Wednesday, November 19, 2008

No Brakes

About every other Saturday, I will work with my Father-in-Law, Bob. This past weekend we worked in D.C. He is currently in the process of gutting an apartment that he will be remodeling. That means that there is plenty of trash, rubble, etc. that needs taken out. So we got an old junk truck from his friend, who is a co-owner of Bob's contracting company, put air in the leaking front tire and headed to D.C.

We brought a little pump to fill the tire every couple of hours to make sure we didn't get stranded hours from home. This was one of my responsibilities. So after we had been there about an hour, I decided the tire needed to be filled. I jumped in the truck, pushed in the clutch, started the engine, put it in neutral, went to apply the parking break when suddenly-SNAP. The parking break peddle fell to the floor and the car rolled forward a foot despite the fact that I had the foot brake also pressed to the floor.

So I sauntered back up to the apartment to tell Bob. He laughed at first thinking I was joking, especially when I told him that for some reason the pump we had didn't work either. So now we have a truck with a couple hundred pounds of trash with a tire that is now almost entirely flat and no brakes.

So we called a tow truck right? Wrong. We decided we needed to fill the tire up before it was completely ruined. So we started driving down the road. When I said no breaks, I didn't mean that our breaks didn't work very well but still worked a little bit. We had absolutely no breaks, and we were in WASHINGTON D.C. We even drove by the White House.

So some how, through down shifting, much wincing and screaming through a few orange lights we actually made it all the way from D.C. to Culpeper without incident.

3 comments:

Whittier said...

Wow, I'm glad you survived! I worry about my safety when I'm driving a normal car.

Janell H. said...

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!!? Somehow I don't think you are getting paid enough to warrant working under those kinds of hazardous conditions!

Whittier said...

so, no more blog?