

I don’t know what his ‘enough’ moment was. My dad wasn’t really sure either, but he ran into his friend on that fateful morning just before his shift started and there was a resolve about him… something had changed.

My dad asked him about the teenage baddies, if their antics had stopped. They had not but my dad’s friend assured him that he was confident that after today, they wouldn’t bother him anymore and then he hopped on his truck and left the yard.

Not thinking too much about it, my father did the same.

That day my dad’s friend was going about his business, delivering his packages, staying on time and target as Big Brown monitored his every move and like clockwork, once he got into their neighborhood he was quickly encircled by the group of teenage shits. They taunted him. They made fun of him ‘working like a bitch for the man,’ they tossed cans and rocks at his truck.

He ignored them best as he could… knowing that he was about to have the last laugh in all of this.

And when he dogged their empty can assaults and got back into his truck, he waited just a second longer as the teenagers clambered on the back, laughing and yelling at the poor guy…

When he was certain that not a single other baddie could fit on his bumper he took the truck out of park and began driving. But this time he drove with purpose… not the purpose of getting away from these hellians as soon as possible, but with the purpose of timing stop lights…

On this strip if you got a red light, you got all red lights but the same could be said about green. So he waited at that light and timed it perfectly, waiting a full cycle until he could time it so that he was pulling away from there as soon as he got green.

He quickly brought the truck up to the speed limit and up ahead the second light of five turned green… he breezed through that intersection, the oblivious teens laughing… and then the next light… green as well and he easily drove through that intersection without so much as tapping the breaks… and that continued on until he reached the stop sign right before the highway…

Cautiously, yet without slowing he surveyed the intersection and knowing he was safe to go, he pulled a little “no cop, no stop” and barreled right through that bitch and onto the freeway.

Now I don’t know when those little bad asses realized that they were not going to get to jump off the truck like they normally did before it careened onto a major interstate, but once he flew through that stop sign, they had to know that something was up.

And there was my dad’s friend, the most calm and relaxed he had been in weeks cruising down the highway, these bad adolescents holding onto the back of the truck for dear life and cars were just honking and doing their best to flag him down… they assumed he didn’t know about the little jerks on the back of the truck.

He just smiled and waved, feigning obliviousness at 55mph.

As soon as he made it to his exit and got onto the off ramp he had to stop at a stop sign… and as soon as he stopped there was a mass exodus of ghost white teens, jumping off the bumper and shouting obscenities at the guy for being a “total fucking psychopath.”

He laughed loudly, tipped his hat, and told them they better start walking back as they had a VERY long walk ahead of them. Then he asked them if they’d be riding with him again tomorrow.

One of them managed to squeak out a “fuck you old man…” but it was panicked and pathetic at best and he drove away triumphantly.

That was THE last time he ever had to deal with those shitty kids again. His crazy hectic delivery job got a little less hectic that day.

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Like they say… life is a highway and I want to ride it… but I suggest doing so at the wheel, and not on the back of some pissed off package car driver’s truck.

“Don’t Fuck With Cats” - (or UPS package delivery drivers) - stickers available in shop