Amazing True Story

I'm not sure why I've been remembering this lately, but here it is. I've had a lot of crappy, badly-paid jobs in my life, working with obnoxious people - unfriendly, hostile, verbally abusive, and sometimes even physically threatening or aggressive (usually in a sneaky, passive-aggressive way). But this is worse than anything I have ever experienced, or even imagined.

Many, many years ago after I burned out the automatic transmission in my last car, I let it sit in the parking lot over the summer while I tried out bicycling for transportation. Finally the battery died, the car wouldn't start at all anymore, and I decided the time had come to junk it. I found an ad for a freelance auto-hauler in the Little Nickel Classifieds paper, or maybe it was one of those signs with the little tear-off tabs you see posted on the bulletin board at the laundromat. I forget now, but I called and made arrangements for them to come by to haul away the car.

Two guys showed up, driving an old flatbed truck with a winch behind the cab. One of them was in his mid-thirties, stocky, dark and Mediterranean-looking; the other was a little, wizened up old guy in his mid-to-late seventies, or older; neither one was above five and a half feet tall. I walked with them out to the parking lot, signed over the title and paid $50 cash while the older man backed their truck up behind my car, which was parked on a slight uphill slope. The younger man jacked up the back end of my old car, pulled a heavy hook on a cable from the winch, then got down on his hands and knees to hook up to the axle. It made me very uneasy to see him with his arm and head under the car which tilted backwards toward him, supported only by an ordinary jack.

"I think there are some cement blocks over by the fence to help brace up the car," I suggested helpfully and nervously as he groped around with half his body out of sight beneath the car. Meanwhile, the old guy skipped around the front end of the truck and began cranking wildly at the winch, trying to wind up the slack cable, while I squawked and dithered.

The young guy got the hook set, then let the jack down. Back on his feet, he said, "Nah, thanks, I'll just use my head."

Walking up toward the truck cab, he pulled a big cotter pin out of his pocket and shook it in the old guy's face, then stuck it in the winch and wound up the slack cable, before using the power winch to drag the car on to the flatbed. The underside of the car scraped horribly all the way up, gouging the tailpipe, muffler and whatever other exposed parts are down there. The car was now definitely an undrivable wreck.

As I say, I've had a lot of crappy jobs, but never one so bad I had to always be on guard against the possibility that my partner might take any chance to try to kill me.