I'm starting to fee like this guy
I’ve become quite the jack-of-all-trades type of individual as of late. I keep thinking of the Odd Job guy from the 007 movies, yet I don’t have the awesome bowling hat that can kill people. If only I did, right?? Anyway, this the The Story Of Birmingham…
So, I get a call from a buddy, let’s call him Joseph, relatively late in the evening on Monday night. Joseph says he needs somebody to go to Birmingham, Alabama with him to pickup a truck and drive it back to Little Rock. Actually, there’s three trucks that need to be driven back. He has no details, but says I’ll be getting paid to do this favor. He’s a good guy, and I’m flat broke, so I begin to seriously consider his offer. (quick background info: Joseph is a Meat Man. He’s one of those guys that drives around in a truck with a freezer in the back who tries to sell you meat.) Joseph gets back with me even later in the evening and says he’ll have to call me back in the morning concerning payment and any other pertinent details. Ok, I can deal with that…
I wake up early Tuesday morning and get ready to hit the road before I even hear anything from Joseph, assuming that the gig is still gonna happen. Sure enough, he calls and says we’ll be leaving around noon. Our job: To drive to Birmingham, pick up some meat trucks, and then turn right around and drive them back to Little Rock. Ok. The payment for each of the drivers is supposed to be there when we get there, along with gas money to get back, and we also have to drive a U-Haul truck back full of office equipment. It’s all ready to go, it just needs to be driven. Once again, ok, I can deal with that. No big deal, right?
We hit the highway around 12:30pm in a Toyota Camry with 5 people in it. Joseph had previously mentioned getting a van, but the company instead decided to employ one of their drivers and his wife, to drive three full-grown men in the back seat…all the way to Alabama. Did I mention it was a CAMRY??? Yeah, it was a tad uncomfortable. It ended up being a 7.5 hour drive. Cramped, smelly to a certain extent, but still no big deal. I’m getting paid to drive, and I like to drive, so this should be a sweet deal…
As we get closer to Birmingham, we’re looking at maps and I’m using my handy iPhone GPS apps to find where we’re supposed to go exactly. We’ve been told Birmingham, AL, on a street called Moody Parkway. No exact address. Ok…but none of my GPS apps know anything about Moody Parkway in Birmingham. I figure it’s a mapping glitch and go to the old standby…Google Maps…it always saves the day…yet it did not in this instance. Paper maps don’t show anything either. And we can’t get anybody on the phone with whom we’re supposed to be meeting. 7.5 hours and now we can’t find the fuckers we’re supposed to meet. We all laugh, get out and stretch, and think it’s no big deal.
Finally, Joseph gets somebody on the phone. The U-Haul full of office equipment? Non-existent. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Remember, we planned and a turn-and-burn, we did not plan on staying in beautiful (HA!) Moody, Alabama. It was supposed to be Birmingham, right? Well, it wasn’t. Hence the confusion.
"Moody Drugs" in AL. Quite appropriate, as we were all getting a bit moody.
So now we need a place to stay, but noooooo, they don’t have any of that set up already. So Joseph has to get on the phone over the course of the next few hours, with numerous less-than-helpful individuals, and eventually scores us some rooms at a Motel 6. We drink a few beers and decompress a bit. We also find out that we’ve walked into more than we were previously aware of. We actually have to go repossess the trucks before we can bring them back. We also have to go find our own U-Haul truck and then hunt down the office equipment and load it up ourselves. Quite a grand predicament, eh?
This picture doesn't show it, but my truck started to overheat as soon as I got they keys. Oh goodie!
After repossessing the vehicles, I get into my truck and found the above…..an overheating truck. This just gets better and better.
Anyway, let’s get to shortening up this story. I’ve let it sit too long in my Drafts folder and I want to share it with others…
Ok, after rounding up a box-truck and filling it with broken-down office equipment, we hit the road. The only problem? Our payment that we were promised upon arrival, along with gas money to drive these trucks back to Little Rock, was unavailable. Joseph had fought long and hard for us up until this point, but he gave up. So, we stopped every so often at gas stations along the interstate and sold meat from the trucks to get money for gas. What a bunch of crap… Anyway, here’s some pics of our ghetto-ass trucks we drove back:
My driver's inside door handle. Or where it USED to be. Had to open my door at highway speeds to close it completely once. That was fun.
Passenger side of my windshield. Crackheads done cracked it!
My broken passenger mirror. What more can I say?!?
My passenger door handle. More like the LACK of a door handle. Although, there was a cable you could reach in & pull on to open the door. Are door handles worth money to crackheads?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Yup. That's Bondo on my left taillight. Which, after dark we found out, was not in working order. Or course!
My right taillight. Been busted at some point, and the freakshow who fixed it decided that Bondo would do the job.
My AC controls had no knobs. I had to adjust them with my multi-tool. Thank the tool gods for multi-tools!
The view I had for 10 hours.
Got a dent? No problem! Just Bondo it! You say it needs to be sanded down? Nah! No need for that! Now where is my black spray paint??
This is Joseph's truck's right taillight. Nice job with the packing tape, eh?
Hope you enjoyed those pictures as much as I did not enjoy driving the truck I was stuck with. 
I finally got paid 4 days later, after dealing with more idiocy and excuses as to why I couldn’t be paid just yet. Was forced to be aggressive, which I am not normally good at, and payment finally arrived in my hand. 75 hard-earned bucks. In the long run, quite a gip. Oh well. Lesson learned.
My next adventure?? Working on a production crew for TruTV. Stay tuned for the story…
