Tuesday, December 30, 2014

How To Kill A Truck

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, Happy Nothing if that is your choice and Happy all of the other things that I forgot. 

      I have been happily employed as a Signal Engineer for about 3 months now, it is challenging, interesting, and I like the people I work with very much.  The problem I seem to be having is keeping my work truck road worthy.  Now it isn't really a truck, it's a Chevy Tahoe, but still, it is a bigger than average vehicle.  One that say a deer could see before it SLAMMED into the drivers side door! 

      That is what happened the first week I had the truck.  I believe I had it for about 6 days.  There I was driving along and I see a deer standing on a high bank on the drivers side of the road.  I slowed down in case he ran out in front of me, but I guess I screwed up his timing, because he ran into the drivers side door, took out my drivers side mirror, used his little spike antlers to carve a scrape in my window, spun around hit the drivers side rear door, and got up and ran off.  So not only did I have to do an accident report 6 days into my new job, but I didn't get any venison out of it either.  This type of incident will also allow you to test your heart functions and your vocabulary, as your heart rate rapidly increases and some colorful language follows. 

     So I got the truck fixed while I was on vacation in November (see shameless brag photo below) and all was well, or so I thought.  Just before Christmas I was cruising up route 81 and dash lights start flashing and the engine starts making a god awful noise. Not good.  I pull into a Sheetz station and called the fleet service.  (A Sheetz station is a gas station + minimart + deli, kind a like a super WaWa for those of you in the northeast) 

     The shop got to it the day after Christmas and low and behold I needed a new engine, there is a piece on one of the lifters that tends to wear out, or so the man at the shop told me.  So in the span of 3 short months I have had to replace a door, a mirror and now an engine.  If this keeps up I am going to have a whole new truck in a year.  They have given me a Toyota 4 Runner to drive in the meantime, if I break this one I might be in trouble. 

     As I mentioned I also went on vacation in November, and we had a blast.  We went to a resort on the Estero Bay in Florida and I went on my first private fishing charter.  Oh so worth it! So here are my shameless brag pictures.  (I did catch the biggest fish!)