Its Not a Good Day

Yesterday started out as a normal day at the office, but ended very differently.

My driver called me shortly after lunch and I could tell that something was drastically wrong. He proclaimed "it is not a good day!!" I said "why, what is up?" He then proceeded to tell me that the tire studs came off. "Tire studs," I thought, "we don't have studded snow tires." I then realized he was talking about the studs that hold the tires to the truck. I now understood why it wasn't a good day. After making sure that he wasn't in accident and that he was okay, we began to make plans of how to handle this situation. He was okay and fortunately he noticed that something wasn't right and pulled over before the wheels fell off. Yes, that is right. When the wheel studs shear off, the tires fall off. Not a good situation when the truck is moving down the highway.

Upon arriving at the scene, the driver had the right side rear wheels off and sure enough not one wheel stud was there. We then agreed that I would relieve the worker at the transfer station so that he could bring the new truck (wheels fell off our old truck) so that driver could finish his collection route and the other guy could stay with the old truck waiting for the tow truck.

I went to the transfer station and monitored the rescue operation via two-way radio communication. All was going well at the transfer station until I stepped outside to close our main gate at closing time. After hearing the door slammed behind me, I realized that my keys were inside and I was locked out. I went to the gate and the gate was frozen. I couldn't move it. My driver's comment "its not a good day" was coming back to me. I hoped that I hadn't locked the window to the scale house. Upon checking it, it was unlocked and I was able to open it from the outside and jump back in the office; this was only after I placed a couple of tires underneath the window to give me height to jump through the window. I called the guys at the truck and told them that I couldn't close the gate because it was frozen. One of them came to my rescue 15 minutes later. We closed up the facility and went back to the truck.

The truck was not looking good. They had just got it on the flatbed. It was sitting lopsided without rear wheels on the right side. They couldn't raise the flatbed to its horizontal position since it was too much weight for the hydraulic system; did I mention that the truck was full of garbage? They got another tow truck to help raise the flatbed. It took a few minutes, but they finally got it to the horizontal position.

The whole rescue mission took about 2 hours and occurred in a snow storm on Route 37. My driver and transfer station worker then had to finish the collection route with the new truck. They are dedicated since they worked until 6 PM.

Lesson learned: beware when your garbage truck driver calls and says "its not a good day." This means that it probably is not a good day in the wonderful world of garbage.