They won't tell you this in truck driving school, but most legal problems you encounter during your career as an OTR truck driver are purely your own to handle. The company will hang you out to dry if it means the corporation can dodge a bullet. Hang the peon. Death to the peasant. Tell the drivers they are important, but remember that in truth they're also as replaceable as individual pieces in a box of Legos.

My first trouble with the law did not rear its head until I'd been driving commercially for nearly a year. I'd applied pressure to the Home Office to upgrade my truck assignment by sending a five page letter to the owner of the company.

It worked, though it did not make me any friends in middle management.

The newer unit had less mileage and an air conditioning unit that actually worked. It also had a poorly adjusted fifth wheel. That's the heavy plate on top of the tractor into which the kingpin goes, the kingpin that's part of the front underside of the semi trailer. The kingpin needs to be able to turn easily within the fifth wheel's latching hookup, and the fifth wheel itself needs to be greased regularly as well. The grease was no problem...but the adjustment was very loose, very sloppy. This meant that whenever the tractor started or stopped, the kingpin would slap back and forth inside the latch.

My first load with this rig consisted of seven rolls of paper from a Missoula, Montana, paper mill to be delivered to a central California customer. Each roll weighed something like five thousand pounds. I watched the forklift load the truck. I thought each roll bumped up against the one in front of it. I was wrong, and that was going to cost me. Had I realized the true situation, I could have and would have hooked up some heavy canvas restraining straps ahead of the middle set of rolls. I did not.

A day and a half later, crossing the scale at Gilroy, California, I was stopped and ordered to pull my truck around for a full D.O.T. inspection. The reason: Although my rig's total overall weight was safely inside the maximum limit of 80,000 pounds, the scale showed that 3,367 too many pounds were sitting over the drive axles. Those unrestrained paper rolls had slif forward just a few miles back up the road when I'd come down a little harder than usual on the brakes in heavy traffic. I'd not really been dangerously close to the vehicle in front of me. It had been a slightly overcautious reaction to possible danger.

And now the price to pay. Both the truck and my logbook passed the inspection with flying colors. I explained to the Sergeant on duty--a woman D.O.T. officer--what I believed had happened. It was really a bummer, especially since I'd been through half a dozen scales earlier without a problem and had gotten stopped just twenty miles short of my delivery point. I was supposed to deliver at midnight, and the time was getting short.

"I can adjust the slider on the trailer," I let her know, "and get back about a thousand pounds. But I won't be able to do any more than that."

She nodded. "Do what you can," she told me, "and come back around."

I did. The scale showed exactly what I'd predicted: Now my drive wheels were packing 2,367 pounds over the limit. If the D.O.T. required me to stop there until my employer could send help to either adjust the load or remove part of it, I'd lose face, cost my boss a bunch of money, and also irritate the customer whose goods were not at his dock when scheduled. It did not look good. After truck driving school comes reality, including legal problems...and maybe employment problems, too.

The Sergeant's voice came through the speaker. "Go on and deliver your load. Have a nice night."

"Thank you," I replied. Seldom have I ever packed such sincerity into those two words.

I did have to pay an OSOW (oversize, overweight) ticket in the amount of $108, which under the circumstances was a bargain. No, my employer would not pay even part of it. No, I was wrong about the sloppy fifth wheel causing an extra SLAM! effect when I'd braked a bit hard.

But it could have been much, much worse.

It was seven-thirty a.m. precisely. Pam and Moe Key Man cat were riding with me. We had just dropped a load of medical supplies a couple of miles to the north and were turning from the street into the driveway of our company's terminal in Santa Fe Springs, California. I had the truck straddling two lanes, not a great thing but absolutely necessary in many cases. If a driver didn't straddle for that particular right turn, the back end of the trailer would drag up over the curb and smack the edge of a building.

There was no other traffic in sight. I had the right turn signal on and had the tractor beginning to point in toward the driveway.

All of a sudden, a brand new silver Montero SUV came roaring up out of a blind hollow some few hundred yard to the rear. When the driver saw the big rig blocking her preferred lane, she had options: (A) Hit the brakes. She could have stopped dead by the time she reached us (the driver turned out to be a lady in her early thirties). (B) Slow down a little, move to the left lane which was still clear, and sail on around with no problem.

Instead she chose to (C) stomp the accelerator and swoop around on the right side like a falcon chasing a rabbit! She was moving so fast that, even though I'd seen her coming, I'd barely had time to stop the tractor when she shot past in front of me, two wheels up on the sidewalk, jaw hanging down in utter shock.

To make a long story short, she crashed into some small trees, through them and into a tall chain link fence, bent the fence and smacked a telephone pole...which bounced the SUV back through the air a good seven feet. It came crashing down on the passenger side. She was knocked out by the airbag.

To make a long story much shorter, the LAPD mailed me a ticket charging me with an improper turn!

Yeah, I beat the ticket. But it was a tense few months until the court date came up, I can tell you that.

A year later, the foolish woman who didn't know how to drive defensively decided to sue me and my employer (individually) for half a million bucks. I was retired by that time--for only a few years, as it turned out--and no longer driving for a living. My lawyer sent a couple of letters. My former boss settled out of court for less than the replacement cost of the SUV, just to get rid of a nuisance claim. And that was that for trucking related legal problems.

Summary: In eighteen months of commercial driving after graduating from truck driving school, I acquired one overweight ticket (paid it), one ticket for an improper turn (beat it), and one half-million-dollar lawsuit (beat it). I have no idea if that's about average or not. You tell me.