Closet Extremist

Side trip

I had a crappy start to my weekend last Friday. Kev and I had made a trip down to Chattanooga to chance out a seal in a jack that was leaking. It took a little while longer than we'd initially intended, just due to the physics of the elevator. The jack is in the ground, and due to the size of the cab, three-iinch oil pipe was required. We set the car down on some pipe stands, and detached the top of the piston from the bottom of the car. Now all we had to do was force the piston down to get around 50 gallons of oil back up into the tank... simple. Unfortunately, we had to get all this oil to flow uphill at least eight feet. We got it done, but it ate up about three hours of the day.

So we finally got headed back towards Knoxville, and we were concerned because they were predicting snow. We got to just north of Athens, TN when the goddamn shop-van just died. One second we were trucking along at 70 MPH, and the next we were parked by the side of the road. After some basic troubleshooting, we determined that we couldn't do anything to get it back on the road, so we started making calls. We got approval from the Boss to call in a Wrecker and contacted a place out of Athens. After talking with the mealy-mouthed dispatcher girl, she decided that they had a rig big enough to haul us home, and stated that it'd be 20 minutes until we saw the driver. We waited forty before we called them back. This time he was three miles behind us. another twenty minutes or so goes by. After some negotiating, we finally procured the driver's cell-phone number, and he agreed to come get us. We spent about 2 1/2 hours by the side of the Interstate, only to get a driver who was crazier than a bedbug. He loaded up that 3/4 ton van (filled with tools and elevator parts), remarked on the wieght of the vehicle, and proceeded to drive 95 to 100 mph all the way to the shop. All I could do was hang on and hope that we made it to the shop okay, but a white-knuckle ride was had by all. I had to carry Kev on to his house, which made it so that I didn't get home 'til 10 PM.

This week we were supposed to head over to Memphis and help out our crew over there, but we obviously couldn't leave today as we didn't have any wheels. I didn't bother packing anything, as I wasn't sure if the truck would get fixed. Well, it got repaired today, so we are leaving out bright and early in the morning. I didn't really want to spend all night packing to go out of town, but I had to anyway. I guess I'll be incommunicado until Friday at least. Not that it's unusual for me to step away from the blog for day's at a time...just this time I've got a good excuse.

Posted by Johnny - Oh at February 13, 2006 11:21 PM | TrackBack