Traffic Trauma. 5/23/2007
Four wheel drives have always figured prominently as my choice of company vehicle over the years. I guess I’ve always been lucky enough to have been working for organisations where my work involved a high amount of mobility, and vehicles were seen more as an essential tool for my work, as opposed to being a status symbol.
There is a certain amount of status locally to having a company provided and paid for vehicle. This is, of course, relative. My first company vehicle was a 4WD with a driver. A real one, not a poser’s wanna-be urban cowboy type thing. Of course, it came with a gun rack, the stereo system was an encrypted UHF/VHF comms system, and it only came in 2 colours, olive drab or camouflage.
I then moved into the corporate world, and a series of mid sized saloon cars came and went. In all cases, every month or so, I would get a memo from the finance department asking why my fuel bill for the month was so high. There were accusations that I was misusing the fleet fuel card issued to me, until I pointed out to the finance manager in a management meeting that a car’s fuel consumption doesn’t do too well when you’re flying down the highway at above 100 m.p.h. Every day. Her reply to that was, “drive slower”, and the General Manager, who had often seen me on the highway on the drive in to work, collapsed laughing in her chair.
I then made a move upwards, and reached a stage of management where I was given a choice of vehicle. This was when I suddenly felt the urge to return to driving 4WDs, unfortunately in an urban setting, making me one of the posers who drives a truck, but never gets it muddy. This changed fairly quickly, when a bunch of guys I met were into off roading. And every Monday I would pull into the company parking lot with a vehicle that was covered in mud and leaves and stray branches, with the paintwork looking like a herd of demented cats had tried to scratch it to death.
There was a sudden change after that, with me rising through the ranks, and company cars getting bigger and more expensive, until the day I was issued a Panzer for my use by a client. This was rather short lived, because I then received an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I made the move to something rather close to what I started off doing, though instead of making things fall down, I now build them up. And due to the nature of the work, when I was asked what kind of a vehicle I wanted, I promptly said, give me a 4WD.
And so they did. A big one. A giant diesel.
I’ve been driving this thing through city traffic the past couple of weeks, and I’ve noticed something that KY first remarked upon when he saw the diesel parked in my driveway.
- Posted in : General
- Author : thesnark
Comments»
I am waitting for the second part. A pic of this new ‘truck’ u r now driving will be good as I also drive a ‘truck’. Have a nice day.
cool… what do u work as?
Well, I drove one of those large Toyota Landcruisers. They’re diesel, abit slow but satisfies another part of me. Definitely not the speeding me.
Horny AM : A pic? Maybe, once I get it dirty enough. As Bikerwannabe knows, I never wash my vehicles.
Howie : There is no way in hell I’m going to tell you what I work as. You can try guessing though.
Dr Tan : This diesel definitely ain’t slow. I had her up to 170 km/h on the highway last weekend.