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Sorry, John, and Dave, if it sounded like I'm down on the diesel bears. Not so. There are times I wish they could enforce rules on some of the rigs I see going down the road, that aren't in commerce. Like the 32' pusher with the twenty-year-old Cadillac Seville in tow, and not a sign of a wire for lights betwenn them, nor any kind of brake arrangement. And as the Mexican trucks work their way throughout the country, I can only hope their superiors can see that there are more valuable uses to be made of the time and efforts of the officers in the field. I do object to the folks above Dave's head giving him orders that effectively make him a revenue agent as opposed to the law enforcement officer that he is and was trained to be. I used to drive regularly by the rest areas at the south end of 271 in Ohio, and it was not uncommon to see DOT cops pounding on the sides of sleepers at 5 or 6 in the morning to roust the drivers. One time that I stopped in there, I heard a pretty interesting exchange between the bear and the driver. The driver refused to participate in whatever it was the cop wanted. He argued that to do so would put him in violation -- he was only four hours into his required sleeper time, during which the regs say that he can have nothing to do with the operation of his truck. Not fueling, not waiting for a parking berth, not nuthin'. He even argued that he couldn't touch his log book, though he did give that up to show that he was on sleeper time. They were still goin' at it when I came out so I don't know how it turned out, but I thought his was an appropriate response. (A cop should be happy for the same reason a fireman is happy. If there's nothing to do it means tht there's nothing on fire, and every one is abiding by the law. Isn't tha what they're there to help with???) There's quite enough trucks on the road for those guys to deal with without rousting drivers. And, again, I don't expect the cop enjoyed it, but I don't doubt either that he had orders. What irks me that is that in no longer about safety -- it's all about revenue. Yes, they do get unsafe trucks off the road. But the largest part of their work has become writing tickets with exorbitant fines attached for minor infractions not related to safety. To impound all vehicles without discretion on the basis of an obscure and questionable interpretation of regulation (not a law, a regulation) unrelated to safety is authority run amok. The history of DOT#s makes them obsolete. They are a leftover from the days when the ICC issued tariffs for the hauling of specific goods between specific points (to haul Oreos and pecaan sandys between the same two cities crequird two different tariffs if they were bakedby different companies). It's an archaic requirement still on the books, and rather that letting it die, there is a new interest in enforcing it solely for the revenue. As to the question of compensation, IRS requires that any compensation be reported as income, and in the case I cited, the fellow who could no longer deduct expenses was also excused from reporting any compensation or income from his hobby. To split the same hair that others do, a ten-dollar bill and a fifty are printed on the same paper. If I were hungry enough to east money, I'd gain no more nourishment from the fifty than from the twenty. But if I take them to the supermarket, I can convert either one of them from a mere token to facilitate commerce into something far more useful to me, being food that I can digest and that has a nutritive value far in excess of the very nice paper we use for currency. It is an act of commerce with compensation for me. The strictest reading would not allow me to take the dually to the Shop'n'Save without my name and a DOT# on the door. And we have an agent contributing on the board who would impound my vehicle under that argument. Again, it ain't personal, but who's pushing a working guy to act like that, and why.
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