professional

Last week, I was on one of the most frustrating jobs I have ever been on. It felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

It started around 1700 last Wednesday. It ended at midnight the next day. Suffice to say, a lot went wrong in the process of trying to push through six inches of fresh snow for 40 miles worth of dirt roads. It's a powerless feeling to see someone have to put a truck into a snow bank to keep it from sliding back down a hill and then having the trailer arc around into the same snow bank. And what did they send instead of a dozer to help pull us up the hill? That's right. They (the operator, meaning the client who is the one responsible for getting us help if we get stuck on the way to location because they don't maintain their lease roads) sent a blade, though he called it a "maintainer". That's because it's for maintaining the damn road, not for pulling a 75,000 pound truck up a hill. (Specifically, it was a 140H.) Of course we had chains on, but that means nothing if you were forced to put one side of the truck into a snow bank. What happens when you try to pull a truck up a hill when the pulling truck isn't powerful enough and the stuck truck is in a bind with the axles sitting in different planes is that something is bound to break. Like axles. They can break. In fact, you can break all four of them.

Now we had 75,000 lbs. of dead weight that we couldn't even help them pull up the hill. So, several more hours of fitful sleep later, our second helper truck arrived and this one had a really big winch on it. They put the blade in front, tied this second truck to it and let out the winch to the front bumper of our truck. Then they tried to use both trucks to pull our truck. Hahahahaha. Not a chance, not with that much weight with no possible assistance from us because of the broken axles. Instead, they anchored the blade into the ice, and started to retract the winch. Now we're in business. About 50 feet at a time. They ended up inch-worming the truck up to the top of the hill onto some flat land after about 30 minutes of letting the winch out, pulling up, reeling the winch in, and repeat. We were able to drop the trailer, have a tow truck take our lame tractor in, and get a new tractor under the trailer and be on our way. More or less.

When we got to location, we found out that something on our other truck was broken. I pretty much wanted to give up on the job at that point. We had been out for nearly 20 hours at that point and that was such a demoralizing blow. Sometimes, some days are like this. We got on the phone with the yard and got a new truck headed our the way and we would meet half-way and trade. From there on out, everything went fine, or as fine as could be expected. As we were driving back to location with the new truck, I had to let it all go. In my mind, everything that had happened didn't happen, or at least not to me on that day. This was a fresh start and a new job as far as I was concerned. Obsessing about the bad luck we had been struck with to that point wasn't going to help me. It would only distract me from the job I still needed to do. This was one of those gut check jobs. If I wanted to be able to call myself a professional, then I needed to act like one. As satisfying in the short-term as shouting and finger pointing and being a short-tempered jerk would have been, it wouldn't have helped. I sucked it up and did my job because I am a professional and I know I've earned the right to say that.