A good day and a bad day.
I wasn't planning on going to the scrapyard today but when I got home last night there was a stove sitting next to the dumpster of my apartment building so I laid claim to it. Not wanting to drive around with it in my truck for a long time I decided to make a run this morning. I went on line to see that the yard was open from 8:00-12:00 on Saturday. I loaded up all I had and headed out. I pulled up to a line of about 12 vehicles waiting outside the gate for the place to open at 9:00 AM instead of 8:00.
They actually opened the gate at about 10 minutes to 9:00 so that was a good thing but there were two total a**holes waiting in line in front of me. There is a huge sign at the entrance to the scale that says WAIT FOR GREEN LIGHT TO PROCEED. The first car in line was sitting there for about 10 minutes while the light was red but these two jerks behind him kept yelling for him to move on. They were honking their horns and yelling all kinds of obscenities at him. Finally the light turned green and he drove over the scale. The next three guys went over and then the line had to wait again because it is a small yard and not that much room on the other side of the scale. When the dump off spots are full the line has to wait for someone to leave. The scale attendant told the next truck in line to wait and of course our two in a hurry scrappers started up again with the honking and yelling.
I finally get through and as I am backing in the truck next to me starts to pull out. They had just dropped off a refrigerator and as they were pulling away a yard attendant opened it and yelled for them to come back.
"You need to empty the refrigerator" she told them, and they backed up with sheepish looks on their faces.
I thought they had been caught trying to pad the weight with rocks or something of the sort but when they started to unload it I saw it was actually food. Several packages of hot dog and hamburger buns. A few packages of bacon, jars of pickles and condiments and the like. All told it looked like the pulled maybe 2 dozen or so packages out. You just know they knew it was in there because I don't care who you are when someone asks you to help move a fridge you open it. If for no other reason than to see how big of a slob they are.
As they drove away I said to the attendant "good call on the frig"
She said "I've found just about everything except dead bodies or bags of money inside these things"
All of that kind of made up for the slow start for the day. I unloaded my inside stuff and collected my almost $200.00 and was feeling pretty good. A full tank of gas, a $50.00 gas card and enough left over to fill my own fridge with a few weeks worth of groceries plus a little left for a night out if I wanted. Or so I thought.
About an hour and 30 or so miles later (I wasn't driving slow, I had stopped off somewhere) I get out of my truck and hear the dreaded hissing sound that can only come from a leaking tire. Sure enough my left front had a nice big screw dead center in the treads. I went to 5 local shops to see if they could fix it. One place couldn't get to it for 4 hours. Another was short handed and couldn't get to it, two others couldn't get to it and one couldn't do it because they had an oil change in front of me and by the time the finished with that it would be too close to closing time (noon) to get me in. It was 11:00 apparently it takes them an hour to do an oil change.
In the 15 minutes I was driving around trying to find someone to fix it I really hadn't noticed that it had gone down at all so I figured the screw was keeping it to a slow leak and I decided to try to make it home (about 12 miles) I was about 11/2 way there when I hear this thump sound. You know, the sound you hear when your tire throws up a small stone into the underside of you car, or in this case the sound of a screw being ejected forcefully from a tire into the underside of my truck. Well, once the screw was out it didn't take long at all for the tire to go flat. The road I was on had no shoulder to pull over onto so I was forced to drive it a few miles as it was going flatter and flatter. I finally was able to pull over and when I went to fix it I found that my bottle jack wouldn't jack. I nice heavy piece of scrap for my next load for sure but that was of little consequence to me at the time. I called my brother in law, he came over and we got it fixed. Thankfully the spare was inflated (though low) and I was able to get home. I dropped the tire off at the place I had just purchased them from less than a month ago and they told me they would get to it first thing Monday as they had also closed at noon. So now I have to wait to see if it can be patched or if I ruined it by driving on it while flat and will need a new one. If so my $200.00 day will be instantly cut in half.
On top of that, I put $1.00 in the air machine to pump up the spare and the nozzle was broken so I couldn't get any air out. I told the attendant and she said she would put a sign on it but she couldn't give me my money back for some stupid reason. I had to go to the station next door and spend another $1.00.
Its 5:00 o'clock now and I have one more errand to run and then its definitely going to be a beer or 6 evening.
I hope your day was better than mine.
