(or); The avalanche in a tin can…

(or); I am running out of stories about my days as a delivery driver, so we can get back to the silly pictures very soon…

One day I had a very heavy delivery to make. If you have ever picked up a big stack of magazines, you know they can be pretty heavy. We had printed up a big order of some kind of brochures on very heavy magazine paper. There were about 200 boxes full of them, and each box weighed about 80 pounds. (These are not the exact numbers. I am bad with numbers).

We stacked the boxes on four pallets, then lifted two of the pallets onto the other two with the fork lift. This is called double stacking, just so you know. We then wrapped these two towers of heavy boxes with this plastic wrap that was like industrial strength Saran Wrap. I put a lot of that plastic wrap on. I was concerned.

When I drove out of the shop, the first thing I noticed was the way the van handled. It was like I was driving in three feet of wet oatmeal, or maybe quicksand. The van was overloaded, there was no doubt about that. But I had a job to do.

On the freeway it was even worse. The van felt like it was sloshing back and forth like a trawler that was taking on water. But I managed to get all the way to the exit before it happened.

What happened, I hear you asking in my head?

You know how rich guys in expensive cars sometimes play that game where they pretend they can’t see you because you are driving a car that doesn’t cost as much as their car does? (I meet these guys a lot because I tend to drive inexpensive vehicles). I met one of them that day.

It was just as I was getting off the freeway at Sorrento Valley Road, which you may recall is the same road where I had my famous hydroplaning incident. But this time I was coming from the other direction. At this exit, the freeway is downhill, but not as downhill as the exit itself, which dips down below the freeway rather quickly. I mean this sucker is steep.

And right there at the top is where the jerk in the expensive sorry-about-the-size-of-your-penis-car cut me off. He just decided that he didn’t want to wait in line with the rest of us cheap-ass-car-driving schmucks. So he just zipped in at the last minute, you know, like they do. I had no choice but to hit the brakes to save both our lives.

Once again I am not sure if this classifies as a near-death-experience story or just a simple I-could-have-been-seriously injured story. I leave that up to you.

As soon as I hit the brakes I knew I was in trouble, because I heard a loud snap and a ripping sound. I knew exactly what it was before I even looked in the center rear view mirror and saw the piles of boxes tumbling towards me. They ripped that heavy plastic wrap like the Hulk rips his t-shirt when he gets all big and green.

I have no words to describe how scary this moment was, as I braced for the impact, although my avalanche in a tin can analogy is pretty good. Remember I was still doing about 60 miles an hour, down hill, with a retaining wall on my left and a little railing ‘protecting’ me from a drop off on the right.

The boxes hit me like a wave and crashed around me. It felt like a mule kicked the back of my seat. Four or five boxes passed between the two front seats to end up wedged against the dashboard and my right side. There were now boxes farther forward in the van than I was, like someone had just built a brick wall beside me. Boxes were leaning on me on that side. One or two boxes hit me in the back of the head before they stopped moving, and were now jammed over my shoulders, forcing my neck to bend forward. Only the driver’s seat had kept me from being crushed.

The thing is I couldn’t move. Even as I brought the van to a safe stop at the red light at the bottom of the hill, I was trying to shove the boxes resting on my head and neck off, but my arms had very little room to move, and all the boxes in back were leaned towards me, holding everything in place. I wasn’t even leaning back against the seat anymore. I was sort of pushed forward almost to the steering wheel. I couldn’t get out of the van because the box on my left shoulder had wedged me into place. And believe me, I wanted to get out, if only to express my displeasure at that other driver’s rudeness. He was stopped at the red light ahead of me, unconcerned by my predicament. Maybe, in retrospect, it is a good thing that I couldn’t get out, because at that moment I would have kicked his expensive window in, dragged him out of his expensive car, and expressed the hell out of my displeasure.

I could still move my legs. My arms could move a little below the shoulders. And I was only two blocks from where I had to deliver the boxes. So I just drove there, very slowly and carefully. I didn’t have a cell phone. I had to park outside the delivery entrance and honk the horn until some guys came out to help me. When they opened my door, the box on my left shoulder fell out, and I just sort of followed it. The guys thought my story was pretty funny. I still had mixed feelings about it at that point.

To give you an idea of how hard that avalanche hit me, when we finished unloading the van one of the guys pointed out something interesting. The whole metal floor of the van, where my seat was solidly bolted to it, was now bent. The back two bolts were now resting in little metal bumps. You could see rips in the metal where the bolts had almost torn right through the floor.

That does it for this episode… join us next time for… oh, you know the routine by now. Be seeing you.