Insanity, annoyed at commercials, and the runaway truck

At this point some of you may be wondering “Seth! What is up with all of these sudden posts? You didn’t post for ages and now suddenly three in the same amount of days.” Well dear reader I’ll tell you why, the exact reason is that I’m bored. Yep I’m bored and I need something to do so I just said to myself, aloud. “Seth.”
                “Yeah what do you need?”

                “Well do you remember that blog you used to write?”

                “Yeah what about it?”

                “You should write in it again.”

                “Why?”

                “Well you keep telling me that you are bored and it would give you something to do, plus you would stop bugging me.”

                “Hmm that is not a bad idea. It would be good to write in that style again.”

                “Yeah plus you can post other stuff, like your story on there too, give anyone who wants to know an idea of what you’ve been up to.”

                “I agree. Let’s do it.”

Yep that’s pretty much exactly what happened and now. Da da da daaaa!  You get all sorts of posts all over the place. Earlier today I was thinking about posting a thought I had and it was going to attempt to be deep and meaningful but now I don’t really feel that deep and I’m a little tired so I’m going to go ahead and talk about something that I find annoying.

Commercials.

 Yep I don’t like them. I know, way to break away from the group, right Seth? Well this came to mind at this moment because I’m listening to Pandora right now and they had one of their commercials on. Now I’m not actually annoyed at the existence of commercials. Businesses like Pandora have to have them otherwise they would no longer exist, it’s how they pay for what they do and I don’t begrudge them that. It’s just the intelligence or rather the lack thereof in some that just drive me up the wall especially when I’ve heard it for the thousandth time. This particular commercial was for Carmax. I cannot say in particular whether or not Carmax itself is worth anything, I’ve never used it. It’s just that the commercial they have on Pandora makes me want to rip out my own hair and then hit someone.

 This particular commercial drives me to the brink of insanity and violence. I don’t think it did the first few times I heard it but after hearing it so very very many times this year I have come to despise it’s stupidity. The premise of it is the best way to do [insert activity here] is to start [some stupid place that really isn’t true] and they usually give two of these examples and then they say “the best way to buy a car is to start at Carmax. Again I have no idea whether or not that has any truth to it, but if it falls in with the other two examples that they usually give I would have to going to Carmax is a complete waste of your time. Here’s one of their examples, they say that if you want to learn to play an instrument the best place to start is air guitar.

Really.

Air Guitar?

Do they realize that it doesn’t really have anything to do with actually playing guitar? I mean I’m just assuming but wouldn’t the best place to be getting yourself a guitar and practicing chords? But what do I know. Another one, they say that the best place to start when teaching your dog to stay is with a really lazy dog.

Umm I don’t think it counts as teaching your dog to stay if he wasn't moving in the first place. Might as well claim you taught a rock how to stay.

So pretty much after hearing that a THOUSAND times I've gotten pretty sick of it.

                Wow I went on about that a lot longer than I meant to. Well hmm is there anything else I want to say. Oh yeah about the story part I was supposed to post. You see I was in the middle of editing it yesterday when Word decided to crash on me. Not sure why, all I know is that my work is gone and I haven’t felt like redoing it yet. I promise it is coming just not until later in the week.

                Last time I told you about a runaway truck right? Well let’s get on with it then.

                It was a Tuesday. I had just returned from lunch, ready to continue painting a very large black trailer under the scorching sun, when I learned that my Grandpa’s truck had shut itself down as he was driving out of town. Mike, the head mechanic, told me that my grandpa was a few miles out when he got a message on the dashboard to “pull over safely, now” and so he did. When he had come to a complete stop on the edge of the freeway the engine shut off and refused to start again. This was bad as my grandpa needed to be somewhere and so Mike sent me out with his truck so that he could continue on his way while we dealt with the broken down truck. I arrived at where my grandpa had pulled off the road shortly and after pulling some chains out of the backseat my grandpa drove off, on his way to his meetings and such, leaving me with truck. I waited for a while until Mike arrived with a trailer in tow. The trailer was the tilt type, meaning if you pulled out the pins the back half could tilt back and touch the ground to allow vehicles, usually heavier equipment to drive right onto it. We unfortunately couldn’t drive the truck onto the trailer as it wouldn’t start. Therefore we had to attach a come-along to the truck and the trailer and pull it on ourselves. If you don’t know what that is, it is essentially a steel cable attached to a ratchet. It allows you move heavy object that you normally wouldn’t be able to move, like a large ford truck with a diesel engine. Having to do it with the come-along was a lot of work. Each time we pulled the ratchet it only moved the vehicle a few inches. Eventually we managed to pull it mostly onto the trailer, only a few more inches and the back tires would have been completely on it. As the front tires crept farther forward onto the tilt we noticed something. Apparently the heavy equipment that this trailer was usually used for had a shorter wheelbase than this truck did, meaning the length from the front tire to the rear tire wasn’t as long. Well this turned into a problem as the weight of the truck tilted the trailer off of the ground. The already difficult job was becoming more so. In order to deal with this problem Mike and I did two things. First he stood on the edge of the tilt to try to weigh it down. Second we jammed a pole under the other side in order to keep it from moving down further. Neither of these were perfect and the trailer still hung an inch or so off the ground. We kept going anyway hoping to be done with it quickly so that we could be done with this. So while Mike was standing on the trailer it was my turn to work the come-along. I pulled and I pulled bringing it closer and closer until it hit the edge of the trailer. I kept pulling, hoping to be able to pull it up that last little lip onto the tilt because then we would be done. I pulled again until suddenly, the cable snapped.

                It rolled off the trailer. Backwards. Down the freeway. Towards oncoming traffic.

Needless to say Mike and I were somewhat worried. Feeling this way we both ran after trying to stop it. I was behind Mike as I was stunned in shock and it took a second for me to realize what was happening. Luckily instead of gaining speed going down the hill it turned sideways, covering as many lanes as possible, but this allow Mike to catch up to it, jump in, throw it in park and slam on the brakes.

                He jumped back out and we both stood in front of the truck frantically waving our arms trying to get people to stop before they hit it. Incredibly this all happened during the largest gap in traffic I’d seen the entire time I was out there. When we were certain the other cars had seen us we pushed the truck off the freeway and rethought our strategy. We decided instead to hook the chains I’d retrieved onto the truck and tow somewhere safer and try again. After about another hour we got it onto the trailer without much incident. By the end we were both pretty giddy from adrenaline and feeling pretty blessed that no damage had been done and that neither of us were injured or killed.

                Oh and if you are curious the reason the truck died was that it had been overfilled with oil and the excess had burnt out the O2 sensors. When they were gone the computer shut off the engine. So yeah make sure to do your oil right, or else it could cause some pretty big problems.