Vermont Adventures
....from Chapter 45
Weekend – 4
When we met at work that night Jimmy couldn’t believe what had happening to him over the weekend. He couldn’t believe that I had usurped his skepticism about what I was dealing with on my trips to Vermont. He was in a dream state all night. I kept a watchful eye on him to make sure he didn’t fall onto the lathe and get turned out the wrong way. Every time I looked at him all I could see was teeth. He was smiling away like a big Cheshire cat. The week would fly by quickly now that we both had something to look forward to doing when Friday morning came. I continued going away every weekend to visit the girls. Jimmy couldn’t make it every time, but I continued to go un-interrupted and was now up to my tenth week in a row. Some weekends I barely made it back on time without sleep, yet I would have to run critical machines all night. I don’t know how I did it but I never made any mistakes with my work. Sometimes I would show up for work, looking like I had just stepped off the cover of’ Saturday night fever’. A big Afro, round sunglasses, skin-tight polyester print shirt, powder-blue bell-bottoms and six-inch high cork soled platforms. I really should have been wearing coveralls or something like that.
I could feel the night foreman peeping around the corner as I walked through the door looking like a reject from the mod squad. He knew I was up to something but he, like the rest of the jamocas I was working with didn’t have a clue. But jimmy did. He was the one guy in the plant that knew what the real deal was. He knew why I was dressed like that. He knew why I didn’t want to waste my time talking shop with the other guys. He knew why I had been late for work a couple of times during my flights of fancy. Sure I had been late a couple of times, but it was only five or ten minutes or so. But when you work for a company that measures everything with micrometers and calipers, five minutes is an eternity to them.
The night Forman had warned me about being late and he told me not to be late again, as if that was going to stop me from making my trips to Vermont. “I don’t think so”. I thought to myself as he walked away looking like a living metallic drill that had just bored a clean hole through my shit. The very next week I was out of there, like a bat out of hell. I had done my forty hours and now it’s Friday morning, and the punch clock was waiting for me. “ Hell, I was a union man”. I thought as I drove up the turnpike like there was no tomorrow. The two fifteen inch woofers and the two six inch tweeters were playing in perfect stereo our favorite traveling song and our anthem, ”When will I see you again”, as I cruised up rt.93. The last thing I was thinking about was being late to work Sunday night. I just wanted to get the hell out of town and have a good time with my friends. I arrived just find and I had a most enjoyable weekend as usual. But little did I know that (“Murphy”) would be waiting for me when I returned to New B.
I was pushing my time right up to the limit when I rolled into town. I had
about twelve minutes to get to work and I was only a few blocks away from the
job and time was running out too fast. I didn’t have one second to spare at this
point. Nothing could go wrong now. There was just enough time for me to drive
the rest of the way to the building, park the car, go inside and punch I that
damned clock that was waiting for me again. I needed to take the next street as
a short cut in order to make it on time, but a huge detour sign blocked the
street. “Oh shit!” I yelled as I stopped the vehicle for a moment. I looked down
the street and could not see anything that would stop me from going one freaking
block. So I decided to take a chance and cut through. It only took about ten
seconds for me to decide because that’s all the time I had. I was having
flashbacks about what the foreman had said about being late. Sheer panic made me
steer the van around that detour sign and head down the street. As I started to
shift from first to second gear, the van suddenly dropped straight down into a
hole that the Gas Company had dug. The van was totally in the hole up to the
roof. When I looked out my side window my eyes was level with the surface of the
road. Dirt had fallen in and around the van, preventing me from opening the
door. There was no way for me to get out .I thought I was going to die. I rolled
my window down and started yelling. “Help, help!” I yelled as I thought about
everything from dying to how stupid I must look with my whole van sunk in the
hole. And to add insult to injury, everybody knew who I was. If not personally,
certainly by recognition of the black VW van with the orange curtains and the
decal with “AnytimeBaby” stuck on the back window. Believe me, I was feeling real stupid at this point, let alone being late for work for what I thought would be the last time for sure.
It was only a few minutes before someone came over, but it seemed like an eternity. “Are you okay?” I heard somebody yell. “Yeah” I replied, feeling like a complete asshole and totally helpless at the same time. I was somewhere between laughing and crying as the guy was explaining to me how he could see my blinkers flashing from below the surface of the street he thought something looked a little strange as he approached the hole and heard me yelling. “Go ahead you #$%^& asshole!” I thought to myself, because I knew he wanted to bust out laughing when he saw the whites of my eyes peeking through the tiny slit left between the road and the top of my window.
The cops were just getting there, as a small crowd gathered to see what the hell was going on. Little did they know that I could have blown up the whole block just because I was late for work and I did something stupid by going through a detour sign and subsequently dropped my whole van into what could have easily been my grave. Now here I sat, feeling like an idiot with a damage vehicle, the cops waiting to write me a ticket and potentially out of a job because I was trying to do something cute and wound up doing something dumb.
The tow truck and the ambulance showed up at the same time and the tow truck driver was chuckling as he tried to figure out how he was going to get me out of this hole. Finally he climbed down into the hole and somehow hooked onto the front end of the van. It took some tricky maneuvering to get the van out of the hole with it being virtually submerged below the street level. Also, I was still in the van. I had no option because the dirt had caved in and I could not open any of the doors. The tow guy slowly cranked the hoist up until the front tires were at street level, and then he slowly pulled the tow truck forward, releasing my vehicle from it urban tomb like a mummy in the desert. Except it was not a mummy, it was a dummy. After everybody saw that I was perfectly all right, the crowd started to break up with giggles and murmurs of the dumbness of it all. Certainly everyone was relieved to see that I was okay as I tried to explain what happened. I was feeling really stupid while everyone was getting his or her laugh of the evening at my expense.
The van surprisingly sustained little damage and it started up right away. There were a few scrapes here and there from dropping into the hole. And a lot of mud all over the tires, underneath and on the sides of the vehicle. I politely thanked the cops for my ticket, paid the tow truck driver and continued on my way to work. In a way I was relieved because I knew there was only one bit of humiliation that I had to go through before the things would get back to normal with my Forman. And he would be waiting at the door I’m sure. The whole incident only lasted about 18 minutes and it only took me another three minutes to get to work and punch the clock. I was nine minutes late. That’s how close I was to being on time. But when I got to my workstation and tried to explain that to the night Forman, he was not a happy camper.
I started out with, you’re not gonna believe this, but…. He just looked at me, shook his head and walked away. He knew I was telling the truth when I told him to go outside and take a look at the damage to my van. I also showed him the traffic ticket I had received from the cops with the time clearly written on it. That was my best evidence that I would have been on time, given that the accident didn’t happen. I can assure you, that's the first time I have ever heard of anyone being saved by (“Murphy’s law “).