7/30/05; by Ruth Zaslow

Field Interviews

For business, I have a 1987 C30 Chevrolet truck. It’s a one-and-a-half ton for my landscape maintenance business. I also have a Dodge Colt for personal use.

The Colt, my dad won the car in a church raffle. He let me drive it for a couple of years, never did switch the title, and eventually sold it to me.

My brother has a big farm. He needed a larger truck, and he’d also been after me for years to do some maintenance for him. So, finally he offered to trade me the truck for the work. So I’m still working the truck off.

I don’t drive much. Less than 4,000 miles a year. And my insurance, very low: only $300 a year. In the Colt, I drive into town, to my singles group functions, out for coffee and groceries. I live five miles out in the country, so I have to drive some to buy most things.

Business, out to do my landscape jobs. I work alone, so I’m not picking anyone up.

I have a tape player, so that might be going. In the mornings, though, I usually listen to NPR. I listen to the news, then to the talk radio shows. If it’s the summer season, like now, I also have a drink with me. Generally, I’m focused on my driving. No book work, cell phones while I’m driving. I have a good driving record and I want to keep it that way.

Not usually. If I have to make a call, I do it while I’m stopped at a customer’s, or else I pull over to the side of the road. Like one time, I was driving past my brother’s farm and I noticed an irrigation hose was broken. It was spurting water in just one place, almost digging a hole. So I pulled over and called him.

In my previous truck, I had a laptop and printer mounted on the dash. I just haven’t gotten around to mounting them in this new truck.

Oh, that’s about six years back now. I had an old pick up and I mounted a laptop and printer onto the dash. Kind of like what you see in a cop car or these days in some of the commercial delivery vans.

One thing was, I basically turned it into a GPS system, you know, you see that today in lots of cars, especially rental cars. Well, actually, anyone who owns a laptop can purchase an antenna and software to turn it into GPS. It’ll show you the shortest path anywhere. It’s a real killer app for the laptop. You can use Microsoft Streets and Trips.

Couple of ways. If I had a new customer, lived in a different town, I’d use it. And I remember one time—this is a long time ago now—I showed it to my cousin. He’s a farmer out in the Willamette Valley. See, usually, he’d send an employee out to a field to put out the fertilizer. But sometimes the employee would put the fertilizer on the wrong field. Big problem.

I showed the GPS set up to him and he saw immediately that he could use it to show his employee exactly where to put the fertilizer. Then, he got the idea to put it with some other information he had that monitors the output of grain from a field. He used it to map the fields, you know, especially wet spots or uneven spots. Then, he set up the machine to put less fertilizer in those spots because they were less productive anyway.

That was his big breakthrough, applying fertilizer at variable speed depending on the quality of the ground. He mapped them all at harvest time and used the information for the next fertilizing time. Now John Deere has that capability available on its newest equipment.

No, he was doing it the hard way. About four, five years ago, he started developing it on his own. But it was slow going, and Deere got there first.

Sure. I used a Compaq Contura for work, no CD, external floppy, with printer port. I also have a full laptop, with wireless capability, USB. For work, I charge by the hour, so the time element is important to me. I input the time when I start the job, do the work, input the time I finish, add in for fertilizer, anything else I use. Then I print out two receipts: one for me and one for the customer. Then, at the end of the month, I print out the last day’s receipts and the month’s statements and I leave a copy of each one for the customer. That way, I never have to deal with mailing anything. I sometimes have sixty yards that I take care of, so that’s a lot of savings.

Yeah. I only drive the truck from my house, on the jobs and home. I used the external A drive to download the information and back it up on my home laptop. Only problem was, after a while, the external drive got dirty from all the dirt and what-not in the truck, so it stopped working.

I’d bring the laptop into the house and download it to my network.

It’s a Panasonic, it lasts for a year with just one cartridge and it’s rugged.

I mounted a piece of plywood and an inverter switch for 110 power, then wired it into the cab.

In the engine compartment. It’s best to place the inverter near the battery.

That was mounted vertically on the dash to save room,. It was between the glove box and the console. There’s no reason that kind of printer has to be kept horizontal. And I built a tray for the paper.

In my truck? Actually, I’d just like to have a lot of things that are standard now—like the 110 inverter, the cigarette lighter jack so I don’t have to do the splitting. I’d like to have enough vents for all the power I need. I’d like 12 volts available all throughout the vehicle. But when it comes to specifics, I like to customize things myself.

OK, first is my dog. My dog is really important to me. He goes with me when I go to work. But sometimes, things get so busy in the mornings that I’ve forgotten to bring him along. That’s really happened a couple of times. Now in Oregon, it’s the law that if your dog is riding in the back of the pick-up, he has to have a collar with a lead attached to something. So, I got some magnetic switches with a read switch, like on a burglar alarm. I mounted them on Velcro and attached them to the dog’s collar. The magnet de-activates the read switch. So if the dog isn’t in the back, and I start the car, an alarm goes off.

Yeah. I’ve done the same thing with the trailer of the truck. The trailer door is on a hinges. I customized it so if it’s open, or if it swings open, it sends an alarm off. It’s useful because I keep equipment back there and I go over a lot of bumpy roads.

*Other things you’ve customized? One time I was up in Tigard, parked my car and forgot to set the handbreak. It’s stickshift, so there’s no “park.” Well, it rolled some and bumped into another car. I was lucky, it was just a bumper on a bumper and didn’t do any damage, but after that, I did the same thing with an alarm going off if I try to exit without setting the break.

No, but I did put op a special string of four lights on the front to use off the highway to watch for deer. It can be dangerous to hit one. The lights come on automatically with the high beams. I only use that off the highway though.

I’ve always liked computers. I graduated from high school in 1970, so there weren’t computer classes then, but by the early 80’s, I was interested. I’d purchase the latest thing out and I’d learn from the manuals. Now today, I have something called Wiband. You know, the usually high speed internet doesn’t run out here into the country. So I have Wiband and I go on the internet and start reading if I want to know something. For example, a while back, when I wanted to connect all of my computers, I went online and read about how to do it.

Five. A desktop, a backup out in the shop, I backup my data daily in case the house burns down. It seems farfetched, but that actually happened to my sister and brother-in-law, poor folks. They had me come down after and see if I could retrieve anything from their hard drive. Nothing.

I have a laptop at home, a laptop in the truck and an auxilliary computer with three printers hooked up to it. It’s not that I go out and by five new computers. I just keep the ones I have when I do get a new one and put them to different use.

Most of my friends see them as status symbols. I don’t. At my income level, I can’t.

If I could put another “zero” after my income, I’d put a zero after my whole life in terms of buying things. For a car, I’d buy a Lexus or Infinity. The amount I’d spend on vehicles would be the same proportion as now, it would just be a larger amount.

One of those H2’s. The town I live in has a small college. Those H2’s are a status symbol with a couple of the rich kids there. That’s why I mention them.

I have nothing against the car as a status symbol if there’s something behind it.

Yeah. It’s bad if you drive a fancy car and the rest of your life is shabby. Like the “welfare Cadillacs” as I call them. Where people place a distorted value on the car. It becomes everything to them. They’re using the car because something’s lacking in them. It represents something they don’t really have.

But if there’s something behind it, then the car is in proportion to the rest of the things in your life. The other things you buy and the other things you do. I mean not just your house, but a service group you belong to, the Christmas gifts you give.