Anything that can go wrong will go wrong (Murphy's Law)

It's been a rough week.

Here's the summary: Clients, baseball, Steem Monsters, clients, baseball, Steem Monsters, clients, baseball, brick wall.

Now for the longer version.

Baseball, Steem Monsters, and Mr. Murphy

As I've written about before, I have a 15-year-old grandson who plays baseball. Because his mother works the third shift, my wife and I sponsor the grandchildrens' extracurriculars. As it happens, in the last two weeks, the boy has played seven games - three last week and four the week before.

Photo by Marcus Wright on Unsplash

It was about two weeks ago when the Steem Monsters creators began assembling teams for writing backstories for each of the game's team splinters. I volunteered to be one of the writers. Since this is a contest with a hard deadline, it's consumed a lot of my time. Unfortunately, since my free time has been consumed by baseball, it hasn't consumed enough. I've been wired.

Squeezing in the writing for Steem Monsters between my clients and my grandson's baseball schedule has been a real challenge. At the beginning of this past week, I decided to take our writing team's notes and consolidate them all into one document so we could prepare for the home stretch (the contest deadline is this coming Monday).

I'd been trying to do this when I got home from baseball games, and in between clients during the day. Finally, on Thursday, I decided to take my computer along with me to my grandson's baseball game and work on it there. Doing that allowed me to get closer to finishing that commitment, but I still had work to do on it, which I was planning to do the next day after completing a couple of deadlines.

In a huge twist of fate, my daughter happened to be off of work. She works at a potato chip manufacturer and they have been unable to harvest their potatoes because their fields were flooded. So they shut everything down until they could get potatoes. That allowed my daughter to be at her son's baseball game.

Ordinarily, my wife and I would have left the game and gone straight home, or taken the boy home first and headed to our house. On this occasion, he would be riding home with his mom, her husband, and his two siblings. But since my daughter was unfamiliar with the area (it was an away game), she was following us to a certain point where she could veer off and make it home on her own without assistance. She needed gas in her car.

So we pulled off at a local convenience store chain by the name of Rutter's. While my daughter pumped her gas, I went inside for a snack and a drink. When I came out, my vehicle wouldn't start. Damn!

I did what I usually do when these things happen. I called a friend of mine, Bill, who is a retired truck driver and a garage mechanic. (A couple of weeks ago, all of Bill's vehicles were under a shade tree, so if I needed his assistance, I'd have been SOL.) I asked Bill if he had fixed his towing capacity. He said, "Yes," but that it would have to be the next day because currently he had an excavator sitting on top of his trailer. Okay, no problem. I told him to call me the next day--Friday--and my family packed ourselves into my daughter's mini-van for a frolicking joy ride home.

What Happened on Friday (Mr. Murphy Kicked Me in the Balls)

I had two writing deadlines on Friday. One was a rush job, an article, and I only had to write a couple of hundred words to flesh out the article for a client who had been wrong on the word count on his first order. So I did that first and sent the final draft first thing. The other deadline was a white paper I had been working on for a month. I looked it over a final time and sent it off. Plus, I took care of some administrative details and answered some emails.

I was about to start working on Steem Monsters again, and had planned to spend the rest of the day working on that. It was about 10 am. Bill pulled into my parking lot with his long trailer ready to go.

Image from Pixabay

My hope was that he could go and pick up my vehicle and all would be good. He wanted me to go along. Okay, it's my car. I should probably go along. Besides, Bill is in his sixties and has a few health conditions. He didn't have any help and needed it (way more than I thought he would).

We drove the 40 minutes or so to where my mini-van was sitting in a convenience store parking lot. A small one too, of course. When we got there, there was a pickup parked between the road and the side of the building where my vehicle was parked. I could not see how we were going to get around that truck to my vehicle. Bill had another plan. He pulled into the opposite parking lot entrance using his expert truck driver rear maneuvering skills, but it was nowhere close to where I had parked my mini-van.

Once he got his truck and trailer parked so that it wasn't obstructing trafic in and out of the Rutter's parking lot, I walked him around to the side of the building where my vehicle was sitting. He checked it out and couldn't figure out immediately what the issue was, so we put together a plan to get his trailer around to that side of the building in order to load my vehicle on it.

