Steadily By Jerks

When I was in high school, my dad was employed by National Trailer Convoy. It was a little different sort of job than picking up freight in one place and delivering it to another. Specifically, he moved mobile homes. A house trailer is a pre-fab structure built on a flatbed trailer. It has a hitch and wheels making it portable. 

The home's owner had responsibilities to fulfill before it could be moved. He should have removed the skirting, unhooked the utilities and made sure the tires were sound. According to the checklist Dad went through with every owner, they also should have secured the cabinet doors and furniture inside the home.

This didn't always happen. Dad came home from one location telling about a trailer anchored in a sea of children, dirty diapers and dogs. The only adult he saw was a young woman. She did not have the trailer ready to move. Some of the tires were flat, but she had spares. He had wrestled the second tire onto the lug bolts when he heard a voice right behind him say, "That's poop."  He looked around and saw a three-year-old boy poking at dog droppings with the handle end of his tire wrench.

Once or twice, Dad was accused of damaging a home in transit when it wasn't his fault. In an instance I particularly remember, the owner showed up during the process of situating the trailer on its new foundation. The guy exclaimed that the outer wall had pulled away from the frame at the back corner. What the heck did the so-and-so driver do to his house? Dad invited the guy to take him inside so they could try to see a reason for the separation. The culprit turned out to be a Chevy engine block in a bedroom closet. The wall didn't pull away from the floor. The floor pulled away from the wall.

Moving a mobile home can be a logistical nightmare. The trailers are over-length and over-width. To be legal, the driver must purchase a permit from the state highway department. Much like an aircraft flight plan, the route and time frame must be observed. It is illegal to pull an over-width, over-length object in the dark for obvious reasons. A front escort car was required to alert oncoming traffic of the road hazard. If the trailer was over a certain length, a rear escort was needed as well.

If one didn't provide their own escort, the driver had to hire one. After seeing his bottom line suffer from paying for an independent escort, my dad decided my mother should do it for him. She drove a bright yellow Mustang. Add a roof-mounted orange, revolving light and a fold-up sign that said WIDE LOAD and what do you have? An escort car. This endeavor provided my dad with years of fodder for wife-bashing stories.

In one incident, National Trailer Convoy had been hired to move three homes for the same company when their employees were reassigned. The distance was far enough the drivers worried they wouldn't get the job done in one day. The evening before the move they readied the homes and got hooked up. The next morning they fudged a little on the daylight hours by going down dirt roads for the first few miles. When they reached the highway, it was still fifteen minutes until sunrise. Dad and the other two drivers had a brief confab and decided to chance it. Mom was driving the lead escort car.

"Okay, we're going now," Dad told her. He turned to get in his truck when the entire area was lit up with strobing orange light.

"Turn that @#$%@#% thing off," he shouted at her. "Why don't you just use a siren to announce our presence? Every highway patrol in thirty miles can see that light."

It must have been nerve-wracking for Mom to drive that escort car. Rules vary from state to state, but she needed to maintain a minimum and maximum distance between Dad's truck and her car. Dad always said she didn't have good depth perception. I expect he was right because she would speed up to get ahead of him and decide she was too far away and step on the brake to slow down. When he saw brake lights, he said he never knew if he should be shifting down or not, so it was equally frustrating for him to follow her.

When someone asked him how his wife did at escorting wide loads, he said she drove 'steadily by jerks.'

Efficiency Expert

My husband's first job as a nuclear engineer was at the Dresden power plant near Morris, Illinois. It was owned and operated by Commonwealth Edison. There were several engineers on site. Many were recent college graduates and newlyweds as well. Since it was nothing unusual for them to stay at work 12 or more hours at a time, they were in the habit of calling their wives a couple of times a day just to check in. In the morning they might call and make sure she was awake and getting ready to go to work or school. In the afternoon, they just called to say hi. There were two phone lines at the plant. One with the local phone company and another direct line to the corporate office in Chicago.

Since this was in 1974, it was at least twenty years before anyone had a cell phone. The calls home to the wives were made on company phones and company time. 

About a year after Commonwealth Edison hired my husband, they retained an efficiency expert to find ways to cut costs within the company.  The man traveled from site to site and studied procedures. At the Dresden power plant, he observed employees making personal phone calls. The engineers were taken to task. 

They informed the guy that marital bliss was maintained through the phone cord. Nevertheless, he told them to cut back. They protested the company was committing telephonus interruptus.

One day my husband answered his desk phone to discover the engineer at the desk next to his was on the line. 

"Bill, why are you calling me? You're sitting right beside me."

Bill laid the receiver down, leaned closer and whispered. "I called your desk long distance on the Chicago line. Their efficiency expert will never figure this one out."

They continued with their work but left the two lines open for an hour or so.

Rule 41: Never tell an engineer he can't do something.