By Smaktakula

At first glance, there is much to envy in the life of the long-haul trucker.  While his contemporaries toil away their lives in antiseptic cubes which vary only in size and color, the trucker remains free, a servant of no man, his domain the byways and backroads, his destination the horizon, with the call of the road his only companion and the eternal asphalt his uneasy ally.  Then there are the perks–scalding black coffee, bathtub crank and toothless truckstop whores.  To those who don’t know any better, it might seem an idyllic life.

But for those perspicacious enough to see past the glitz and the glory, a different world reveals itself.  In fact, long-haul trucking makes for a hard and lonely life, one made all the more arduous by hidden inconveniences which go unnoticed by most of workaday America.

Trucker bombs are the result of one of these unseen inconveniences.  Very much the IEDs of America’s roadways, these golden grenades of ammoniac horror wait silently among the roadside detritus for the hapless charity organization or prison work crew misfortunate enough to stumble upon it.  Because of the time constraints placed upon them, many truckers eschew the everyday activities which would otherwise slow them down, such as the bathroom break.

Teamsters, who have previously taken the art of beating the system to new and dizzying heights, have devised a means by which drivers can cheat biology’s heretofore unshakable summons.  The teamsters’ workaround was not only so simple and elegant as to almost defy belief, but also so efficient that it is a wonder it has yet to come into greater use among non-commercial drivers.

The system works like this: when a driver needs to relieve himself, rather than stop to find facilities, he urinates directly into an empty and–most critically–resealable container.  Plastic milk jugs are the preferred receptacle, but other varieties of plastic containers as well as some glass jars work well for urine storage.  The result is a trucker bomb.

As the second half of the name might imply to the careful listener, trucker bombs save precious time by being easily disposable.  When the containment unit is three-quarters full of human fluids (truckers say that to fill the container beyond 85% is to invite disaster), it can be discarded easily and quickly by hurling it from the window of a speeding truck.  The resultant explosion is a phenomenon described as “a golden spectacle” by those fortunate enough to have witnessed it.