I walked to the backside of the convenience store and saw a huge gravel-based turn around circle back there. Perfect. He could fit his truck and trailer there easily. I asked Bill if he could back his trailer around the building to the other side using that space. He said he could. So he did.

Once he got his trailer into place, we pushed my van out of its parking space and set about to pull it up onto his trailer using his wench, which he had to get going by charging its battery first. I won't go into detail about that.

He hooked up the wench to the front of my vehicle, I climbed into the driver's seat, and he began to pull me up onto the trailer. My job was to steer the vehicle when he told me which direction to turn the wheels. We got the front end up on the trailer and Bill noticed the back wheels weren't lining up with the ramps, so he stopped pulling. And that's when Mr. Murphy showed up with his ball-kicking equipment.

Photo by Keith Johnston on Unsplash

How Two Bozos and a Mr. Murphy Nurtured a Lifelong Friendship

Bill suggested something that was supposed to be a plan for lining up the vehicle to get it on the trailer straight. I don't even remember what it is now, but I didn't quite understand my part in it. So I asked him if we could just back the vehicle down and straighten it up then pull it back onto the ramps. He said that would probably work. So we attempted to execute that plan.

It was a lousy plan.

Bill reversed the wench and started directing me to turn the steering wheel to the right. Without power steering, it was a chore. But he kept the wench going as I attempted to turn the wheels right. Next thing I knew, the left front wheel was off the ramp and the vehicle was suspended with its nose in the air. The hook from the wench was caught in the teeth of the trailer's metal ramp. I knew that wasn't supposed to happen.

I wish I had taken a picture of it. I didn't think to do that at the time because I was on Discord chatting with one of the writers from my Steem Monsters team about an idea he had. At the time, I thought his idea was creative, but it sounded like a lot of work, and I was up to my neck in a-lot-of-work right at that moment.

Bill said he wished he had a jack. I said, "I got one." He looked at me, "You do?" "Oh, yeah," I said, and went to the back of the mini-van, opened the hatch, and began to dig out the standard car jack that comes with all vehicles (the shitty ones), and held it up in the air like it was some grand sports trophy. I've only had this vehicle for a year, so I've never used the jack. It looked like it had never been used.

Bill asked me to get a block of wood out of the back of his pickup, so I did. It was a 3-foot piece of 2x6, and I put it on the hot pavement under the left front tire of my vehicle. Bill put the car jack on top of it under my tire and started to jack it up. Like a dufus, I asked, "Are you going to jack up the tire?"

"Yep," he said and kept jacking.

I said, "Maybe we need another piece of wood so we don't puncture the tire." I noticed there was a short piece of 2x4 in the bed of Bill's truck before when I went after the 2x6. I retrieved it and put it on top of the jack. Bill kept turning the crank to lift the tire in the air. After a couple of minutes, he wore himself out and asked me to take over. I did, and about the time I got the vehicle high enough to unlock the wench's hook from the trailer's metal ramp, the weight of the vehicle toppled the jack and it all fell down. The good news is, the vehicle rolled backwards about six inches and that was enough to allow Bill to pull his trailer forward so that my car could get all four of its wheels back on the ground again.

At that point, Bill repositioned his truck and trailer and I pushed my mini-van around to line it up more evenly with his trailer ramps. Then he hooked up his wench again and we went in for round two.

Fortunately, the plan worked better the second time around. Mr. Murphy gave up and went home, we got my mini-van on Bill's trailer, and the two of us went inside for lunch, something cold and wet to throw down, and to pay for my 5-gallon gas can to be filled with lawn mower juice. By the time I got home, it was almost 3:00 p.m. I checked my email to see if I had any pressing client issues. Since I didn't, I thanked Bill for his kind assistance and the incredible adventure, then I set about to complete the Steem Monsters task I committed myself to the week before. In a couple of hours, I was able to post our document to a secure location in the cloud for easy collaboration. We're right on track to meet our deadline.

I'd like to say yesterday was a typical day for a writer, but it wasn't. Mr. Murphy often likes to visit me in my office, but he doesn't usually drag me out into the hot sun to wax my ass. But it's Mr. Murphy. I've learned he doesn't need an invitation to make an appearance, and when he visits you, under whatever circumstances, he expects your full, undivided attention.

Well, Mr. Murphy, you got it. But next time, will you call first please?

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