Hmmm... all of this talk about asteroid strikes and infernos and high Celsius temperatures just reminded me that I never got around to...
WRECKING YARD STORY NUMBER 3 - Part 4 of 4:
Let's see... where were we? I believe we left off with a description of torch trucks and the general layout of the wrecking yard, and the fire on Tire Mountain.
Well, crazy-bad-funny things are a normal occurrence in some places, and this wrecking yard was one of those places. Fights between employees, and employees and customers, and customers and the owner, or the owner and the employees were as just par for the course. Looking back on all of it, most of the altercations were harmless... A typical one between the owner and the customers would go something like this...
Customer arrives at the office with the inner trim panel from the door of an old Cadillac which he has just spent a good half hour taking off (customers being allowed to do some of their own re-&-re out in the field).
"How much for this trim panel that I just took off that old Caddy down at the edge of the swamp".
"Oh...that's a RARE piece, that one.... I'd have to get...uh...twenty-five bucks for that"
"Twenty-five bucks!!! NO WAY!! I'll give you ten for it!"
"Hey, it's RARE.. it's worth at least twenty"
"Listen, it's not worth more than ten bucks and you know it"... the customer whines as he holds up the door panel... "I mean, look at it, there's a little tear here on the corner".
"Oh yeah? Let me have a closer look at that thing...."
The customer hands the panel to the owner... He gives the little tear a good look.. then grabs the vinyl and gives it a real good rip right across, then folds the panel clean in half in one quick move and tosses it into the garbage... yelling... "YOU'RE RIGHT!! It ISN'T worth more than ten bucks!! IN FACT, it isn't even worth FIVE BUCKS!!!"
The customer stands there... kind of shell-shocked for a moment, then yells "YOU'RE NUTS!!" and storms out the door and jumps into his car and drives off...shooting gravel in every direction.
Saw that scene more than one or two times. After a while, when some customer would start to whine in this certain tone of voice while haggling over a part, you'd just turn and walk away and try not to start to laugh before the scene would unfold the way it was destined to.....
Employee conflicts were usually a little wilder... often ending in a good car chase scene out in the field... torch trucks flying through the mud... sometimes even the articulating loader in hot pursuit. At those times, if a truck happened to break down, it was basically "dead meat". Along would come the loader and pick the truck up..driver and all... and both would be summarily deposited... uhm... maybe up on top of a stack of cars waiting to be crushed and hauled away....
But the rarest altercations, were the employee-customer kind. They weren't supposed to happen, but they did...
OK, well, you remember the guy with the knife... for convenience sake, let's just call him "Slash".... you DO remember him, don't you?
Now, Slash didn't like customers too much... or at least that's the line that he liked to shoot. He didn't want them around when he was taking parts off for them... It made him mad...and you didn't want him to get MAD! No sir..that wasn't good at all. More than a few times, I would be working away in the office and some nervous-looking dude would come rushing in to say that there was a big guy going crazy down in the field... maybe throwing rocks through windshields and cursing like a maniac... I'd just nod and say, "Did he tell you to wait up here while he got your part?"
"Well, uh... yeah"
"And you didn't...?"
"Uhm... no..."
"Well listen here... You go fix yourself a coffee and DON'T GO DOWN THERE AGAIN!!"
"Uh... OK"
A few minutes later, the "part" would suddenly appear ... often arriving as if by some form of Air Express as it came...propelled by some unseen force... flying past the big window to land with a dull thud next to the doorway.
Now... I guess you're starting to wonder about my reference to asteroid strikes, fires, infernos and other delightful things...
Well, on the day in question, some dude wanted the exhaust system off of some old beater in the back lot. Now, don't ask me why anyone would want an old exhaust system, but some people actually do... I guess maybe because they need it for some old car that has obsolete parts.
An exhaust system is the kind of thing that you can't just cut off out in the field. Instead, the car or truck is carried to a set of racks and placed up there so that the parts stripper can cut the parts away from underneath.
Now, on this particular day, Slash got the job of cutting the exhaust system off of this car. The customer who had requested it was a thin little French-Canadienne guy with a moustache and slate-grey hair worn in some kind of long, fuzzy afro.
As the car was brought up to the rack, I could see the guy and his pal heading back down the alley to the field. I called out the window... "Hey, you shouldn't be going back there!!"... to which they made some rude hand gesture and kept right on going....
Well, a couple of minutes go by and I suddenly hear Slash cursing at these guys and telling them to go somewhere else... but do they listen...?? Do cows fly?
Another couple of minutes go by and all of a sudden there's this big BOOM... the wrecking yard equivalent of a nuclear blast... actually not unknown to most of us in this profession... just the sound of a gas tank exploding and tearing apart...
I drop everything that I'm doing and rush out the door...only to be met by the two French-Canadienne guys... No longer looking like quite the smart-aleck know-it-alls they were less than 5 minutes ago... Nope... these guys were running scared... yelling things like... "MON DIEU!! WHAT A CRAZY MAN!! TABERNACLE!! CHALICE!!! LET ME OUT OF HERE!!!"... As they raced by on their way to the car, I got a good look at the fear in their eyes... and also their burnt afros and singed off eyebrows....just before they drove off in a cloud of dust and screeching tires...
I turned to run back to the rack to see what kind of damage had been done... but I didn't have to... Slash was standing back there with his welding mask turned up... laughing like I'd never seen him laugh before....
I called out, "What happened back there?!!"
Stifling his laughter for a second, he choked out... "Aw... nothing really... They just got too damned close and I had to get rid of them so I put the torch on the gas tank and blew them away. Wasn't more than a spoonful of gas in it but it blew up real good... Did you see them RUN!!! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!"...
.....Ah.... wrecking yard life... it will either turn your hair gray... or make you go bald before your time...;-}> |
