Relaxation

Rowan and I recently took a trip to the mountains and stayed in an awesome cabin. Like most of these places, they have a guest book. We must have read all the entries going back two years, but the one above really caught our eye. It's no lie, though, it was a relaxing place.

Trukz: Not as bad as I made it out to be

I realize my last entry about Trukz sort of made it out to be a pointless, useless game. An utter waste of time and energy. A couple of people wrote me after that and wondered why, if it was so very inane, did I (and they) continue to play?

I know having said "I still can't see the point of it" and "I have to wonder sometimes whether I'm a dedicated driver or just rising up through attrition" might have made it seem I'm not into the game, and at the time I said those things they were true, but recently that's change slightly.

Basically what happened was that my company began to get contracts. In the game, contracts are special orders where your company has a fixed time in which to make deliveries of a particular item to a particular city. For example, right now my company (Owner Operator Drivers Assoc.) has a contract to deliver 101 loads of steel to Anchorage, Alaska.

If the company succeeds they get a load of money, if they fail they get penalized. For the current contract, if we make it the company gets around $5k and if we fail the company loses around $12k. Also, those routes (if you drive them) pay better than normal deliveries. I'm making $2 per mile driving from Las Vegas to Anchorage right now, $5482 total, which is way more than I could make on any normal delivery of that distance.

The fun part about contracts is that they, well, give you something to do. There's a goal involved. Too much of the game otherwise is fairly lonely and without purpose. Contracts at least allow you to focus on something and work towards an end. Even better is that the huge money you make from driving contract routes allows you to advance much faster than normal.

Do a few contract routes and that triple trailer endorsement doesn't seem so unattainable. Hell, I just bought warning lights because I knew I'd be driving in Alaska. A few weeks ago I would have punched myself for even thinking about doing something like that.

But now $700 isn't such a big deal. I'll get that back making a U-turn.