First, many locations have dockworkers who are of different ethnicities. I always liked going to the place where the dockworkers had some Latinos, because I have often heard them refer to me as " Pinche Negro : or " Pinchie Miyati ". Hope I spelled those right, LOL. The first one means the F-bomb with Negro on the end. The second literally means F-bomb and N-word together. At many places where I have been all over the country, I have heard this too often. What I would do was act like I didn 't hear it, do what I needed to do, and then when leaving I would walk over to them. Then I would look them in them in the face and thank them for their comments in my limited Spanish. While they were shocked that I understood their words, I have told some …show more content…
That I just worked locally. I had something happen one day that was so awful that I remember as if it was yesterday. Here it is. At a warehouse I frequented, I saw what is called a " border runner ". Those are the drivers travel back and forth across our south border every day. Well, one day as I was waiting my turn to get to a loading dock. A Mexican driver was having problems connecting up to his trailer. As I watched from my truck, hi Co-driver exited their truck and crawled under the nose of their trailer. That completely got my attention. This was their situation. When the main driver backed his truck under the nose of the trailer, the height of the trailer was too high and the truck just passed what is called the kingpin. The kingpin for those who don 't know, is how the tractor holds onto the trailer when moving it. This situation is called "High Hooking ". With the truck 's fifth-wheel, and I don 't think I need to explain what a fifth-wheel is, behind the kingpin, he truck could not pull back out a try to connect to the trailer again. Why?, because triler 's kingpin prevented it. What had to be done was to raise the trailer, or lower the tractor. The biggest problem was that the co-driver was under the trailer as their truck was backing under it, trying crank the trailer up higher manually. If he would have succeeded at the wrong time, my fear was, as I watched, the truck going back at the wrong time and