Dumb and Dumber

Was talking to my daughter and she was telling me about how she got the outside of her car detailed for free.

I guess at her workplace the "roofers" arrived to repair the tar and gravel roof along the cant strip. They spudded off the area and sprayed about 30 cars with pea gravel and asphalt flakes.

When the office manager stopped them they said "Oh we were going to come down after and brush them off with our broom" (yes, the old barn broom on the car paint trick). Some people tried to clean them off but with the sun and engine heat, the tar had already stuck to the paint. The owner of the roofing company was called and arranged for the cars to be all detailed. He was none to pleased with the crew.

I looked at the paint on my daughters car and it looked like the paint had fractures in it on the hood and roof. I didn't know if this was road damage or from the roof rocks. Some of the cars hit were only a few weeks old. I would have liked to see the paint on them after being showered from 4 stories high.

The office manager was going on about how good the roofing company is and was praising them for dealing with the situation and my daughter said to her "My dad wouldn't have even let that happen in the first place. His workers would know better than to do that"

Go girl, I was proud of her.

I can't take the fame for these two-

The very first outfit I worked for had a couple D&D episodes that I wasn't a party to. They both happened pretty-close together,

- A 1-ton showed up in the yard w/o the kettle it had towed back from a job 80 miles away. The kid backed-tracked all the way; No kettle! A couple of weeks later someone had contacted the company about a kettle that was just a few blocks away from the shop. Apparently the kettle came un-hitched - went across the on-coming traffic lane- up and over a raised railroad track, coming to a stop on the other side, never overturning.

- Same outfit; A hot kettle came un-hitched rolled and flipped-over in a gas station- hot spewed/flowed all over....(Must've been the same truck/hitch? I dunno - long time ago).

Ah...cranes, yes you gotta love em. Like the time or operator tried to flip a stack so the crown of the trusses was pointing toward the crane, by pulling them with the extended boom. As I recall as was good until they went past that twelve o'clock position in a near freefall. The snap to the cable when they hit tension buckled the boom about dead center. I think that was over 15k in the mid nineties.

All-righty-then...How dumb can we get? The memories are flowing a bit now....

The time one of our guys tipped-over one of our forklifts while attempting to move forward w/3000lbs of tile extended 20'+ up/out.....Mason's 55gal drum of water went right through the cab/driver cockpit, as the lift flopped. That was a near-death experience, as well as a costly crane visit.

I racked my brain trying to come up with a similar tale but the worse damage I can remember causing was just a nasty scratch on a garage door from dropping tear off down 2 stories on a windy day.

But that led to some more damage on the next job. It was back in the day when I was still young and a bit wild. I was sub-contracting from another company and they had an arse hole over seeing the subs. The guy with the scratched up garage door insisted it be repainted before he would pay ( and rightfully so ).

The problem came in when I started the next job with only one helper after having 3 guys quit over night. The two of us were really struggling on this next job when the arse hole supervisor learned of the garage issue and took it upon himself to come by my job and tell me in person just what he thought about it.

He pulls up all cocky and ripping into me about it. Reading from a paper that said repaint garage door. I was on the roof and him on the ground but when he screamed out you see this chit. Paint the Fin garage door, I came off the roof like a lightning bolt with my plumb roofing hatchett held high gaining ground on him pretty fast as he ran toward his truck.

Right as I was about to catch up with him, he jumped in his truck, cranked it up, threw it in reverse and left a 30 foot long black mark in the drive way as the tires squealed and the smoke flew. I'm pretty sure it cost more to get those black marks off this nice concrete drive way than it would to paint the garage door.

Ironically, the owner of the company came by just about 30 minutes after all this happened without any knowledge of it. The home owner was not at home. I told the owner in detail about what happened and he said " Chuck please don't quit over this, I will take care of it all and him too! He won't be coming by your jobs anymore". :laugh:

Then thar wuz that time ol' uncle Ed didn't ratchet down the up tube from the kettle that was parked up 'longside that purdy, porus, white brick of the new dairy in town. Yepper's, they pulled that ol' chain, blew the pipe off the back uh the ol' kettle pump and proceeded to empty 'bout half uh that kettle on the side uh that thar fancy wall.

That ol' "hot" reached into cracks and crevacise no one knew existed.

yeppers. That one was a little pricy too.

We've moved cars on several occasions, at least once was due to a disgruntled tenant. The look on her face!

Don't think I'd move 30 though, right under the roof or especially 100 yards away. :laugh:

Bout' 20+ years ago.....aprx 6AM, one of my employees whips out of a 7-11 & promptly dumps a 55gal drum of emulsion all over the intersection.

Right at rush-hour, near an entry gate to a military base we were working on. 8-10 guys spent the day running all over the base cleaning cars.

That's pretty dumb......

We repainted or detailed about 30 cars one particular windy day on a mall in WV about 15 years ago.

I can tell ya that even on very hot days, the fine overspray mist of Carlisle Fast100 adhesive takes more time to dry than it takes for it to float and settle over 100 yards away. Yup. A very true, and very expensive learnin' experience. "Per Occurance" is some very impotent words in them thar insurance contracts that Garntees the insurance company ain't gonna have to pay too much for the unadulterated ignorance of the dumb Hick(s) they be underwritin'.

When we were doing hi rises we always covered the cars in the parking lot if we could not find or contact the car owners so they could move their machines, but sometimes the wind would get a hold of what we called hot webs and blow them all over the place, usually we would not work when the wind was blowing, but thats hard to do in warm sunny Florida where those tropical breezes are always around except today where the temps only reached 67 degrees today lol and it will be in the 40's tonite the heat is on were in a cold snap lol must be that old climate change thing those liberals keep talking about